Thursday, October 25, 2007
Freshman Democrats kill transgender amendment
| October 25, 2007 | |
| Reps. Tim Walz (Minn.) and Ron Klein (Fla.), leaders of the class of freshman Democrats, carried a message to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday that their fellow first-term lawmakers did not want to vote on an amendment extending civil rights to transgender employees. House Education and Labor panel Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), whose committee passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, said he told the freshman lawmakers at their Wednesday breakfast with Pelosi that the amendment did not have the votes to pass and would not be brought to the House floor. In addition, Miller told the freshmen he recognized that the amendment exposed the first-term lawmakers to political attacks from conservatives and liberals alike, said two sources who attended the breakfast. Democratic leaders are wrestling with when and how to bring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) had introduced an amendment extending the civil rights protections to transgender workers. Such language was included in the initial bill until Democratic members convinced House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to pull it. Frank approves the transgender language but maintains it lacks the votes to pass. “People didn’t want to force a ‘hard’ vote that might hurt their election chances,” Hilary Rosen, a Democratic lobbyist and gay and lesbian advocate, wrote on the Huffington Post, a liberal blog. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget said on Wednesday in its Statement of Administration Policy that President Bush’s senior advisers would recommend he veto the bill on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and restricts religious liberty. |
Thailand: NLA defers Mr/Ms bill
A bill allowing transgender people to use titles appropriate for their new sex has been put on hold after male National Legislative Assembly members spoke against it.
October 25, 2007
They said the "ambiguous identities" of post-operative transgender people could be confusing and affect common practice, such as mandatory Army conscription and ordination into the monkhood.
The assembly yesterday withdrew the bill pending government scrutiny within the next 30 days. Amphol Watthanajinda said unclear gender could be used to deceive partners in courtship or marriage, and a criminal's hard-to-identify sex could make police work and crime prevention difficult. It was counter-productive for the public, he added.
Juree Wijitwathakarn introduced the 10-article bill, which was tabled yesterday with the support of her fellow NLA members. She cited complaints from transsexuals about discrimination and social inequity and injustice. General Ood Buengbon, a former Defence Ministry permanent secretary, said men with ambiguous titles and appearance caused legal problems and headaches during annual Army conscription.
Assemblyman Wallop Tangkhananurak supports Juree's bill. However, he said it needed a provision to allow for the original sex of a citizen to be noted on identity cards. This would prevent confusion and deception.
Deputy Interior Minister Banyat Jansena said the government - which is reportedly reluctant to declare its stance - needed 30 days to scrutinise it. . . .
Mayor Giuliani tells Transgender Joke At Republican Debate
In arguing against a federal marriage amendment, Mayor Giuliani pointed out that he married 210 couples when he was mayor of New York, and…well, here’s the joke directly from the debate transcript:
GIULIANI:
I do not believe under the state that we presently exist, with the Defense of Marriage Act and basically one state that has by judicial fiat created same-sex marriage — and they’re wrong, by the way; I think the governor is absolutely right — I don’t think we need a constitutional amendment at this point.
What I said to Mr. Perkins — which I also said five years ago and have consistently said — is if a lot of states start to do that, three, four, five, six states, where we have that kind of judicial activism, and the kind of situation the governor is talking about actually occurs, if we’re dealing with a real problem, then we should have a constitutional amendment.
I did 210 weddings when I was mayor of New York City. So I have experience doing this. They were all men and women.
(LAUGHTER)
I hope.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
GIULIANI: You got to give me a little slack here. It was New York City, you know, but it’s not just a religious institution.
Nice.
There’s a lot of stigma that would be attached to a candidate joking about ethnicities, women, the disabled, or military veterans — without expecting the media to rip the candidate apart for insensitivity, but apparently there’s not a significant stigma attached to joking about transgender people getting married. Apparently, no matter what I do, no matter how productive a productive citizen I am, Giuliani apparently will thik it’s funny to joke about *me* really being a man.
As a transwoman, I’ll remember that joke — and I’ll especially remember it when it comes time to vote.
~~~~~
Leave it to a girl to take the fun out of sex discrimination.
–Bill Watterson (writing for Calvin in “Calvin and Hobbes”). . .
A TransAmazon Takes on 'The Man'
TransNation
10/25/2007
By Jacob Anderson-Minshall
You may think the brouhaha over the film The Gendercator is heated, but it’s nothing compared to the controversy over 2003’s The Man Who Would Be Queen by J. Michael Bailey, a psych professor at Northwestern University. As Joelle Ruby Ryan—a graduate student at Bowling Green University—can attest, it may be four years later but the Bailey Controversy is still boiling over.
With an impressive c.v. and two documentary films to her credit, Ryan recently became the first MTF-spectrum trans person to receive a prestigious Point Foundation Scholarship, but that’s not what’s getting her noticed these days.
Ryan (joellerubyryan.com) inadvertently stumbled into the fray around Bailey’s book, his research methods and alleged professional misconduct (including accusations that he had sex with several of his trans), and his latest defender, intersex researcher/activist Alice Dreger.
The Man raised the ire of trans women by re-asserting Ray Blanchard’s theory that transsexual women are either “feminine homosexual males who want to be women” (“Perhaps,” Bailey writes, “because many of them seem incapable of sounding or acting like typical males even when they try to do so.”) or they suffer from “autogynephilia: a sexual attraction to, and love of, the idea of oneself as a woman.”
Ryan, who identifies as a transgender woman and a genderqueer, pansexual trans-feminist, says Bailey’s taxonomies are “patently ridiculous. In addition, this theory furthers the notion that transgenderism and transitioning are sexually motivated. People don’t transition for sexual reasons—they transition because of their gender identity.”
She claims that Bailey’s writing is misogynistic and offensive to the LGBT community. “His theories on male bisexuality (it does not exist), his endorsement of gay gene selection (eugenics) and his connection to Kenneth Zucker (who supports reparative therapy for gender-variant youth) [also] taint him as an enemy to [our] community.”
Still, Ryan thought the Bailey controversy was over until this summer, when Dreger (alicedreger.com) released a 62-page paper (to be published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior next year) defending Bailey and accusing a number of high profile trans women of attempting to “ruin” him. In light of the pending Dreger piece, Ryan proposed a panel for 2008’s National Women Studies Association conference entitled “The Bailey Brouhaha: Community Members Speak Out on Resisting Transphobia and Sexism in Academia and Beyond.”
“I briefly considered wording it in such a way that allowed those more sympathetic to Bailey and Dreger’s work to participate,” Ryan admits. “But I quickly discarded the idea. This simply isn’t a both sides type of panel. Trans people have repeatedly been silenced by powerful elites. We’ve been endlessly researched and talked about by others. We’ve been objectified and gazed at like a butterfly pinned to a wall. [Now] we refuse to let others define us in ways that we know to be harmful, specious and destructive. The reaction to Bailey is a pivotal milestone in this history of resistance.” . . .
Ireland: Court Affirms Transgender Rights
Clancy A LANDMARK High Court decision on the rights of transgender people in Ireland could lead to “an explosion” of people coming forward with identity issues, a lobby group has predicted.The judgment last week found Irish law “incompatible” with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Dr. Lydia Foy, a 59-year-old dentist from Athy, Co. Kildare, wanted the right to change her name and sex on her birth certificate, having undergone gender reassignment 15 years ago.
Once the formal court order is issued within in the next three weeks, the government will have 21 days to move on the issue, after Mr. Justice McKechnie said that those with gender identity disorder were suffering from an “incurable condition.”
Foy welcomed the ruling and said she was confident the government would move quickly to amend legislation.
Lobby group Gender Identity Disorder Ireland said the ruling would be welcomed everywhere.
The group’s president Sarah-Jane Cromwell said, “The judgment is going to have a fantastic ripple effect throughout the country, because even the most secretive of people with the condition are going to be looking at this, and it’s going to give them so much hope.”
She said recent international data suggested that as many as one in
2,500 of the population may have gender identity disorder.
She added, “I think there’s going to be an explosion of people coming forward once the law is changed.” . . .
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Fish gender-bender
by David Suzuki, with Faisal Moola
Most people alive today were born after 1950. To these people, our modern world is just the way things have always been. Imagining life without TV, radio, telephones and the Internet is next to impossible. Teenagers probably have a hard time imagining life without text messaging!
And it's true, human reach is now profound. We are the most integrated, interconnected and mobile species that has ever existed on this planet. Some of these interconnections produce marvelous results. We get to know other cultures. We understand more about history and each other. We can easily chat with friends and family on the other side of the world.
 | What startled the scientists was that fish populations crashed to near-extinction levels by the end of the experiment. |
But we have to remember that, although we are connected with each other more than ever, we are also intimately connected to the rest of the natural world. These connections can manifest themselves physically, such as through global warming. But they can also manifest themselves biologically — and in some surprising ways.
Recently, researchers writing in the US journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists reported that male fish became "feminized" when exposed to human hormones. Some of the fish, a type of fathead minnow, produced early-stage eggs in their testes while others actually developed tissues for both reproductive organs.
How would fish be exposed to female human hormones? Through treated or untreated municipal wastewater, of course. It seems that widespread use of birth control pills has elevated the amount of estrogenic substances going into our waste stream. Remember, things that go down our toilets don't just disappear. They can actually survive simple sewage treatment processes and end up in our rivers, lakes and oceans.
Reports of fish feminization due to human female hormones are today fairly well documented — but long-term studies of what impact this can have on fish populations have not been done. For this latest study, researchers actually added the synthetic estrogen found in contraceptive pills to a remote lake in northern Ontario in amounts that are normally found in human wastewater. They did this for three years, and monitored the results over a period of seven years.
The results were startling. As expected, the male fish developed some feminized characteristics, such as producing proteins normally synthesized in females. But what really disturbed the scientists was how populations of the fish crashed to near extinction levels by the end of the experiment. Feminization of the males combined with hormonal changes to the females apparently damaged their overall reproductive capacity to the point that the fish were unable to maintain their population.
Conclude the researchers: "The results from this whole-lake experiment demonstrate that continued inputs of natural and synthetic estrogens and estrogen mimics to the aquatic environment in municipal wastewaters could decrease the reproductive success and sustainability of fish populations."
This spells trouble. Most Canadians have probably never heard of the fathead minnow, but these fish are a vital food source for well-known and popular sport fish that people have heard of — such as walleye, lake trout and northern pike. They are also well-studied and often used in toxicology testing because they have short life cycles, adapt well to lab conditions and are representative of a large family of fish. . . .
Australia: TRANSGENDER DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
by Cara Davis |
Almost 10 percent of transgender people will be murdered, compared to 0.0055 percent of the general population. |
Battling stigma
A Singaporean transsexual fights the ‘culture of shame’ in Asia.
SHE loves children and her lifelong dream is to be a wife and a mother, but the raspy voice and masculine frame betray the fact that Leona Lo was born a man.
Unlike many other transsexuals in Asia who prefer to live privately because of the social stigma of sex change, the British-educated, Singaporean transsexual has chosen to live a normal life, but in public.
Smart, confident and articulate, the communications specialist who heads her own public relations company has embarked on a mission to help turn around the “culture of shame” surrounding transsexuals in Singapore and the region.
“Somewhere out there, not just in Singapore but throughout Asia, there are lots of young people who are suffering the way I suffered years ago,” Leona, 32, says.
In her former life as a man, she was called Leonard.
These days, she draws on her experiences of gender identity crisis, rejection and discrimination to challenge social mores on behalf of the so-called silent community.
“It’s this entire culture of shame that gets under your skin. It’s not something that you can isolate and demolish because it is so much a part of our culture,” she says.
While a few transsexuals are gaining prominence in Asia – notably China’s Jin Xing – most continue to live in silence.
 |
Leona Lo plans to travel Asia to advocate greater tolerance for gender diversity. |
In Thailand, transsexual kickboxer Parinya “Nong Toom” Charoenphol’s rags-to-riches story was made into a movie, Beautiful Boxer. Former Chinese People’s Liberation Army colonel-and-now-woman Jin Xing is a prize-winning dancer and choreographer.
Discrimination is the biggest challenge, Leona says, recalling repeated rejection by prospective employers in Singapore despite her academic credentials.
“Singapore may be a cosmopolitan city, but many things are still swept under the carpet,” Leona adds. No reliable figures on the number of transsexual men and women in Singapore, or the region, are available, because those who feel they have been born into the wrong body prefer to endure in silence rather than embarrass their families, she says.
“It’s because a lot of transsexual women face discrimination at work and experience failure of relationships that a lot attempt suicide, or suffer depression. They end up on the streets as prostitutes.”
This is why she has taken time off from her thriving consultancy which promotes beauty products to wage her campaign.
After much persuasion, one local university allowed her to speak to an audience of students but she is finding it hard to pry open a window to share her thoughts in the corporate world.
Last month, she launched her autobiography, From Leonard to Leona – A Singapore Transsexual’s Journey to Womanhood. . . .
A Snug Fit
Wig industry maven Amy Gibson relates to her transgender clientele -- and not just because they provide incredible income. Skeptics can rest assured her sympathy is rooted in commiseration, not marketing.
“I really feel what they go through, being stuck in the wrong body,” says the Emmy-nominated Gibson, who played runaway alcoholic Lynn Henderson on the long-running soap Love of Life. “I really get it.”
As a teenager, she was diagnosed with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that eventually fried her hair follicles, leaving her bald. Years later she parlayed her own journey of hair loss into a growing business. In March 2006 she launched Crown and Glory Enterprises, a Los Angeles boutique that produces high-end, customized wigs as well as international luxury line called Amy’s Presence.
For her new venture, Gibson is extending a hand, or rather a few cap sizes, to trans women.
“It’s important for them to understand that getting the right wig could be the answer to a lot of discomfort,” Gibson says. “It truly is the finishing touch.”
Her interest in the trans market ignited when she started hearing complaints that wig boutiques offered nothing feminine and durable in the range of larger cap sizes. With Amy’s Presence, she now provides larger sizes (24 and 25) in up to eight different styles, with costs ranging from $1,600 to $2,500 per wig. The hairpieces also feature Cyber Hair, a revolutionary velvety material that when tousled remolds to its original form within 15 minutes. For the choosier athletic customer, a swim cap version is available that performs well in water.
“I don’t want to call it a wig,” says Stacy Alexeief, a 52-year-old Long Beach, Calif., resident. “A wig almost connotes something that’s artificial. There’s a lightness and flow to [the hairpieces] that’s beyond human hair.” . . .
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
GenderQueer Love, Coming Out as a TG Family
Mr. Flamboyance. . .
Sun Oct 21 2007
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That's why he gives me a hello hug at his Exchange District studio while wearing more foundation, blush, eyeliner, mascara and lipstick than I've worn in six months.
"When I'm working, I have my face on," says the effusive local style maven. "If you wear it, then you can sell it, and you can inspire. If I tell (a customer) 'I love using lip pencil,' I'd better be having lip pencil on."
In a Prairie city where we tend to dress pragmatically and trends are slow to arrive, the 31-year-old Polvorosa is a deliciously over-the-top personality. A Free Press editor recently spotted him in a women's shop, looking fabulous as he tried on the same pink trenchcoat as she did -- in a smaller size.
As a boy who outdresses, outstyles and outstruts most girls, Polvorosa is fast branding himself as Winnipeg's answer to celebrity stylist Jay Manuel (host of Canada's Next Top Model) or red-carpet style arbiter Steven Cojocaru ("Cojo") . . . .
Ian is a captain in the Paras. This week he'll tell the Army he is having a sex change
At first glance, Captain Ian Hamilton looks no different to any other paratrooper. A snapshot taken of him on a tour of duty in Iraq shows him squinting into the sunlight, his well-built frame set squarely against the desert horizon.
He is wearing combat fatigues, his sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular, tanned forearms. A rugged smile plays across his face.
But then you notice his stance. One foot is placed carefully in front of the other, the military boots elegantly angled away from each other. It is almost the pose of a catwalk model, designed to show her legs to the best advantage.
Scroll down for more...
Captain Ian Hamilton; below Jan and girlfriend Rachel Ward
‘I know!’ Ian says now. ‘You can tell that I wasn’t your average Para, standing there like a ballerina.’
To say he was not an average Para is something of an understatement. Three months ago, Captain Hamilton, 42, a decorated officer who also served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, took the extraordinary decision to become a woman. . . .
'Does Gender Still Matter?' crosses usual boundaries
Andrew Wodzianski paints, draws and finds images of women's legs and attaches them to motorcycles, race cars and monsters in his work in "Does Gender Still Matter?
If the latest exhibition in Purdue Memorial Union's Robert Ringel Gallery was a rock band, it would be the New York Dolls.
Like the influential 1970s glam rock band, "Does Gender Still Matter?" is bold, a little brash and cutting edge just like the Dolls were. "Does Gender Still Matter?" has work that crosses normal gender boundaries in a light and humorous way and in serious and unnerving ways. The show is full of contradictions, just like the Dolls were with their quite masculine, heterosexual personalities and tough rock 'n' roll underneath pounds of make-up and women's clothes.
"Does Gender Still Matter" opens Monday and runs through Dec. 2. The show was created by Purdue Galleries director Craig Martin and Elizabeth Mix, an assistant professor in art history at Butler University. A worldwide call-out for work that relates to gender issues was made, and Martin and Mix received about 400 submissions from all over the United States and as far away as Australia. The best seven were carefully selected.
"We were looking for works that were fresh," said Mix, who was an assistant professor in art history at Purdue University. "We didn't want tired old representations of general versions of feminism like in the '60s and '70s, now we have transgender, androgyny and homosexuality issues to work with."
Through coincidence, the seven artists are all from New England and the East Coast. Call-outs were made on multiple Web sites including www.artdeadline.com.
Many of the pieces are striking. There's the mesmerizing portrait photography of transgender people by New York City's Mariette Pathy-Allen and the bold video by David Politzer of Syracuse, N.Y. His Change Your Body/Change Your Mind looks at body issues often associated with females but from a male perspective.
Christina Pitsch played with the masculinity of objects, including deer antlers and trucks, in her three pieces in the show. In Trophy Suite, multiple antler trophies are embellished in silver in a tough, metallic tone -- save the dozens of rose buds and pretty bows that are subtly attached to the trophies. Five has the antler trophy theme but the cast plastic pieces are coated in a pink flocking in front of large, lacy doilies.
"Flocking reminds me of those little plastic flocked Easter bunnies. It's nylon fiber sprayed on an enamel paint base," Pitsch stated. "It's fuzzy and soft-feeling."
Flocking was added to Present, a piece featuring three small porcelain trucks that spin around as though it was on stage at a car show. Pitsch said she was thinking of wedding cakes and beauty contests while designing the show.
"I enjoy tweaking gender in my work," Pitsch said. "I'm taking hunting and truck culture and emasculating them and feminizing them. Maybe it was from growing up as a tomboy and people asking me 'Why don't you wear a skirt?' ... Thematically, the title of this show is the crux of my work.". . .
How can I tell my kids I dress like a woman?
SLUMPED in the middle of the dance floor, tears streaming down her face, Kate Rose was at rock bottom. Her wig ripped from her head by a total stranger
- who then pelted her with abuse
- she felt totally worthless.
"It was like a woman having her top pulled off, or a Muslim having their veil snatched away," explains the 38-year-old.
"At least that's how it felt to me: I felt totally exposed. It was like my identity, and my dignity, had just been torn away."
To most people, Kate is better known as Michael. By day, in the boardroom, Mike looks much like any other man: short hair, smart suit, neatly knotted tie. But then, after work, he changes into a long wig, make-up and women's clothes - and becomes Kate.
Clad in elegant black trousers and high heels, Kate is talking about her double-life with awe-inspiring candour. Sitting in a Cambridge café, waiting for her latte to arrive, she admits that "some people can be really unpleasant".
"But I don't believe in going to special places where 'different' people go," she continues. "I don't want to have to hide away.
"A lot of the finger-pointing and unpleasant comments are borne of ignorance; a lot of people have never met someone like me before.
"The best thing I can do is make people aware of who I am and what I am, both as a person and a transvestite."
A father to three young children - who don't know about their dad's alter-ego - Michael has felt the urge to wear girls' clothes all his life.
"My earliest memory is from about the age of four," explains Kate. "I can remember going to primary school wearing a girl's vest underneath my top, and pants under my trousers. They must have been my sister's.
"My mum went to pull my trousers down, to tuck my shirt in properly, and I remember thinking 'Oh my God, she's going to see'."
Going on to an all-boys boarding school, Michael "felt different". "But I think everyone feels 'different' when they're growing up," says Kate. "That's one thing we've all got in common. As he got older, Michael's desire to sneak into women's clothes didn't go away; if anything, it got stronger. "It felt like I was doing something wrong, so there was this incredible feeling of guilt," recalls Kate, a scientist. "Then I would throw everything I had away; sometimes I didn't wear the clothes for months and months. . . .
Cross-dress mess
'Frozen somewhere between underwear and pastrami sandwiches, I felt a sudden need to rebel against the gender taxonomy of baby vests...'
Rafael BehrSunday October 21, 2007
Observer
Because of a hedgehog, I had a gender crisis in Marks & Spencer. I was shopping for clothes for my daughter and had found some vests I liked. They depicted hedgehogs, friendly, mischievous-looking hedgehogs, blue hedgehogs. They didn't have pink hedgehogs. Presumably you get girl hedgehogs in the wild, otherwise there'd be no baby hedgehogs and, pretty soon, no hedgehogs at all. But according to baby clothes designers, hedgehogs are essentially male. So are crocodiles. Rabbits and butterflies are female. Trains and cars are male. Flowers are female.That was the root of my crisis. I didn't feel ready to identify my daughter as a flower-sniffing rabbit. If that is her vocation, I'm happy for her to pursue it. But I'd like her to grow up with the confidence to also consider becoming an engine-driving crocodile.
Frozen on the spot, somewhere between underpants and pastrami sandwiches, I felt a sudden need to rebel against the regressive gender taxonomy of baby vests. I'll buy the hedgehogs anyway, I thought. Boys don't have a monopoly on blue. But then I wondered if maybe I only liked the hedgehogs because I was a man. Maybe I had been brainwashed into blue-centricity as a child.
But that didn't seem plausible. I was a Seventies baby. We all romped around in sludge-coloured neutrality. I am Generation Orangey-Brown. We all had our hair in shoulder-length bobs. When we were older we graduated into purple corduroy flares. There's no sex in corduroy.
But if my preference for hedgehogs wasn't acquired as a child, it must be innate. Perhaps there is a recognised classification of creatures that most of us don't know about, but that is familiar to people who work in the infant rag trade. I imagine a studio many storeys underground, where designers are sitting in rows on tall stools at drawing boards. There is a constant scrabble, scratch, scratch, squeak sound, like cockroaches crawling over balloons. It is nibs on paper.
'Panda! Boy or Girl?' a young designer calls without looking up, to no one in particular. 'Girl,' comes a reply from the other side of the room. 'It's a bear. Bears are girl.' The young designer takes a fine brush, moistens it between his lips and dips it into one of two paint wells built into his desk - the left-hand well, the pink one.
I imagine that on the studio shelves there is a reference book, Pre-school Animal Preference by Gender (Vol II)' by RG Hobsbaum and CW Richardson, two sociologists from the early Eighties. Dr Hobsbaum showed zoological slides to babies and used a specially customised protractor to measure the corners of their mouths for evidence of a smile. Then he noted the inclinations of boys and girls. Professor Richardson, meanwhile, was an expert in de-scarification - the technique of making children want to cuddle animals that, in the wild, would tear their throats out. He learned how to switch off the instinctive fear that all creatures have of dangerous predators. His breakthrough came when he successfully trained baby foxes to play with fluffy toy aristocrats. . . .
Monday, October 22, 2007
Ireland violated transsexual's right to new birth certificate under EU law, judge rules
DUBLIN, Ireland: Ireland violated European human rights law by refusing to give a transsexual a new birth certificate recording her new gender and name, a Dublin judge ruled Friday in a landmark judgment.
The ruling by High Court Justice Liam McKechnie was the first time that an Irish judge has found Ireland in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. It means the government of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern must pass legislation amending the law or risk a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
"This is such a wonderful breakthrough after such a long, long time," said Dr. Lydia Foy, a 60-year-old dentist who began her case in 1997, five years after undergoing a sex-change operation to become a woman.
She said existing Irish law, which does not permit transsexuals to be issued new birth-certificate records, means "you can be outed and embarrassed" in any applications that require birth certificate details. "You might be tempted to lie to save yourself embarrassment," she said.
Foy said she also feared suffering loss of insurance benefits or other rights if officials accused her of misrepresenting her identity.
The Justice Department said it was studying the 70-page judgment and declined immediate comment.
McKechnie said Foy suffered "stress, humiliation, embarrassment and loss of dignity" because of the state's refusal to give her sex change legal standing. He said her right to privacy would be jeopardized if she was arrested or faced insurance claims, which would require reference to her birth records and expose her sex-change status.
Foy's wife Anne and two daughters opposed her lawsuit, fearing that any change in her birth record would invalidate the marriage and their inheritance rights.
Foy was married in 1977 and is the biological father of both girls, and was judicially separated after undergoing a sex-change operation in 1992. Foy filed for divorce in 2006 but that process was put on hold pending her lawsuit against the state.
In his judgment, McKechnie said Ireland should consider adopting Britain's Gender Recognition Act, which was passed in 2003 in response to a Strasbourg ruling that British law violated the rights of transsexuals. He noted that the British law permitted both original and amended birth-certificate records to enjoy legal standing in the case of transsexuals.
"I didn't want to interfere with their rights," Foy said of her wife and daughters.
"But we don't want to be embarrassed any further," Foy said of Ireland's transsexuals, whom she described as "a very small and rather battered minority." . . .
POV, Critique, Opinion: Ban on 'Mom' and 'Dad' sparks call for exodus
October 16, 2007
By Bob Unruh
A call is being issued to Christians who have been engaged in the culture wars in California's schools to abandon the system, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a ban on "discriminatory bias" against homosexuals and others with alternative sexual lifestyles.
"We're calling upon every California parent to pull their child out of California's public school system," Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, told WND.
"The so-called 'public schools' are no longer a safe emotional environment for children. Under the new law, schoolchildren as young as kindergarten will be sexually indoctrinated and introduced to homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality, over the protests of parents, teachers and even school districts," he said.
The law at issue went through the California legislature as SB 777, and now bans in school texts and activities any discriminatory bias against those who have chosen alternative sexual lifestyles, Meredith Turney, legislative liaison for Capitol Resource Institute, said.
There are no similar protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, however. Offenders will face the wrath of the state Department of Education, up to and including lawsuits.
"SB 777 will result in reverse discrimination against students with religious and traditional family values. These students have lost their voice as the direct result of Gov. Schwarzenegger's unbelievable decision. The terms 'mom and dad' or 'husband and wife' could promote discrimination against homosexuals if a same-sex couple is not also featured. . . .
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I hope no RATIONAL, thinking transgender person is even comtemplating voting for Rudy Guliani or any other Republican. . . .