Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Monica Roberts has been covering a proposed bill call SB 723; her most recent update is here. It’s in the Senate, & what it will do is make it illegal to use a court order about name/gender change to apply for a marriage license. The only reason it’s been proposed is to mess with the legal marriages of trans women to men, such as in the Nikki Araguz.
If you live in TX, call your senators now and tell them to kill this bill. List below the break.
… but you can definitely buy a vibrator at a drugstore near you these days, thanks to the lines manufactures by Trojan (of the condom, not the horse).
Still, I prefer places like Babeland and The Tool Shed because it was the woman-friendly stores that made this all possible in the first place.
There is a petition at change.org which is calling for the McDonald’s employees who stood by, laughed, and videotaped the violent attack on a trans woman be held responsible.
I have no idea what kind of precedent that might be, but a law like this is long overdue.
Not at all ironically, it is in Maryland that a recent non-discrimination law recently went down in flames because gender identity was added to the bill and legislators, as per usual, were presented with the bullshit argument that somehow “men in dresses” would be hiding out in ladies’ room inflicting violence. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A CASE OF THIS HAPPENING, and as we can all see here, it is transpeople who require protection and safety from transphobic bigots. The Democratic Senators who backed out of supporting the bill – even after confirming their support – should be ashamed of themselves.
Fair Wisconsin, the large LGBTQA organization in the state, has decided I deserve an award as an activist; I am honestly humbled and ridiculously pleased.
ACTIVIST: Helen Boyd
Author of My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, Helen Boyd is a nationally recognized and trusted voice on issues concerning gender and has championed gender equality for years. She lives in Appleton with her partner Rachel Crowl and teaches gender studies at Lawrence University.
I’ve won as part of their Education Fund Leadership Awards, for which there is a reception on May 4th in Milwaukee. I hope you can join me and Rachel, FAIR and the other honorees that evening.
I joked a month ago that in Wisconsin, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a pissed off bear, but I had no idea what was coming:
My friend Miriam Hall took this lovely shot, which sums it up:
You can see more of her cool photography on her flickr page, too.
It turns out that the lovely porn star Drew Deveaux – who just won Heartthrob of the Year at the Feminist Porn Awards – is out & trans.
How fucking cool.
There are plans afoot for an educational/outreach conference for West Michigan. Here is their call for organizers:
Call For Organizers: Transgender Education Collaboration of West Michigan (2011-2012)
A collaborative plan for educating West Michigan about transgender, gender variant, and intersex issues
Why?There is a need for education about Transgendered, gender variant, and intersex issues in West Michigan.
How? LGBT and educational related groups will be able to educate & advocate on transgender, gender variant, and intersex issues by creating a conference/awareness week with speakers, workshops, and other activities.
What Can You Do? Email M Kelley at mattkelley39@gmail.com if you would like to get involved, would be interested in speaking, know organizations willing to join the collaboration, or want to contribute somehow to this happening. It is my hope that together we can begin to change West Michigan.
Please copy + re-post widely.
In the light of some upcoming news, I thought I’d post two songs today that are ones I really do hum to myself when I need them, when my spine isn’t feeling as tall as I’d like.
I first heard “Stand!” as performed by World Party with Sinead O’Connor as guest vocalist at the old New Ritz (which was once Studio 54): a better introduction to a song you couldn’t have asked for.
Last week, Jennifer Finney Boylan spoke to the Maine legislature over gender inclusion in Maine’s non discrimination laws. She writes:
Yesterday, I spoke to the Maine legislature’s Judiciary committee. A bill has been proposed to “exempt” transgender people from protections under the Maine Human Rights Act, which went into effect six years ago. Currently, Maine protects GLBT people from discrimination, and this includes a so called “public accommodations” provision of the very sort that was, in part, the deal breaker in the Maryland law that was shelved last week. (Although I should make it clear that the Maine law has been on the books for six years without problem, and the proposed legislation is to REMOVE the protection for trans people; Maryland currently has no such provisions and the shelved legislation would have put these protections into place.)
She made some lovely remarks to the Maine legislature’s judiciary committee, which she’s reprinted in full on her blog, but the issue that comes up is that of passing privilege: how people are more than ready to have trans people who pass in their transitioned gender protected and welcomed in gender-specific spaces, but that the people who don’t pass are suspect.
That’s obviously a problem, since it’s exactly the trans people (and cis people, for that matter) who don’t have “acceptable” or culturally legible genders that need the protection most. No one asks for anyone’s ID on the way into a public bathroom after all; we are carded by our gender expression, and if our gender isnt normative, there’s often trouble, whether the person is trans, butch or some other gender that doesn’t stick closely enough to “man” or “woman”.
A quick thanks to Boylan for the heads up and for speaking up, too.
