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Thailand’s Got Talent

This performance has upset a lot of Western trans people, who find the attitude of the judges, and the singer hirself, as somehow demeaning or belittling of this person’s trans identity.

I would argue, however, that unless you’re Thai, it may be very difficult to understand the place of trans people in their own cultural context. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely 100% great to be what’s called a ladyboy (or, more properly, Kathoey) in Thailand, but the singer’s experience of being trans might be entirely different than a US trans woman’s.

Anyhoo, I think she rocks.

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Marriage Equality: Conversion Narrative

NOM has lost a hater. A couple of weeks ago, Louis J. Marinelli jumped ship and now supports full marriage equality. He was turned off by the people who had gathered around the cause:

I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun to question. This would be timeline point number three. I wanted to extend an olive branch in some way and started to reinstate those who had been banned by previous administrators of my page. I welcomed them to participate on the page and did what I could do erase the worst comments and even ban those who posted them.

He explains as well exactly how, as a conservative, Catholic, and Republican, he has come to see where he was wrong:

Once you understand the great difference between civil marriage and holy marriage, there is not one valid reason to forbid the former from same-sex couples, and all that is left to protect is the latter.

Indeed Christians and Catholics alike are well within their right to demand that holy matrimony, a sacrament and service performed by the Church and recognized by the Church, remains between a man and a woman as their faith would dictate. However, that has nothing to do with civil marriage, performed and recognized by the State in accordance with state law.

My name is Louis J. Marinelli, a conservative-Republican and I now support full civil marriage equality. The constitution calls for nothing less.

For those of us for whom this is obvious, it’s easy to scoff, but I got goosebumps reading his entire letter about this conversion, and interestingly, I would place it very much in a huge tradition of Christian “conversion” literature – it’s not Saul to Paul, but I’ll take it!

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What Does a Feminist President Look Like?

Oh yes: Not just Obama, but his VP Joe Biden, who in a recent interview on NPR about rapes on college campuses, said plainly:

Look, folks, rape is rape is rape.

Among the points made by the administration, are:

— When a woman brings a complaint that she was a victim of assault, a school cannot punish her for using alcohol or drugs. In most allegations of sexual assault, alcohol is involved. Laws in every state say when a woman is drunk to the point of passing out, she can’t give consent. But some women have complained that when they went to school administrators to say they’d been sexually assaulted, they ended up getting punished for breaking school rules on drinking or using drugs.

— Schools must fully inform a person who brings a complaint of her or his (men are victims in about 6 percent of assault cases, according to federal officials) rights to an investigation and then they must be told the outcome of the investigation. Some schools thought they could not tell the victim the result of an investigation because it would violate the privacy of the alleged perpetrator.

— Even if a student is said to have assaulted another student in off-campus housing, the school must investigate.

— Schools must investigate in a timely manner. Some schools told women they could not get involved until after local police completed a criminal investigation. That often left a woman on campus — and even in the same dormitory or classrooms — with the man she said had assaulted her.

I would like to see this same points used to investigate accounts of hate crimes, too.

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Beyond Fushcia and Teal

I love this.

Because honestly, didn’t we all grow up with Crayola? So when is it that boys are taught not to care about the finer differences in color?

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How to Defeat Bigoted Bullshit

What an amazing story: a Brazilian volleyball player was heckled with the chant “faggot” during an uber-important match and was shaken by the incident. He came out – acknowledging that he was gay, & that everyone knew it – and the rest of him team showed support by wearing pink shirts, rainbow shirts, and unfurling a huge banner that said “Volleyball against prejudice” and fans brought thundersticks that had the player’s name on them.

Here, we pretend this is all about Kobe Bryant – as if no one else in sports uses these kinds of slurs! Please.: the whole “I didn’t mean gay people when I used ‘fag’ as an insult” is so 1994. There is absolutely no excuse for anyone to use words that have been used to oppress, intimidate and threaten people of whatever minority group anymore.

(h/to to SS!)

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Speechless = Priceless

Yesterday, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) had one minute on the floor:

He makes me proud to be a Dem & a NYer. Really.

Happy Tax Day, everyone.

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13 Years

It’s 13 years to the day since our first date. Amazing to think about how much has gone down since then, to each of us individually, and to us as a couple, and considering all that in the context of all that has gone on in the world makes my brain hurt.

Still: happy anniversary, doll!

(We celebrate two anniversaries because (1) we do, and (2) because we have the same birthday, and didn’t want one less celebratory day in our lives. So there.)

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Missing Girls

News from that radical feminist magazine The Economist states that Indian females seem to be missing:

NEW data from the 2011 Indian census show that there are now 914 girls aged 0-6 years old for every 1,000 boys of the same age, or 75.8m girls and 82.9m boys. A cultural preference for sons and the increasing availability of prenatal screening to determine a baby’s sex have helped contribute to a worsening in the ratio (from 927 in the previous census in 2001), which has been deteriorating rapidly even as the ratio for the population as a whole has improved. A decline was recorded in 28 of the country’s 35 states and territories, among which there is wide variation; from 830 in the northern state of Haryana to 973 Meghalaya in the east.

The articles goes on to point out that the Chinese are facing a similar problem.

& Here, my dear trans readers, is the problem with being born with a vagina: too often, it means you don’t get to be born at all. Granted, if transness were viewable in the womb, most trans people wouldn’t get to be born, either.