Trans United for Obama Congratulates Transgender Delegates

WASHINGTON, August 28 – As Democrats from all over convene in Charlotte, NC to nominate Barack Obama for reelection as President, there will be at least 11 transgender people in official roles.

Delegates and Committee members are equally divided between male and female and, under the Democratic National Committee’s rules, should demographically reflect the Democratic electorate in each state. In 2008, each state was mandated to set a goal for LGBT delegates. Each State has their own procedure in electing and appointing delegates. The DNC Chair appoints 25 at-large Standing Committee members to each committee, including the 2 co-chairs and 4 vice chairs. Each jurisdiction also sends its allotted number of committee members.

In 2000, Jane Fee of Minnesota was the first transgender delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In 2004, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas sent transgender people in their delegation to Boston. In 2008, “gender identity” was included in the Democratic platform at the Denver National Convention and Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Texas sent delegates. Now, in 2012, we have our largest and most diverse contingent of openly transgender delegates.

In 2009, the DNC added “Gender Identity” as a characteristic of full inclusion within the party. The language of the 2012 Democratic Platform will be fully inclusive of transgender people’s civil rights.

The 2012 transgender Americans who are part of official DNC Convention are:

  1. Barbra Casbar Siperstein of New Jersey, Super Delegate (member of the Executive Committee of the DNC)
  2. Dana Beyer, M.D. of Maryland (Credentials Committee)
  3. Kylar William Broadus of Missouri (Platform Committee)
  4. Janice Covington of North Carolina (Delegate, 8th Cong. Dist.)
  5. Cris Land of Oregon (Delegate, 1st Cong. Dist)
  6. Daria Lynn Lohman of Arizona (Delegate Alternate for AZ)
  7. Marisa Richmond of Tennessee (At Large Delegate for TN)
  8. Diego Miguel Sanchez of Massachusetts (At Large Delegate for MA)
  9. Jamie Dianne Shiner of Wisconsin (Delegate, 8th Cong. Dist.)
  10. Melissa Sklarz of New York (Credentials Committee)
  11. Meghan Stabler of Texas (Delegate, 5th Cong. Dist.)

You can see all of their photos and statements at the delegates page of the Trans United for Obama website. Continue reading “Trans United for Obama Congratulates Transgender Delegates”

Still Vanilla

Jezebel has compiled the 10 worst “BDSM” suggestions made by Cosmo, and, um, I’d like to know what exactly is kinky about sticking your finger in someone’s mouth & ordering him to suck it. Is it because you’re ordering and not asking, or suggesting coyly, or whatever non-kink version of a similar scenario Cosmo might recommend? Or is it somehow kinky just to penetrate your male partner & not the other way around? I don’t know. I have lost track of how tepid people have sex, and I thank my lucky stars for that.

Honestly, I’m not sure if it gives me a headache or amuses me greatly to think of the crazy awkward scenes happening in bedrooms across America because of those fifty shades of goofy. Just, um, make sure you have the key to the handcuffs FIRST, don’t draw blood, and um, maybe remember that most of us have day jobs we have to sit at desks to do. (Although a day of uncomfortable sitting can be a lovely reminder of what went on the night before.)

& Honestly, leave the utensils in the kitchen where they belong. Except the slatted spoons: those things really sting.

Seriously, try Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Rough Sex, instead.

Not a Drag Queen

I wish when people wrote stories about gender they actually knew something about gender.

The new Barbie is what’s called a Faux Queen. Not a drag queen, not a crossdresser. She doesn’t have to be male-bodied to be a queen, nor does she have to be in order to be fabulous. She could, as well, be high femme.

Catholics Against Ryan

From Maureen Dowd’s column this past week:

Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.

Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.

“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.

The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”

Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”

Oh, & um, Ayn Rand was an atheist. Can we get that news out to the Christian Right, please?

Who’s Poor? Women

With all of this blather about financial bottom lines, I’d just like to point out a small fact: the majority of the poor people in this country are women. So any budget plan that cuts funding for the poor is cutting funding for women, especially single mothers with children.

It’s embarrassing that we have the largest gap in poverty rates between men & women in the Western world.

Here are some other useful facts the next time someone starts going on about budgets and bottom lines and how there’s no need for feminism:

  • 13% of women over the age of 65 are poor; only 6% of men that age are.
  • The poverty gap between women and men widens significantly between ages 18 and 24—20.6 percent of women are poor at that age, compared to 14.0 percent of men. The gap narrows, but never closes, throughout adult life, and it more than doubles during the elderly years.

Why? Not just because of the wage gap, which is still significant – 77 cents on the dollar these days – but also because

  • women provide far more unpaid care giving than men,
  • they are still responsible for most of the unpaid childcare,
  • women still get pregnant and lose jobs as a result, and finally,
  • women lose paid work days dealing with the sexual and other violence.

So how about we actually work on a plan that eliminates sexual violence against women to balance the fucking budget, instead?

(h/t to Dylan.)