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Plan B?

For those of you who have been following the issue of pharmacists deciding not to fill hormone prescriptions due to them following their conscience, US District Court Judge Jeanne Scott of Illionois just ruled in favor of Ethan Vandersand – one such pharmacist, who refused to fill a prescription for emergency contraception.

Despite a 2005 law issued by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) that requires Illinois pharmacists to either dispense or ensure timely access to Plan B upon request, Judge Jeanne Scott ruled that Vandersand was protected under the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act. Wal-Mart and Walgreen Co. — which have both terminated or disciplined employees for refusing to fill Plan B requests — maintain that Illinois’ conscience laws do not apply to pharmacists.

From the Feminist Daily News.

I’m curious if there are any reported instances where a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for a trans person’s hormones.

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Drink from the Tap

Pepsi has been forced to admit that their Aquafina water is actually public tap water.

Bottled water is probably the best example of a “healthy” concern gone awry, or What You Think is Good for You Actually Sucks for the Planet (and May or May Not Be Good for You).

  • Each day an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. The plastics they’re made of go on to poison ground water when they’re not recycled (most aren’t).
  • The Pacific Institute has estimated 20 million barrels of oil are used each year to make the plastic for water bottles.
  • For every bottle of water consumed, twice that amount of used was used in the bottling process.

There’s more here.

It’s a hot day in NYC, the fourth in the 90s, so drink from your tap. It’s safe, at least as safe or safer than most bottled water. Get a water filter, instead.

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Trans Partner Advocacy

Recently on our message boards, the partner of someone who was transitioning posted about her very last day with her male husband. She was sad, she was mourning, and she was feeling both loss & resentment.

Sometimes the larger trans community seems to view feelings like that as anti-trans; that a partner isn’t throwing the big coming out party for her transitioning companion is seen as less than enthusiastic, and the difficult feelings are interpreted as saying ‘trans is bad.’

But the thing is, it’s part of the gig. There’s a lot of change involved in transition, which every trans person with half a brain admits. I mean, that’s the point. Change is a difficult thing for most people – all people, really – and it is stressful even when the change is a good thing, like getting a better job or getting married or having a baby that you’ve long wanted.

But to miss the old, worse job, or thinking fondly about the time when you were single or childfree, doesn’t mean you don’t want the new change in your life. You do. But you can’t just tell your mind not to think about how it once was, either.

& Sometimes I think that’s what’s expected of partners, that we never have a time to say, “I did love him as a man.” We can’t admit that we liked the cocky or shy guy we first fell in love with, & the partners of FTMs aren’t supposed to mourn the loss of breasts and smooth cheeks that they loved to touch.

But the thing is, as any trans person should know, repressing a feeling of loss or sadness is really bad all around; repression poisons the groundwater, in effect, and everyone feels it. So while I don’t advise partners make themselves miserable longing for the past (just as I wouldn’t advise trans people to think the future will definitely be rosy simply because they’ll transition), expressing the more difficult feelings associated with transition is healthier, in my opinion, in the long run. Not easy to hear as the trans person, for sure, but from what I hear from same trans people, they too may need some time to mourn the loss of their own former self.

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(Ex) Surgeon General’s Warning: Bush Presidency Bad for Health

Not a big surprise, but the former Surgeon General under Bush, Dr. Richard Carmona, has testified that he was asked or told to withhold information on abstinence-only sex ed, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.

They have, of course, found this sap Holsinger to nominate, who I’m going to assume is more their kind of yes man. Not only that, but he’s declared publicly that homosexual sex is unnatural & unhealthy.

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Unhappy Boob

Jane magazine discovered in a recent survey of their readers that 75% of women are unhappy with their breasts, so they decided to dedicate their May issue to breasts & breast health (both physical & psychological). There’s photos of breasts & comments by the women who love them, & why. You can submit your own, with your own reason you love them, if you’re so inclined.

Geralyn Lucas, who lost one of hers to breast cancer, is blogging for them all month, too, keeping readers abreast of relevant issues. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

There’s also a neat Before & After section – with more photos – about getting bras that fit correctly.

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The Penn State Law Talk

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

Continue reading “The Penn State Law Talk”

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Philly IFGE

When we arrived at IFGE, we were greeted nearly immediately by Veronica Vera & Mariette Pathy Allen, even while we were checking in! Miss Vera would answer the question “Are crossdressers obsolete?” in her opening remarks the next day, & she looked fantastic. (Her answer, in a nutshell, was “no.”)

Crossdressers made a graceful stand for their place in the trans community this year, as in addition to Miss Vera, Miqqi Gilbert received a Trinity Award & delivered an acceptance speech that both (1) asked crossdressers to step up & (2) asked anyone who would disrespect or exclude CDs to step off. I was damned glad to hear it, since there really are some trans women who come off so smug I often feel tempted to mention that being a woman does not prevent one from liking crossdressers.

Donna Rose (author of Wrapped in Blue) & Alyson Meiselman (one of Christie Lee Littleton‘s lawyers) won Trinity Awards as well, which was an interesting juxtaposition, since Donna Rose is on the Board of HRC, which I imagine Meiselman considers something like the Evil Empire, since she delivered an acceptance speech that detailed exactly how much groups like Equality Georgia (& by extension, groups like HRC) sold out the trans community by not excluding “gender identity & expression” in legislation that got them theirs (discrimination protection for gays & lesbians).

Dallas Denny was given the Virginia Prince Award for Lifetime Achievement, and intended to explain that she’d turned down the award in years past because she was the paid editor of Transgender Tapestry at the time, but as she stepped down last year, she felt free to accept it this year, & did so with a concise list of what concerns her about the current state of the trans community (underfunded orgs) & what encourages her (the increases in visibility).

The biggest, nicest surprise for us was having Jamison Green unexpectedly in attendance. He stayed over from having given the keynote at Trans Health the previous week in Philly. His presence always adds some warmth and intelligence.

Our favorite new personality & friend was Ethan St. Pierre of NTAC & TransFM & FUAH. (NTAC, btw, has merged with IFGE, the news of which was announced at this conference.) Betty finally got to meet the irrepressible Monica Helms, of TAVA, who I met last year when I went by myself, & many games of wise-cracking pool were played.

& There ends the bigwig update from IFGE. More on our personal experiences when I get there.

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Blinding Paperwork

A Polish woman with a worsening eye condition needed to get an abortion after being warned by her doctor that she might go blind if she didn’t abort. Unfortunately for her, Poland requires written authorization for an abortion – which it only allows in cases such as hers, where the women’s health is at risk as a result of pregnancy – and she couldn’t get the doctor’s note. She instead carried to term and delivered the baby and her vision, as predicted, got worse – so much so she was declared legally disabled.

She did win $50k from the Polish government after the European Court of Appeals ruled in her favor, but I read this as a cautionary tale: making it too difficult for a woman to get an abortion results in unnecessary tragedy.