This is a chart that shows the support for same-sex marriage by age group — which, in a nutshell, means we’ve got a waiting game on our hands if nothing else. There’s a nice analysis of the chart where I found it, too.
Other charts about same sex marriage issues can be found here.
I was asked recently for resources for trans people with children. Honestly, there’s never very much, but here’s the list I sent her:
If anyone has any newer resources I haven’t yet seen, please do add them!
A decent article in the NYT about high schools, crossdressing, and identity:
At Wesson Attendance Center, a Mississippi public school, just that sort of fight erupted over senior portraits. Last summer, during her photo session, Ceara Sturgis, 17, dutifully tried on the traditional black drape, the open-necked robe that reveals the collarbone, a hint of bare shoulder.
“It was terrible!” said Ms. Sturgis, an honors student, band president and soccer goalie, who has been openly gay since 10th grade. “If you put a boy in a drape, that’s me! I have big shoulders and ooh, it didn’t look like me! I said, ‘I can’t do this!’ So my mom said, ‘Try on the tux.’ And that looked normal.”
Shortly thereafter, students were informed that girls had to wear drapes for yearbook portraits; boys, tuxedos.
The Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the school. Rickey Clopton, superintendent of Copiah County schools, did not return phone calls. Last month he released a statement affirming that the school’s decision was “based upon sound educational policy and legal precedent.”
Last month, Veronica Rodriguez, Ms. Sturgis’s mother, paid for a full-page ad in the yearbook that is to include a photograph of her daughter in a tuxedo.
Bea Arthur left the Ali Forney Center $300k:
The Ali Forney Center, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBT youth, announced at Bea Arthur’s Memorial Service on September 14th that they planned to purchase a building to house 12 youths and name it her honor.
Someone asked me recently if I knew what WWJD meant, and if so, how I would answer that question as per LGBT community.
My answer was: Honestly, I think Jesus would be working with the LGBT teenagers who are thrown out of their homes every year & forced to engage in survival sex to live.
TransActive has some great posters for download about transgender kids; I’ve already got one on my office door.
In Spanish & English, 11 x 17 and 8 x 11, black & white and color. Download them here.
The Walkman turned 30 and one kid who’s 13 took three days to figure out you can flip the cassette for more music. And they say these kids are clever.
& Yes, I do still have my yellow Sports version… somewhere. And a LOT of cassettes. I still miss the mindful mixing of 45 minutes of music. Tape-cover making was an art form all its own too: my favorite personal creation was a cover I painted a purplish black and then wrote on with a toothpick dipped in Wite-Out. It was a Love & Rockets‘ Express b/w Tones on Tail and gave me many hours of listening pleasure. Now, Tones on Tail songs are on car commercials. *sigh*
Ah, back in the day.
This morning, Rob & Arnie & Dawn of KRXQ radio talked about transgender youth with Autumn Sandeen (of Pam’s House Blend) and Kim Pearson (of TYFA).
Veronica has the links up of the original comments and has this mornings show up in three audio files.
A local (to the radio station) blogged about it too.
Today at noon the CA Supreme Court will hand down its decision about Prop 8, & I’m nervous. The wrong decision is going to set off rallies all over the country, which is a good thing, but therer is so much anger, sadness, & frustration compacted into this ruling that – well, old lady that I am, I worry about people’s safety.
Kids: art. not. riots. Pretty please, be creative, break the law, but stay safe & don’t give the haters more fuel for their fire.
My Damned tribute seems uncannily well-timed. Anti-Pope indeed.
While most of us were having a day on Monday, and many of us were celebrating victory in Vermont, one mother lost her child because he was bullied and taunted for being gay.
Enough of this. We have to put more pressure on school administrators to do a helluva lot more when it comes to school bullying.
The other part – which we don’t talk about often enough – is why homophobia is still allowed to go unchecked amongst the middle school set, and how we might prepare kids who are being gender-baited or gay-baited (whether or not they are queer) to deal with it.
Act Two — Tom Girls: Lilly and Thomasina have a lot in common. They’re both 8 years old. And they were both born boys, although it became clear pretty early on that they’d prefer to be girls. There aren’t all that many kids in the world like them, but recently, at a conference in Seattle on transgender parenting, they met. And they immediately hit it off. They could talk about things with each other that they’d never been able to share with other friends back home. And that’s comforting, even if they never see each other after the conference ends. Producer Mary Beth Kirchner tells the story, with production help from Rebecca Weiker.
It’s only about 20 minutes, & worth listening to.
(Thanks to Chris & Jess for the tip.)
Law & Order’s show tonight is about a trans teenager who is accused of attacking her father who insists she’s a boy and is trying to get custody of her from her mother.
9:59 PM definitely sympathetic. hopefully indicative of a sea change. still problematic in some ways, but pretty damn good for within the context of a police procedural.
9:57 PM crying.
9:54 PM history, violence, genitals.
9:52 PM oy.
9:51 PM hooboy. non trans advocate of trans youth loses her mind.
9:48 PM the kid can ACT. (& he’s from Poplar, WI.)
9:46 PM wow. sympathy for the loved ones of the trans person who don’t get it! & also the anger & frustration & sadness of the trans person, too.
9:39 PM getting worse. & worse than that. fast.
9:34 PM hooboy. weird turn. righteous trans youth activists who knock off pharmaceutical companies.
9:27 PM hrm. so far so good. inaccurate information, sure, but so far sympathetic. nearly an after-school special.
from yesterday’s Dr. Phil show. It seems the typical “poor mom” trans kids show until Toni confronts the reparative doctor.
‘50 Under 30’ Youth Hate Crimes Report Re-Issued: Almost 20 New Victims; Re-Titled “70 Under 30â€
WASHINGTON (December 4, 2008) — The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition’s 2006 hate crimes report, “50 Under 30: Masculinity & The War Against America’s Youth” has been updated and re-issued. Because of the nearly 20 new murders, the new title has been changed to “70 Under 30.”
Said GenderPAC Executive Director Riki Wilchins, “It’s sad to see so many new murders so quickly. We had hoped to only need to update this report every few years or so, but the pace of violence has surpassed our expectations.”
The report highlights the continuing vulnerability to assault that individuals face if they are young, of color and gender non-conforming. It also underscores the limited resources for safety and support many of them have.
Asswipe. He had someone on from Focus on the Family as an expert on trans & gender variant kids. As if they’re the arbiters of tolerance.
He tires me.
More and more we’re starting to see some very serious venues take on some aspect of trans issues, whether it’s 20/20 last year with GID and trans youth or The Atlantic Monthly’s current article on the same topic.
But I didn’t really expect Harvard Business Review to publish an article about workplace issues, or rather, I wouldn’t have if I didn’t know how fantatic Jillian Todd Weiss is.
I had transitioned from male to female in 1998, and my new employer neither knew nor suspected that I was transgender. Now I was receiving the condescending treatment that some of my female colleagues had complained about all along. After several such incidents, I quietly left the practice of law, never to return. As a male attorney, my competence had never been questioned so harshly by my employers, so I assumed that reports of gender discrimination were bogus complaints brought by females who didn’t measure up. As a male, I had been privileged, though I didn’t know it at the time, to avoid much of the harsh treatment reserved for females in a male bastion.
I didn’t know Ms. Weiss before her transition so I can’t say “I told you so” but I’m going to anyway! No, women aren’t blowing smoke up anyone’s ass about this stuff. I appreciate her honesty in admitting she thought they were “bogus complaints” and am pleased to know that transitioners, as I expected, are turning out to be the last tool in the feminist toolbox.
It’s one of the reasons I find the slogan “equal pay for equal work” problematic, because so much of the struggle is getting people to see your work as equal to your male peers’ — even when it’s superior.
(via Bilerico)
This study, about how Americans discourage the highest level of math genius, is far more interesting than all the ink we waste on the differences between boys’ and girls’ math skills. To me, this is the great American tradition of anti-intellectualism at its worst. My guess, of course, is that the lower you go on the socio-economic scale, the more pervasive these ideas are.
I had friends stomp on my report cards. Me and other smart working class kids weren’t exactly encouraged. I feel very lucky that my emotional needs to be smart outweighed all the discouraging influences; as with other kids from big families, being smart got me attention from my teachers, attention that was a little lacking at home. Because otherwise, being good at math came with major social stigma, and most of the young women I’ve met at colleges seem to have developed a reflexive “fuck you, I can do math” kind of attitude that keeps them safe.
That they should need it is the sore point. We celebrate athletic prowess, the people who make the top 1%, but not in intellectual arenas. Oh, this country. Maybe having an actual smart guy for president will change that & start to filter down, & kids might want to grow up to be something other than an NBA star.
De-gendering this stuff really points up actual real problems that need to be dealt with.
(h/t to Lena for sending me the article)
I was poking around recently, trying to find out about a PSA that we’d been discussing in the mHB forums lately which is about trying to discourage kids to say “that’s so gay” when they mean “that’s not cool” when I found that the PSA is part of a larger campaign by The Ad Council & GLSEN to “think b4 you speak.” I love the idea, and not just because “that’s so gay” is unnecessarily homophobic, but because I so wish people didn’t use language so carelessly.
As a result I found change.org, which is a huge social issues/activist-oriented collection of blogs on various issues. There’s a blog on women’s rights, animal rights, global warming, immigration, and of course gay rights, which – lo & behold! – has me on its recommended reading list. How cool is that?
Great resource for us social justice types, so do go check it out.
Kate Bornstein has her wrap-up post up (thanks, Kate!) and so does our Canadian friend Veronique, and I also wanted to get in a few words from Melissa Sklarz, who is currently the vice chair of National Stonewall Democrats, about NSD and its trans representation:
NSD has had trans representation on its board for almost 10 years. I have been on the Board for 6 years and have been a vice chair of the Board for the last 4. We have had trans representation from the East and the West and now our friends in Colorado are starting an NSD trans group for all of us. The three of us comprise 8% of the Board total and all do service at the Exec level.
Most gay poltical groups have either few or no trans folks on board.
Which is one of the reasons it’s so damn cool that they decided to host the donations for Obama for the trans community. Thank you, Stonewall Democrats, especially Jon Hoadley and John Marble, who spearheaded this project, and thank you Babrbara Casbar (NJ), Melissa Sklarz (NY), and Laura Calvo (OR), for your work within NSD’s state organizations.
Betty White just gave out an Emmy along with Mary Tyler Moore, and she looks fantastic. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t had any work done, and honestly, she made Mary Tyler Moore – who’s had too much work done – look even weirder than she did already.
My opinion, only, but I really do feel that when women try to preserve their youth with too much plastic surgery, they kind of end up underlining that they’re old.
My guilty confession is that I’m a late-night Golden Girls addict, which is a genius show. Imagine, a comedy about four women over 50 who all have active sex lives! It seems like such a radical idea, even now. Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White and the late Estelle Getty were all exactly right for their parts, and the writing was corny in an 80s kind of way, but still funny.
