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Colorbind

A great, much-needed and overdue article on the intersections of transness and race by Daisy Hernandez at ColorLines:

Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of which happened.

What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.

Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,” says Mitchell, who is Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.

This essay might be an interesting read to compare to Jacob Anderson Minshall‘s essay in “The Enemy Within: Becoming a Straight White Guy” which details what it’s been like for a feminist to transition to male. It’s in the new anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power.

(via Feministing, where you will also currently see a blog ad for She’s Not the Man I Married)

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Press Release: NCTE Mourns the Loss of Congressman Tom Lantos

Lantos was thought to have introduced the first pro-transgender effort in the U.S. Congress – the resolution he introduced would have condemned, “all violations of internationally recognized human rights norms based on the real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of an individual.”

The only survivor of the Nazi Holocaust ever elected to the U.S. Congress, Rep. Lantos was a strong supporter of human rights for all people. He was a co-sponsor in 2007 of both the federal hate crimes bill that passed the House of Representatives and of the unified and inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 2015) that was eventually abandoned this fall.

Our thoughts are with the family and friends of this brave leader.

For more about Lantos, do check the Mercury News article about him.

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45 Below

It’s 45 degrees below zero with the wind chill here in Wisconsin.

I’ll let Lewis Black say the rest:

(thanks to Megan, who is also here in WI cursing the cold.)

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NYCCentric

I’ve noticed that people who don’t live in New York don’t seem to mind – or even notice – that they don’t live in New York.

How peculiar.

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Kinks

There’s been a small administrative problem with the boards, but it seems to be unwrinkling itself just now.