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Diane Schroer & the LOC

The ACLU has a stunning blog post up about the Diane Schroer / Library of Congress case.

Science doesn’t matter, the Library insists, it’s what Congress was thinking of when it passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “Everett Dirksen,” a reporter said to me in the hall outside Court, “wasn’t thinking of Diane Schroer when he helped pass the Civil Rights Act.” “Probably true,” I said as she headed off to meet her cameraman, “but James Madison wasn’t thinking of TV when he penned the First Amendment either.”

The issue isn’t the way someone who wrote or voted for a law was thinking it would apply; the issue is the concept embodied in the law. What was the idea? The flip answer is that on this point, Congress didn’t have an idea; many of those who voted to put sex into the 1964 Civil Rights Act were hoping it would kill the bill.

But in 1964, as today, it is hard to believe that anyone thought sex was just about chromosomes or even just anatomy. It was about the whole package. The issue in the case is how does that idea apply in a world where the package is different than we thought in 1964, a reflection of more things than we thought, maybe not including a lot of things we thought, maybe more fluid than we thought.

It was written by Matt Coles, the Director of the ACLU’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & AIDS projects. Read it.

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Rachel on TV

Rachel Maddow will have her own show on MSNBC starting September 8th, 2008. It’ll be at 9PM, after Keith Olbermann. We’re both big fans of hers, and are very very pleased that all her guest hosting for Olbermann panned out.

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Mental Dental

Betty’s off to CO to get some necessary dental surgery – that’s dental, not genital – and will be gone for a few weeks since it’s such extensive surgery. And once again I’m in Brooklyn without her, and I’m always amazed at how purposeless I feel for the first day or so when she’s gone. I’m so used to her coming home and being her big self on the other side of the living room, playing songs for me or changing the channel or telling me about what’s going on in the lefty blogosphere.

What’s funny to me is how much I’ve always liked and appreciated time to myself, and how unused to having time alone I’ve become.

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NYC Soundtracks

MSG has a contest going – like American Idol – of musicians who play in the NYC subways. They aired 16 for the first round, which has already been aired, & yesterday they revealed the 8 that got the most “change.” That’s how you vote for them – you drop virtual change in their baskets, at the MSG website. Eventually they’ll eliminate all but one.

Clever idea, & some really good musicians. Do check it out. You can start by catching up with Episode 1, and you can find more information about the voting and how they chose the musicians, also on their website.

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Jenny Boylan & The “Complementarians”

Here’s an interesting exchange between a blogger,  CWMW (a Christian group), and the NYT op-ed by Jenny Boylan about the gender testing planned for the Olympics:

The issue of the ‘extremely rare’ defects that result from this being a fallen world ‘not invalidating the binary nature of God’s good design of manhood and womanhood’ fails to address this. For if the binary is to hold, then 65 million people need to be categorized as either male or female. Otherwise they cannot logically be assigned scripturally defined gender roles. So what are the standards? Genitalia? Chromosomes? Capability to give birth? If the Bible doesn’t provide the standards, then someone has to. I look forward to CMWM’s answer to this.

Which is an interesting thought: if people are convinced our gender roles are laid out for us in The Bible, then what about the people who don’t fit the pre-existing genders? & What about the eunuchs?

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Media Trans

The next round of America’s Next Top Model will have a transgender candidate named Isis. I’m sure it will be a big mess, the way ANTM tends to be, with too many dramas & too much revelation about the candidates’ personal issues (issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with their ability to model).

BUT – compared to the recent footage of the recently cancelled Pretty Handsome (which was previously known as 4 oz.) – I’m sure it’ll be better, at least for the reason that the woman’s goal is not to transition on the show or anything like that. The focus will not be on her being trans, per se, but on her desire to be a model.

When transness becomes an aspect of someone’s identity – even an aspect that’s given way too much attention in light of the whole human being – they have a chance to come across as people, first.

edited to add: & I’m not going to dignify the comments made by a dickwad on Fox News about Isis by commenting or linking since it’s just the usual bullshit hateful transphobia you’d expect. GLAAD did demand an apology, but none was received.

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Queer + Catholic NYC Readings

I’ll be reading with other Queer + Catholic authors on September 4th & 5th in NY. Do come!

Queer and Catholic is an essay collection that examines the culture of how being raised Catholic informs and influences, positively or negatively, our queerness and how our queerness affects our Catholicism, our vestigial Catholic nature or even our flight from and continued struggle with the ʽthe Church of Rome.ʼ  Whether we embrace or reject our Catholic upbringings, they affect and shape who we are and bump up against our queer identities. Examining the culture of Catholicism, rather than the dogma or letter of it, these essays and short stories do not seek to address whether or not queers and the Catholic Church can reconcile or how and why the church should change, but instead explore the impact that growing up Catholic and queer has on us as individuals, writers, and political agents.

Join editor Amie M. Evans and contributors Helen Boyd, Joseph de Marco, Anthony Easton, Stephen Greco, Vince Sgambati, Charlie Vazquez and Emanuel Xavier as they read from their contributions to the anthology.

  • Thursday, September 4 at 6:30PM, CUNY Grad Center, 365 5th Avenue, Skylight Room, (Rm 9100, T. 212-817-7000)
  • Friday, September 5th at 7PM, Bluestockings, 172 Allen St (btwn Rivington and Stanton Street).

edited to add: the San Francisco reading is tonight at SF’s Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, 6PM.

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Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest

As many of you know, Monica Canfield-Lenfest is the daughter of a trans woman and created a new resource, with COLAGE, for kids with trans parents. I highly recommend it.

1) First, tell me about COLAGE & how the book for Kids of Trans happened, what your goals were.

COLAGE (www.colage.org) is a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer parents. We build community and work toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy. I first contacted COLAGE five and a half years ago, when I was working on my undergraduate thesis: “She’s My Father: The Social Experience of People with Transgender Parents”. Looking for references for my project, I discovered a diverse community of queerspawn who gave me the space to better articulate my experience and encouraged me to continue my work, since there are hardly any resources for transgender parented families. I started presenting at transgender conferences and gained a renewed sense of responsibility to build community and develop resources for people with transgender parents.

During a COLAGE conference in Dallas two years ago, I suggested to Meredith Fenton, COLAGE Program Director, that perhaps I could fill a fall internship position at the national office. We came up with a Fellowship model for my position, which has become a new program for the organization. I worked full-time for eight months focused specifically on the Kids of Trans Program. The major goal of the fellowship was to develop resources for people with transgender parents. Since there was no book detailing our experiences and offering advice to people with trans parents, the Kids of Trans Resource Guide became the obvious main project.

My goals in writing the guide were: first, to tell other people with trans parents that they are not alone; second, to recognize that the entire family transitions when a parent transitions; and third, to provide compassionate advice from people who have similar families. In short, I hoped to create the book I wanted my father to give me when she came out to me over ten years ago. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest”

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Deal

My only sign of aging this week is that anti-wrinkle commercials have really started to piss me off. Especially that one with Andie McDowell, who weighs all of 12 lbs., talking about how hard it is to lose a dress size & how easy to lose your wrinkles.

You get wrinkles when you’re not young anymore. Deal.