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Mourning Miners

Thank you, President Obama, for saying what you’ve said about the miners’ deaths. I’ve been maybe uncharacteristically silent on their massacre, because I’ve had no words.

The owners of Massey should be responsible, forever, for the financial well-being of all the families those miners left behind, and they should have to provide for them all on miners’ wages.

It is amazing to me that anyone could ever think companies could be responsible & not need government oversight. Massey is what you get when you even relax safety standards.

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Anti Pope

Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens want to have the Pope arrested when he comes to the UK. I saw the story on MSNBC & laughed for a full five minutes, because: why not? Is there some rule about why we should respect religious leaders globally? Don’t people who aren’t Catholic have the right to see justice for those kids?

I think it’s brilliant. After that, we can arrest all sorts of religious leaders for whatever, & then – no more religious bullshit.

I know it wouldn’t work. But the idea is lovely.

Continue reading “Anti Pope”

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Housing Discrimination Protections

A transgender apartment-hunter thought he’d found a perfect place in Baltimore. But when he showed up, the woman raised the rent by $100 over the advertised price, said she would only take cash and was clearly uncomfortable.

Last year, the Task Force joined forces with the National Center for Transgender Equality to survey 6,456 transgender people. An alarming 11 percent reported having been evicted because of their gender identity and 19 percent said they’d become homeless, the survey found. And while 68 percent of Americans own a home, only 32 percent of transgender Americans have achieved that level of security in their living arrangements.

Of course, gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans are also frequently the victims of housing discrimination. Using testers posing as would-be renters or buyers, the Michigan Fair Housing Centers reported in 2007 that 27 percent of same-sex couples were treated differently: “We found differences in rental rates, level of encouragement and application fees that favored the male/female test teams. We also saw behavior bordering on sexual harassment directed toward testers posing as same-sex couples,” the group noted . . .

Likewise, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2001 that 34 percent of lesbians, gays or bisexuals said “they or someone they know” had experienced discrimination while trying to rent an apartment or buy a house . . .

Nothing in federal law prohibits refusing to rent or sell to those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. And as Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, recently stressed, “Housing discrimination remains a persistent problem in our country.”

Nadler recently introduced legislation to amend the Fair Housing Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected categories. Enacted in 1968 to outlaw housing discrimination based on race, color, religion or national original, the measure has gradually been expanded to also cover sex, disability and familial status. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., is co-sponsoring Nadler’s drive for a much-needed upgrade.

Read the whole article here.

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Trans Characters in Novels

Cheryl Morgan asks Is There, or Should There Be, Such a Thing as Trans Lit? It’s a good question. She leaves out a bunch of books, like Feinberg’s Drag King Dreams and Luna, written for young adults and winner of the prestigious National Book Award. Ursula LeGuin’s entire civilization in The Left Hand of Darkness is, effectively, trans, in a third gender, gender-fluid, gender-neutral sort of way. Neil Gaiman has had good portrayals of trans people in his books, most notably in Sandman. There’s Trans-Sister Radio, which came out a few years back.

I’d love to hear more, if you can think of others – novels in which trans people are characters – so have at it.

I think there already is such a thing as Trans Lit. As with gay & lesbian lit, it includes all the various genres: history, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, etc. Personally I’d like to see more books where a character happens to be trans, and what is important about them isn’t necessarily, or only tangentially, their transness. The novel I’m working on now has at least one, and I’m not even sure I’m going to mention that the person is trans. Honestly, isn’t every book about any person potentially about a trans person? How do we know Jake Gatsby wasn’t a trans guy, after all?