I’ll be tabling today for Fair Wisconsin at Green Bay’s Pride event, Pride Alive. You can get more info about the event on their website, and let people know you’re going/invite others via the FB page.
Author for Hire
For the next two months, I’m a freelancer again! So if you’ve thought about hiring me to read or edit your manuscript, or consult on transition or relationship or sexuality issues, or write something for you, now is the time.
Feel free to contact me for information, or to bounce an idea to see if I’d be willing: helenboyd(at)myhusbandbetty(dot)com.
Good News for Trans Portland
A note from organizer Aubrey Harrison of Basic Right Oregon:
WE DID IT! After nearly two years of working with city leaders, we are proud to announce that today the Portland City Council unanimously voted to end insurance exclusions against transgender City employees.
This is huge. Portland is now the third municipality in the country to provide trans-inclusive care to their employees, and Oregon is a clear leader in the national efforts to end insurance discrimination against transgender communities.
This victory belongs to Basic Rights Oregon’s Trans Justice Working Group-trans and allied community leaders who have worked tirelessly for nearly two years on our campaign to end health care discrimination against transgender Oregonians. It also belongs to the Portland City Council, especially Mayor Sam Adams whose leadership for the LGBT community shone through today.
Why is this care so important? Basic Rights’ Executive Director Jeana Frazzini explained it in her testimony today:
The American Medical Association has identified transgender health care as being medically ncessary. Yet many transgender Oregonians are routinely denied the ability to purchase health insurance or are denied coverage for basic, medically-necessary care solely becaust they are transgender. Without health insurance, many transgender people have no access to health care and have nowhere to turn if they develop health problems. This discrimination is all too common and can lead to serious-even life-threatening-conditions.
Such great, great news.
DC Trans Coalition Findings: Not Good
from the DC Trans Coalition:
Washington, DC – The DC Trans Coalition today released summary findings from the first phase of its ongoing Needs Assessment Project, which found that transgender, transsexual, and gender non-conforming people in the District of Columbia – regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status – have serious concerns about their safety as they go about their everyday lives. Other findings include severe underemployment, and major difficulties accessing adequate healthcare.
“This needs assessment is the first study of its kind in DC in over a decade, and is the first trans needs study in the nation to deploy community mapping as a research technique,” said Elijah Edelman, one of the needs assessment coordinators. Over 100 trans residents in DC participated in a series of roundtable discussions where they mapped Washington, DC as a trans city, and suggested questions for the survey portion of the study. “The maps create a qualitative picture of DC that a survey simply can’t provide, and the discussion around their creation will help us craft a survey that truly investigates the community’s concerns,” Edelman said.
The mapping exercise also identified places where trans people spend their time and access resources across the city. The study found that while over half of participants mapped areas commonly referred to as sex work “strolls,” many participants mentioned these not as places where they seek income, but rather as places where they interact with their friends. “Roundtable participants overwhelmingly described the strolls as places where – despite the high chances of facing harassment or arrest – trans people go to look out for their friends, distribute resources, and support one another,” said Sadie Ryanne Vashti, a DCTC organizer. “We are concerned that some of the central places where trans people build communities are also some of the most heavily policed areas in the city, thanks to policies like the ‘Prostitution Free Zones,’” Vashti added.
The DC Trans Coalition has received a grant from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law to conduct the survey phase of the Needs Assessment Project. DCTC is actively soliciting additional funding to support the research and economic empowerment components of this project. Donations are fully tax-deductible thanks to the fiscal sponsorship of AGREAA – The Association for Gender Research, Education, Academia and Action.
To download the summary findings from phase one of the DC Trans Needs Assessment, or to donate to the project, visit www.dctranscoalition.org.
(You can find them on Facebook as well, of course.)
Two Tune Tuesday: Red Hot + Rio 2
Red Hot is the organization that raises funds for HIV/AIDS, and has been doing so for a long while – Red Hot + Blue was the first of the compilation CDs & celebrated the songs of Cole Porter. This week, the 2nd Brazilian-inspirted Red Hot CD is out. The first one, Red Hot + Rio
This new one, Red Hot + Rio 2
Here’s a list of the best Tropicalia albums, but do get Red Hot + Rio 2
(& Yes, I know I’m a day late. Monday holidays screw me up.)
Jane Scott, RIP
She was a rock journalist before anyone was paying attention:
In 1952, she joined The Plain Dealer and was assigned, typically for the time, to the society pages.
She found her lifework on Sept. 15, 1964, the day four lads from Liverpool came to Cleveland. No one at the paper was interested in covering the Beatles, and Ms. Scott volunteered.
How women’s careers are born: good luck & excellent timing. It would be nice if women got the kinds of careers they deserve instead of needing both, but too often – especially for the “first woman to ____________”, we seem to need a lot more than talent and hard work.
Dan Savage’s Family Values
I”m sure plenty have already seen Mark Oppenheimer’s NYT column about infidelity; in it, he talks a lot about Dan Savage, who I love (and whose show I was on back in January). Despite how angry people are about the transphobic way he talked about the dilemma’s of a trans person’s relationship with her wife & son, I can’t really disagree with it, either. (Although I’d add, too, that sometimes children and wives are transphobic; still, giving loved ones a little while to get used to the idea would be great, and may preserve some familiar relationships that will not sustain a very speedy transition.)
Still, that’s hardly what’s interesting to me about this column. First off, he said it a few years ago, & Savage has been sucking a little less on trans issues. He is, in my opinion, someone who could have been an amazing ally if he weren’t shouted at every second he said something stupid (but not necessarily hateful). He is, in my opinion, one of the people we lost with the overuse of the word transphobic, a la Christine Burns.
But what’s more interesting to me is the way this article paints him as something like a conservative. Really… Dan Savage? But yes: he’s always been pro nuclear family, that’s for sure. He’s opinionated in ways only ex-Catholics can be (she says, securely seated in her glass house). But that idea that someone could be considered conservative even as they suggest that perhaps nonmonogamy should be on the table for heterosexual marriage kind of blows my mind. I don’t disagree. I think in plenty of cases, nonmonogamy makes perfect sense. I’ve been learning a lot more about it – not just from friends who practice it, but from Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up
And that’s the kind of thing that makes my feminist hackles rise.
Because Coontz – who Oppenheimer mentions and quotes – has said elsewhere that in happy marriages, both people benefit. But in unhappy marriages, men continue to benefit, but women do much, much worse in terms of their health. Even a miserable wife feeds her husband vegetables, she once cleverly concluded in her Marriage, A History. (It’s a great book, absolutely 100% worth reading.)
So the idea of preserving a marriage simply because preserving marriage is what you’re supposed to do strikes me as kind of wrong-headed and — well, sexist. It’s not like Savage will have been the first gay man to give out sexist advice unthinkingly, but it’s still a surprise.
Research Announcement (& Forecasted Problems)
Over at Trans Group Blog, Angus “Andrea” Grieve-Smith has posted a piece about HHS’s announcement to begin collecting data on LGBTQ issues.
The Department of Health and Human Services has just made a big announcement: they will begin collecting data on LGBT issues, including transgender issues. The goal is to document disparities in health care, as well as plain old disparities in health, so that they can be addressed in the future. The plan is to have two roundtables on “gender identity data collection” with “key experts” this summer and fall, and then the “Data Council” will present a strategy next spring. The department will also collect public comment in various ways, one being through a website called regulations.gov, which is currently down.
If done right, this could be a tremendous help to understanding transgender issues. “The first step is to make sure we are asking the right questions,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the Washington Post. “Sound data collection takes careful planning to ensure that accurate and actionable data is being recorded.” As I’ve written before, current research on transgender feelings and actions is severely hampered by the lack of any kind of representative sample. Just to give you a quick sense, here are ten very basic questions that nobody knows the answer to: Continue reading “Research Announcement (& Forecasted Problems)”
Two Weeks
They called today to tell me his ashes are ready for pick up, and it’s like some part of my brain broke all over again. We miss you, kid.
Shave and Get Drunk.
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