That’s my little goober on a better day; today he has surgery to get his leg removed because it’s got cancer. Keep us all in your thoughts.
Required ID to Vote Suppresses Votes
This whole idea of requiring people to present photo ID to vote is bad news indeed for a lot of kinds of people, but especially for transgender ones, who, in exchange for expressing their right to vote, will have to deal with harassment, denial of suffrage, and lack of representation.
Because what exactly it takes to get a gender marker in your lived gender if you are trans varies from state to state.
But more important, as Alex Blaze points out, the whole idea is to suppress the vote of people who are most likely to be intimidated by needing an ID card & by the voting process in general.
Teen Connection: LGBTQ Youth
A few days ago, some of the teens of the Fox Valley sat down for a talk about LGBTQ issues in high school: bullying, suicide, coming out, gender, sexuality. It’s a cool piece that also highlights some of the safe spaces for youth here.
Watch the full episode. See more Teen Connection.
I was very impressed.
Oh Cancer, Up Yours: RIP Poly Styrene
Poly Styrene, most known as the lead for X Ray Spex, died at the age of 53 of breast/spinal cancer. She was an inspiration to me, more riot grrrl than the riot grrrls, and famous too for shaving her head long before Sinead O’Connor did. She was a trained opera singer. She was an early critic of plastic consumer culture — thus her name. Their song Oh Bondage, Up Yours has always been one of my favorites, a rallying cry; the voice-over at the start of the song intones:
Some say little girls should be seen and not heard.
I say: OH BONDAGE UP YOURS
FUCK CANCER.
ATM Blog
Just discovered the blog American Trans Man, which, according to its description, is:
written by a FTM trans scientist who supplies information about different biological and genetic aspects of being transgender with a focus on the transmasculine.
I’m especially pleased there’s a focus on trans science.
Survey: By & For
There’s a new cool survey out for – and more importantly, by – trans people. Non trans people can take it too: it examines attitudes about self, gender, & relationships. The researcher explains:
My advisor and I are painfully aware that most surveys in psychology are not inclusive of—or even recognizing of—trans spectrum identities because we ourselves have trans spectrum identities. Specifically, I am genderqueer and Professor Tate is a transgender woman (who is also genderqueer as butch-presenting). Thus, we do not see ourselves and our experiences represented very well in the status quo of psychology research. We are therefore personally as well as professionally motivated to change the way psychology studies transgender and genderqueer identities. Yet, we need your help to do this well. We need our voices to be heard.
More below the break.
Texas Marriage Law
Monica Roberts has been covering a proposed bill call SB 723; her most recent update is here. It’s in the Senate, & what it will do is make it illegal to use a court order about name/gender change to apply for a marriage license. The only reason it’s been proposed is to mess with the legal marriages of trans women to men, such as in the Nikki Araguz.
If you live in TX, call your senators now and tell them to kill this bill. List below the break.
Don’t Forget the Lincoln Logs.
Maybe Not Pap Smears…
… but you can definitely buy a vibrator at a drugstore near you these days, thanks to the lines manufactures by Trojan (of the condom, not the horse).
Still, I prefer places like Babeland and The Tool Shed because it was the woman-friendly stores that made this all possible in the first place.
McDonald’s Employees
There is a petition at change.org which is calling for the McDonald’s employees who stood by, laughed, and videotaped the violent attack on a trans woman be held responsible.
I have no idea what kind of precedent that might be, but a law like this is long overdue.
Not at all ironically, it is in Maryland that a recent non-discrimination law recently went down in flames because gender identity was added to the bill and legislators, as per usual, were presented with the bullshit argument that somehow “men in dresses” would be hiding out in ladies’ room inflicting violence. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A CASE OF THIS HAPPENING, and as we can all see here, it is transpeople who require protection and safety from transphobic bigots. The Democratic Senators who backed out of supporting the bill – even after confirming their support – should be ashamed of themselves.
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