Here are some photos and a report from the candlelight vigil held in SF last night, courtesy of Robert of Left in SF, and some from the HRC protest in DC.
ENDA Links
For more reading about ENDA than you might ever want, I’ve put together a bunch of the articles, essays, & blog posts on the topic since it was introduced in April, below the break:
Tim Hardaway
I wish they’d reported what his answer was.
Crossdressing: Erotic Stories Reading
Two months from today, there’s be an event based on Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories book, which Veronica Vera wrote the forward to & which includes a story by me. I’ll be reading, as will Miss Vera, amongst others.
- Where: LGBT Center, West 13th Street, www.gaycenter.org
- When: Thursday, November 29th, 7PM
Do come! It should be a fun night!
National Coming Out Day
National Coming Out Day is October 11th – so who are you coming out to this year?
CO Events
Finally, I have all the details on the stuff we’ll be doing in Colorado!
On October 9th, I’ll be speaking at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.
Where: MSCD Campus, Denver
When: Tuesday, October 9th, 1-3PM
then, in Boulder:
We’ll be part of the TRANSforming Gender 2007 Conference at the University of Colorado @ Boulder. More details about other speakers – including Matt Kailey (author of Just Add Hormones) & Julia Serano (author of Whipping Girl) – can be found on the conference’s website.
Where: Dennis Small Cultural Center, University Memorial Center Rm 457
When: Wednesday, October 10th
I’ll be doing a workshop on Queer Heterosexuals/Emerging Identities from 3:30-4:45
and then will be part of a panel with the other speakers from 5:15-6:30.
Both/all these events are open to the general public, so do come if you can.
& Now the Bad News
House Democrats are taking out transgender inclusion for ENDA:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Reps. George Miller, D-Martinez, Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., believe that they lack the votes in the Democrat-controlled House to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act if it includes gender identity along with sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for firing an employee.
Frank and Baldwin are the only openly gay members of Congress.
“People now accept the fact that we just don’t have the votes for the transgender,” Frank said.
Nervous Democrats had been hearing about Republican amendments to the employment bill, Frank said, “that would talk about schoolteachers, and what happens when the kid comes back from summer vacation and teachers change gender. We just lost enough Democrats and we couldn’t be sure of the Republicans.
The move put a damper Thursday on what Democrats otherwise were hailing as a landmark day for gay rights.
Passed!
from NCTE’s website:
Senate Passes Historic Hate Crimes Bill
The Hate Crimes Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (S. 1105) was passed on a voice vote of the Senate today, September 27th. Immediately prior to the voice vote, a cloture vote to end debate of the Amendment was passed 60-39 with bipartisan support.This amendment was already passed on May 3rd in the House by a vote of 237-180.  NCTE is calling on President Bush to sign the bill with this historic provision included.
Mara Keisling, NCTE Executive Director, says, “While transgender people still have many obstacles to overcome, we are overjoyed that the hard work of so many people is coming to fruition.”
The Hate Crimes Amendment extends the federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability.
Five Questions With… Julia Serano
Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?
In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,†I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.
Hate Crimes Vote – Thursday
ACTION ALERT from the National Center for Transgender Equality
On Thursday, the Senate will be voting on Senator Kennedy’s Hate Crimes amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (S.1105). We need you to call your Senators now to urge their support of this critical bill, which would extend hate crimes protections to transgender people.
Please, call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 right now; let them know what state you are from and ask to be connected with your Senators.
The language of the amendment is identical to that passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 3, 2007 (H.R.1592). It is vital that you contact your Senator today or tomorrow. As you read this, the Radical Right is mobilizing to oppose the federal hate crimes bill and attempt to prevent its passage in the Senate. They’re using scare tactics and flat-out lies in hopes of killing the amendment. Make sure that your Senators hear your voice and how important this bill is to you and our community.
The Hate Crimes bill would:
- Extend existing federal protections to include “gender identity, sexual orientation, gender and disability”
- Allow the Justice Department to assist in hate crime investigations at the local level when local law enforcement is unable or unwilling to fully address these crimes
- Mandate that the FBI begin tracking hate crimes based on actual or perceived gender identity
- Remove limitations that narrowly define hate crimes to violence committed while a person is accessing a federally protected activity, such as voting.
Find your Senators’ contact information.
Background information about the hate crimes bill is available on NCTE’S webpage.Call your Senators today and urge your friends and family to do the same.