Category: trans

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Revised Passport Requirements

From NCTE: New News on Passport Requirements

The U.S. State Department has announced some small but important additional changes to its policy for updating gender on U.S. passports and Consular Reports of Birth Abroad (CRBAs). The changes make clear that any physician who has treated or evaluated a passport applicant may certify that he or she has had appropriate treatment for gender transition. The revised policy also clarifies language and procedures to ensure that individuals with intersex condition can obtain documents with the correct gender.

In June 2010, the Obama Administration announced a new policy for updating gender markers on passports and CRBAs. For the first time, the June policy enabled transgender people to a passport that reflects their current gender without providing details of specific medical or surgical procedures. Instead, applicants could provide certification from a physician that they had received “appropriate clinical treatment” for gender transition. This policy was the result of years of advocacy, and represented a significant advance in providing safe, humane and dignified treatment of transgender people.

The policy announced in June was a huge step forward, but it was not perfect. It contained rigid and unnecessary restrictions on which physicians could write supporting letters for applicants, and contained confusing provisions regarding people with intersex conditions. With input from NCTE and other organizations, the Department moved swiftly to clarify and improve the policy. The passport policy as it now stands represents a model that other federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, should move swiftly to adopt.

NCTE has prepared a revised resource that fully explains the new guidelines and outlines the ways in which transgender people can make changes to their passports and CRBAs. We are thankful for our colleagues at the Council for Global Equality, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Lesbian Rights for their wonderful collaborative work on this vital issue.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

To a lot of people, transgender identities are new, some emerging idea that’s only happened in the modern era, & to some degree, that’s true: without the discovery of hormones (turn of the last century) and the development of surgeries (middle of the last century), it is much more difficult for people to live in a body that’s wrongly gendered.

But that, however, is only for the people who require medical intervention. There have always been bodies that bridge male and female, that express secondary sex characteristics of both. Evidence:

How fantastic is she? At the very least, when some moralizing pundit talks about trans or intersex as some kind of new perversity, and a sign that the world is coming to an end, we can at least point out that it’s a very old perversity indeed. Most perversions are. We don’t invent much, but instead mostly forget, or otherwise bury some histories and identities and pretend they never did exist. (For the record, for those of you who aren’t careful readers: I do not think trans or intersex is a perversion.I am employing rhetoric in order to make my point clear. Civil and cultural recognition of trans and intersex identities and bodies is a sign of civilization, to me.)

But they did exist. This piece is not on display, but owned by the Louvre, yet this other one is on display, and in my opinion, far more sensual. Museum stats below the break.

Continue reading “Nothing New Under the Sun”

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From NCTE: New HUD Rules

The National Center for Transgender Equality applauds President Obama and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for proposing new regulations, unveiled today, that would ensure that HUD’s programs would be open to all who need them, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. This means that all of HUD’s core programs, such as Public Housing, rental vouchers (called Housing Choice vouchers), and FHA home financing, will serve all those who are eligible.
Data from a forthcoming report on transgender discrimination in the United States, co-sponsored by NCTE and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was cited as evidence demonstrating the dire need for housing protections for the transgender community.  Nineteen percent (19%) of the survey’s more than 6,000 respondents had been denied a house or apartment because of their gender identity, while 11% had been evicted due to bias. The full report will be released in a matter of weeks.

“There are so many individuals and families who rely on HUD’s programs to ensure that they have a roof over their heads and that they can make ends meet,” noted NCTE’s executive director, Mara Keisling. “And yet far too often, they have encountered discriminatory landlords and regulations that make it impossible for them to have a fair deal. HUD’s strong stand against discrimination will make a concrete difference in the lives of transgender people and our families. Every American needs and deserves a home.”

If the rules proposed today are fully implemented after the 60 day public comment period, transgender people facing discrimination in public housing or public housing financing will have recourse to fix the problem. The new regulations would include definitions of sexual orientation and gender identity, ban landlords from asking about sexual orientation or gender identity, prohibit lenders from discriminating on that basis, and clarify that public housing programs are open to LGBT families who are otherwise eligible for them.

This is far from HUD’s first advance in transgender equality. Thus far, the Obama Administration has announced that they will conduct the first-ever national study of housing discrimination against LGBT people. They have also issued fair housing guidance that specifically clarified that discrimination against transgender people can be considered a violation of the Fair Housing Act. In addition, HUD has ruled that those who receive HUD discretionary funding must abide by state and local anti-discrimination laws.

NCTE will continue to follow HUD’s progress through the comment period.

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Charting Identities

via Google Labs:

Apparently, transsexuals and transvestites are waning, and transgender is ascendant. Not that we didn’t know that, but there it is in red green and blue.

I like the way dyke has remained a subcultural word (consistently small percentages over time), while I assume queer went from being used in the “odd or weird” way to the current meaning, dipping in the late 80s/early 90s.

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Counted as Trans

Nepal has created a ‘transgender’ category for their census. And before the traditional transsexual people get upset, no one is required to identify as trans, and the category was added in response to LGBT rights legislation (which passed in 2008).

It’s more than the US managed, that’s for sure.

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RIP: Sonia Burgess

After the UK press made an absolute mockery of a transgender person’s death, The Guardian publishes a eulogy to the person who was known first as David Burgess and who had previously been known as Sonia for some of the time, and who had only recently become Sonia Burgess all of the time.

“Sonia’s defining characteristic was her kindness,” says Tara. “It shone out of her. She had time for everybody and an absolute absence of snobbery and condescension. Sonia would interact equally comfortably and fluently with everyone without changing gear. I was devastated when Sonia died. I didn’t sleep for days. The sheer suddenness and finality of it was what was so awful. I miss her terribly.”

On 17 November, a funeral service for Sonia Burgess was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, an impressive, grey-stone, porticoed church that overlooks Trafalgar Square. The church was filled with around 600 people from diverse backgrounds – lawyers, university contemporaries, former asylum seekers, members of the transgender community and countless others who, in some way, had had their lives touched by the person they knew as either David or Sonia. His three children stood up to deliver a eulogy about the father they had known, slipping easily between female and male pronouns as they talked. It was, everyone agreed, a moving tribute to an exceptional person.

I am, as others will be, uncomfortable with referring to Sonia as David and with “he” pronouns, but since Sonia did have a significant public life as David – as a well-known and accomplished immigration lawyer – I can understand The Guardian’s decision so that those who didn’t know her could read about the remarkable person she was.

Sonia, thank you for the beauty and grace you brought to being publicly transgender. Love and condolences to the communities that are mourning her personally. Feel free to leave comments or memories.

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Whose Surgery?

Here’s some interesting news about health insurance companies covering transition-related costs according to Joanne Herman at HuffPo (although I do wish the word “transgender” weren’t used when “transsexual” is the more accurate term. Plenty of transgender people don’t want or require medical intervention, like genderqueer people and crossdressers and the many transgender people who don’t want different genitals (for a variety of reasons).

It becomes more & more difficult to be inclusive of the wide range of transgender people when an article by a transsexual person about transsexual people uses the term transgender, i.e. for the people who do not medically transition. I worry that many people who live as one gender but who have no issue with the genitals they were born with are going to face that much more pressure to have surgery they don’t want & can’t afford.