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Adding Insult to Injury

Detroit police have decided to stop asking questions about the death of Andrew Anthos, who died after being beaten by a homophobe. Why? They’ve ruled the man’s arthritic neck was what killed him, not the blow that may have aggravated that arthritis.

Anthos’ cousin is continuing to pursue the case because no one has answered how the man ended up in the hospital with a 2″ scar on his neck, and while she is okay with them disputing him having died of the blow, she insists that he was attacked and that the attack was a hate crime. The Triangle Foundation, an LGBT group, have offered $5000 to anyone who can step forward with more information.

But the really pathetic thing is that the American Family Association of Michigan called on the Detroit police to look into the “filing of a false police report” concerning this incident. If any of us have any doubts, these folks not only want to prevent LGBT folks from being protected from discrimination and hate crimes, but they want to prevent our families from finding justice. Hateful.

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Hard to Believe We’re All One Species, Sometimes

This, in a report about a 72 year old man who was beaten for being a homosexual:

Anthos, who was helping a wheel-chair-bound friend who was stuck in the snow, was struck with a metal pipe by a man he had been riding the bus with that evening.

Okay, now read that sentence again.

Isn’t it hard to believe those two men are the same species, sometimes? It reminds me of those lyrics from Family Affair by Sly & the Family Stone:

One child grows up to be
Somebody that just loves to learn
And another child grows up to be
Somebody you’d just love to burn

At the very least, they are going to prosecute the murderer for a hate crime, but you know, what about the friend in the wheelchair? Shouldn’t the murderer have to pay for the person to hire an attendant now that he’s taken his friend’s help from him? I think so.

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Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang

Richard JuangAlthough Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.

(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.Transgender Rights

One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.

Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang”

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Domestic Violence Drops

The rate of domestic violence dropped, in half, between 1993 and 2004. Everything you’d expect is still true, however: women who own homes are less likely to be beaten than those with low annual incomes; black women are more likely than white women to be beaten, and domestic violence against men is dropping faster than violence against women.

Analysts speculate that the lower rate of intimate violence may be linked to better police training and more funding for prosecution as a result of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act or the declining violent crime rate in general (it reached its lowest recorded level in 2005).

From the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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Not Dancing

So I found this interesting article – way more measured and frankly, sympathetic, than most articles about transness that throw around the word “mutilation,” so instead of ignoring it as I’d normally do, I responded.

I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Josie, but tell me this: what do we do with the people who could be either? Who are both?

My husband is. She never knows what bathroom to use. We worry about someone disagreeing with the M on her license.

A lot of people who are innately gender variant, or androgynous, may transition only because more cards fall on the F than on the M when they fall from the sky.

And at the moment, the only way to get your ID changed is to get genital surgery.

I think a lot more of them would keep their healthy, operative genitals if that weren’t the case, but you try telling the DMV you want neither gender marked on your license.

Go ahead.

Or, just read some of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s work. People have tried to relieve transsexualism via therapy, spirituality, and all sorts of other non-operative means. But what Benajamin notices is that it doesn’t work. So he fixed their body (since their minds wouldn’t be changed).

There are plenty of us working within the trans community who would like to see people be able to peacably live as either gender, or both, or fluid. But living that way is, for now, brutally hard work. I’d agree with you, philosophically, if I didn’t see what my husband and other friends go through every day, all day long, day after day after day. The world just beats the crap out of them, puts them at greater risk for hate crimes, and insists on them being “ma’am” or “sir” when it comes to buying a cup of coffee to using a public toilet.

So, join us. Make the world safe for the gender variant, with us.

helen boyd
www.myhusbandbetty.com

There are a lot of other ways to respond, but this was the one that struck me. I’m sure some of you can add other important facts. Just please, be polite and be reasoned.

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NCTE’s Responding to Hate Crimes manual

Just in time for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually on November 20th, NCTE has published a small manual called Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual, which, according to NCTE’s Simon Aronoff, “represents a holistic, community-based approach to responding to hate violence in a wya that aims to curb the number of attacks faced by transgender people.”

Read the full press release from NCTE below the break, and read or download a copy of the manual at NCTE’s website: http://www.nctequality.org/resources/hatecrimes.pdf

Continue reading “NCTE’s Responding to Hate Crimes manual”

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Now I Know How Joan of Arc Felt

Remains purported to have been Joan of Arc’s are being tested as to whether they could be hers. They can’t, of course, confirm anything, as they don’t have anything of hers to test against.

The illiterate farm girl from Lorraine in eastern France disguised herself as a man in her war campaigns and said she heard voices from a trio of saints telling her to deliver France from the English. Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and made a saint in 1920.

Actually, this is quite wrong. Everyone knew Joan was a woman; her crime was wearing men’s clothes despite the fact that she was a woman. If she’d been passing as male, she would have had a lot better chance of escaping the interrogations and pyre.

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JT LeRoy: Will the Real Tranny Please Stand Up?

I was recently asked a few questions by Ron Hogan (of Beatrice.com and GalleyCat.com) about the news that JT LeRoy is a sham.
He asked:
As a writer in a relationship with a transgendered person, what is your reaction? Have you and Betty ever wished you could simply send a “stand-in” to deal with all the hassles of going out in public, let alone the threat of attack? And what’s your take on “Leroy’s” taking up an identity which, for Betty and other transfolks, is a real day- to-day struggle and, apparently, using it as a cover for a pseudonym?
For that matter, I should ask: Did you have any awareness of/contact with JT Leroy prior to these revelations? If so, have your feelings about his writing/your acquaintance changed?
It turns out that JT LeRoy is not only not trans, but she was never a he in the first place. (NY Times, New York magazine, SF Chronicle).

“‘As a transgendered human, subject to attacks,’ the statement read, ‘I use stand-ins to protect my identity.’ In the past, JT Leroy has invoked transgenderism to explain confusion over his identity.”

I’m not sure if I’m more frustrated as a writer or as a transgender educator – probably a combination of both. That JT LeRoy used transness as an excuse for this sham just adds to the heap of misinformation about transpeople. The association of transness and ‘big fat liar’ – when transpeople are everyday accused of being deceitful, and often harmed as a result of that perceived deceit – is supremely irresponsible. I think once the dust settles, some of the money she collected from celebrities should go to organizations like NCTE and the IFGE – organizations that help diminish the myths surrounding transpeople and work on legislation that makes harming transfolk hate crimes.
Because of stuff like this (& the various negative portrayals of transpeople, in general) Betty and I don’t have the luxury of sending someone else in our stead. As talented, reasonable people, we feel a real need to go out there and present any kind of example that isn’t so negative.
As someone who writes about trans subjects, it’s even more frustrating. So many good books about transness don’t get light of day – no reviews in the Times, no reviews in magazines, etc – yet people can’t stop talking about JT LeRoy because of her transnes. Believe me, the irony isn’t lost on me.
But then there’s the history of women writers and pseudonyms, and for that I can’t really blame her for using any kind of “cover.” Being reminded of being a “woman novelist” or a “woman writer” is enough to make any woman who writes borrow whatever front she might in order to stop hearing that. “Helen Boyd” is a nom de plume, after all, and I chose it in order to protect my family from the kind of transphobia that JT LeRoy claims she was protecting herself from.
Does being trans mean you’re subject to attacks? It can. Especially for less priveleged transpeople, trans people of color and those lower on the economic scale. None of us feel especially safe, but you take the risks you have to in order to educate people as fast as you can.
JT LeRoy certainly didn’t do trans people at large any favors.

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Without a Trace

Tonight, the crime drama Without a Trace took on a storyline featuring a transwoman – including a transman she knew, her ex-wife, brother, and parents – and did a fine job presenting the story. The episode is called “Transitions” and though I won’t give away the plot, I was really heartened to see a tv show – especially a crime drama – portray a transwoman who wasn’t evil or insane at the end.
Thanks, CBS.