Trans people are often tagged as either being predators or enabling predators in public restrooms. It seems to always be the one sure thing that will be trotted out when arguing against civil rights for trans people, especially public accommodation protections. Within the last month, Maryland has passed legislation that adds employment, housing and public…
I’ve had a back-and-forth with Nicole Murray Ramirez at LGBT Weekly over RuPaul’s promotion of the term tra**y. We disagree on the pejorative nature of the term, but it says something that the former Tra**y Awards has changed the name of the event to the Transgender Erotic Awards. “When we named the show the ‘Tranny…
My friend, Nicole Shounder, currently serves on board a Military Sealift Command (MSC) ship out of the Pacific Northwest. She’s a nurse, and when she’s assigned onto any U.S. Navy ship she takes on the equivalent rank of a lieutenant commander (LCDR). She was cited in a document entitled Report of the Transgender Military Service…
Karen England, the executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute (CRI) – a partner in the Privacy for All Students Coalition (PFAS) – spoke March 10 to a Salt and Light Ministry meeting at Calvary Chapel Golden Springs in Diamond Bar about the School Success and Opportunity Act, or AB1266. AB1266 is the bill that…
I’ve never been quite able to fully check my emotions in at the door in most any situations. I can and often act on what I intellectually know is true, and then if those actions have an emotional component for me I just deal with it at a later time. I’ve recently had to deal…
Monday night the tally was in – the effort to repeal the School Success and Opportunity Act (AB1266) failed to qualify for the ballot. The Privacy For All Students (PFAS) coalition, the coalition that spearheaded a petition drive effort to put AB1266 up for referendum this November, collected 619,387 signatures from across California for that…
“Nothing about us without us.” It’s a slogan meant to impress on broad society that no decision making about a minority group should be made without the full participation of members of the minority group that will be impacted by any decisions made about it. When it comes to telling the narratives of trans community…
“In a nutshell, it’s a harsh world out there for trans public figures and Janet Mock is likely going to experience that harsh world first hand,” I wrote back in the spring of 2011 in one of two open letters to Janet Mock on her publicly coming out as a woman of transsexual history. I…
Physical pain. I’ve been experiencing a lot of it in the past week. One of the chronic conditions that contribute to my VA disability rating of 100 percent is the lumbar area of my back. A combination of exaggerated lordosis (an exaggerated curve in the lumbar region of the spine), years of lifting heavy gas…
Student bathrooms post AB1266, the Schools Success and Opportunity Act, are “going to be a hostile situation, I think, and dangerous to everybody. I don’t see [accommodating transgender girls in school bathrooms] as a way that cuts down on bullying as the quote in the Wall Street Journal – forcing boys and girls to share…
