Back in 1997, I was assigned to the USS Coronado (AGF-11) as the leading petty officer of the Ordinance Division. I was a fire controlman first class petty officer with over 17 years in service – about two-and-a-half years from my transfer to the Fleet Reserve with a retirement pension. My division officer was Ensign…
In the big picture of basic civil rights for transgender Americans, 2011 has to this point been a good year for civil rights progress. Sometimes I know it’s hard to focus on what’s been accomplished when we also see what hasn’t yet been accomplished, or see backward steps, but for trans people we’ve seen more…
On the Friday before the Memorial Day Weekend, the Obama Administration released a new federal workplace antidiscrimination policy relating to gender identity. There is history behind this policy release. Back on June 17, 2009, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released a memorandum entitled Federal Benefits and Non-Discrimination. In that memorandum, The White House directed…
Janet Mock has a career as a writer and journalist; she’s an editor for People.com. She’s young, beautiful and African American. Recently, she came out as a woman of transsexual experience. Mock came out in conjunction with releasing a video for the It Gets Better project – a video series created by Dan Savage to…
One of the things I’ve learned about the LGBT community is that we do a really good job of shooting ourselves in the foot. So with that thought in mind, here’s a question for my peers: How does the LGBT community get more out of the Obama administration in the next two years – those…
On Tuesday, May 10, 2011, the GetEQUAL 13 went to court for the Nov. 15, 2010 White House fence protest to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) for what we hoped was the last time. No media were in the courtroom, so what happened there was for the most part not reported on. We went…
Within the trans community, there is a misconception that antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity are about transsexual people, while antidiscrimination protections based on gender expression are about cross-dressers. The oversimplifying and boiling down of the term gender expression to apply to a narrow subset of trans people strips out the broad concept of what…
An acquaintance of mine recently introduced me to the concept of the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” There is a book of essays on the subject from Incite! The Women Of Color Against Violence entitled it The Revolution Will Not Be Funded – the book came after the Incite!-organized conference of the same name. They describe the…
The first day of my transition from male-to-female was Feb. 6, 2003. I had been retired from the U.S. Navy for about 2 1/2 years, and was attending classes at National University in a bid to obtain a Bachelor of Science for Information Systems (IS). Since I’d been awarded a 60 percent Veterans Administration (VA)…
Recently, I was looking at a copy of Equality Maryland’s State Senate Whip Count for HB 235 – a Maryland bill that will provide housing and employment antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity. I received the whip count from a source that leaked it – it seemed very apparent to me that someone at Equality…
