I was raised in Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions where I wasn’t taught to see my transgender self in the Bible. With socially conservative Christian dogma being that transgender people are not of God, it’s important to note there are gender variant people in the Bible where God worked through them. Bible scholar and actor Peterson…
I spend a lot of money at coffee houses. I don’t eat out a lot, or drink alcohol at all; coffee is my major vice. I notice when I go to a local coffee house, or a chain coffee house like Starbucks, how they have their restroom stalls marked. As of March 1 of this…
Hearing a transgender police officer being called “pig” by a protesting group plugged into the Trans Youth Project (TYP) at the recent Transgender Day of Empowerment (TDOE) struck me as heartbreaking. “We want The Center to be a space that is safe. This means no cops,” read an April 14 statement from the TYP’s Facebook…
The mundane in California includes a lot. What’s mundane here isn’t mundane everywhere. On Facebook I’ve used the term “trans-genda” and the hashtag #transgenda; I’ve used it to list mundane things I do on many days. Such as, I listed out my trans-genda to my Facebook friends on one day this past week as: •…
I have a new roommate Andrea who just came to San Diego from out of state. She works as an IT specialist for a large restaurant chain, and with her move needs to find a new doctor to take care of her transgender related health care needs that are in her company’s health care network….
On a certain level I don’t understand hate. I can’t maintain it against individuals as it takes too much energy; I can’t hold it against classes of people because I’m aware, as a member of a minority community, of unintentional (or sometimes willful) ignorance that bigotry arises from. It takes a certain amount of self-awareness…
Last September, I moved into a house with a small yard. With a yard, I began work on what I’m calling our Victory Garden (“Victory Garden” being the old WWII term for home vegetable gardens). As I’ve said before, I don’t want to get lost in the day-to-day goings on of the news cycles, and…
I lost track of time this week. I didn’t know when it was Monday or Wednesday, Jan. 30 or Feb. 1. I’ve lost my cues this week that tell me. Being medically retired and not having a Monday through Friday life, it can happen. I usually have appointments scheduled for Wednesdays and get reminders from…
In one of his last acts as president of the United States, President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning. Under the current commutation scheme, she’ll be released in May. It was an act, in my opinion, that was justice tempered with mercy. Not many remember how Manning was mistreated during her pretrial confinement, but…
“Phil Berger, the powerful Republican leader of North Carolina’s Senate, couldn’t stop the debacle,” wrote Jonathan M. Katz for Politico in the article In North Carolina, Some Democrats See Their Grim Future. “A state law that effectively banned legal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people – a law he’d pushed through the statehouse…
