Sandy Stone is a touchstone woman in transgender history. She has a whole section dedicated to her place in transgender and feminist history in the book Transgender History and the book is worth reading if just for that segment. In a nutshell, Stone was the first recording engineer at Olivia Records, a lesbian collective founded…
I don’t shop at Saks Fifth Ave. I occasionally shopped there, but the company tends to stock fashions that don’t match my sensibilities. I haven’t ever shopped at Forever 21. I never actually checked the stores’ fashions out, so I don’t really know if I liked theirs or not. I used to do a lot…
Occasionally I go on The Rick Amato Show, and I’m usually there when there’s a transgender issue involved. I’m sort of the “go to” trans person on all things trans there. The Rick Amato Show airs on the One America Now Network (OANN) at 7 p.m. PDT (AT&T U-verse 208 and 1208 HD; and Verizon…
Aug. 12, 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the School Success and Opportunity Act (AB 1266) into law. Paraphrasing the fact sheet for the bill promulgated by the Transgender Law Center, Equality California, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the GSA Network, the bill Introduced in February 2013 by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and co-authored by…
In this issue of LGBT Weekly, Stampp Corbin makes the moral and right case for gender affirmation surgery for a transgender prisoner in the California State Penal System. “Judge Jon S. Tigar said Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, 51,” publisher Stampp Corbin wrote, “should be entitled to gender reassignment surgery because it was the ‘only adequate’ treatment for…
Ephesians 6:11-13 says, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in…
On a morning this week I awoke to yet another story regarding the Planet Fitness “”no judgment” policy. The new story is about a lawsuit. Yvette Cormier of Midland County, Michigan is the woman who complained first to her local Planet Fitness’ management that a transgender woman she considered to be a man was using…
“Every gay person must come out,” Harvey Milk said in his What America Is speech in June 1978. “As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must…
“‘Homosexuality’ remains an identity that is subject to a ‘we/they’ distinction. People who would not say ‘I am like this, but black people are like that,’ or ‘we are like this, but women are like that.’ or ‘we are like this, but Jews are like that,’ find it simple to say, ‘homosexuals are like that,…
I remember in early 2004 going to the SRO bar on Fifth and Elm, one of the maybe half-a-dozen times in my life. I remember hearing the line from a cis man (a non-trans man) in male attire saying to me, “I like people like you.” I remember thinking it was the oddest line I’d…
