A letter of Christmas thanks, to a diverse LGBT community Dear Editor, As we approach the looming day, the Supreme Court will be deciding the fate of decades of work for the gay community. In times like these, as I think about the meaning of this Christmas season, what unites us is more, what divides…
Saturday, Dec. 2, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced that their governing body has voted to replace Gender Identity Disorder (GID) with Gender Dysphoria (GD). It’s a milestone for transgender and transsexual people, as well as for those who identify as both transgender and transsexual; the decision has medical, political and psychiatric implications. From a…
Do you remember Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno? He was the alderman who stated he wouldn’t allow a Chick-fil-A to be built in his ward after Chick-fil-A’s CEO Dan T. Cathy stated that Chick-fil-A supported “the biblical definition of the family unit,” and the broad LGBT community became aware that Chick-fil-A’s non-profit arm (the Winshape Foundation)…
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, that’s now become a major holiday season shopping day, has a different meaning for me. That’s because on Black Friday in 2009 Christine Daniels, fka Mike Penner, died by suicide. I wasn’t her closest friend by far, but her death still impacts me greatly to this day. For those…
What I believe we can’t have enough of is leadership training for our young, as well as our older, newly-out future leaders in the LGBT community. And, given that the only national LGBT non-profit organization with a trans person at the helm is OutServe-SLDN, more leadership training to develop and prepare more trans people to…
This past Election Day, LGBT rights activists had a lot to celebrate. Marriage equality was legalized on the state level by popular vote for the first time, but not just with one state’s vote, but in all three states where freedom to marry the one you love was on the ballot: Maryland, Maine and Washington….
