The new guidelines advise officers to ask a variety of questions for screening when a person is taken into custody, including asking “about a detainee’s gender identification and history of transition related care”.  If the detainee was already receiving transition related care, they are to continue receiving that treatment in the detention facility.

These standards are actually the 2011 revision, so they may have been released several months ago (I can’t find a timestamp on the document or website).  The story is currently appearing on Fox News and the Daily Caller because Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) has suddenly decided to make an issue of it.  Not because he actually thinks that anything will be changed, but just because, ya know, he’s a dick.

For those that aren’t familiar with the now extensive series of unfortunate events between Dan Savage and the trans community, I wrote about this the last time that he was glitterbombed, and I stand by what I said in that post.  Dan did say some things that were very offensive in 2003, but he has since apologized multiple times.  Dan has conversed with the trans community extensively, and he has had Kate Bornstein write guest columns for him.

The “T” in GLBT was simply not as visible eight years ago.  A lot of people that want to be allies simply don’t know how to do it.  I meet people all the time who are completely supportive of transgender people’s rights, but they say offensive things because I am the first transgender person that they have ever met.  And ya know what I do? GO BUY SOME GLITTER AT WALGREENS AND THROW IT IN THEIR FUCKING FACE.

No, I don’t do that, because then they would just be cleaning glitter out of their eyes instead of learning how to be sensitive to transgender issues. Keep in mind that I live in San Francisco, California, one of the gayest places in the country.

Allow me a personal anecdote to illustrate the climate that certain transgender activists are creating:  I have a friend who worked at an LGBT rights organization, and she went to a class that was intended to educate people on how to be sensitive to transgender issues.  When she asked questions, what did the presenters do?  They attacked her as being ignorant.  Her education consisted of getting drinks with me later and asking me questions because she knew I was a friend and I wouldn’t get mad at her.

Two writers at the Bilerico Project have written how unproductive the continued attacks on Savage have been.  John Becker gets at my central point about visibility and education:

As Bil points out, trans people are not alone in their journey. All of us cisgendered individuals – even those of us in the LGBT movement – are on a journey too, into an ever-greater understanding of the perspectives and experiences that our trans siblings bring to the table and the unique issues, circumstances, and difficulties they face.

Some writers at Bilerico have even coined the term “trans mafia”, which is an organization that actually sounds pretty cool, but I just don’t want them to attack Dan Savage.  Because you know what?  While activists are throwing glitter on other GLBT people’s faces, Newt Gingrich might become your President.

Baltimore County is following the lead of neighboring Howard County, which added gender identity to their anti-discrimination legislation last month.  The action of both counties follows several high profile crimes against transgender women:  Tyra Trent was found dead in an abandoned house in Baltimore last February, and the case has not been solved.  Crissy Lee Polis, another transgender woman, was beaten viciously in a Baltimore County McDonald’s for using the women’s restroom.  The attack was captured on video, and it went viral and sparked quite a bit of outrage.

It’s sad that it takes violence, and even more specifically violence on camera, for action to be taken on transgender rights.  That said, more power to Councilman Quirk for taking initiative to introduce a bill.

For those that aren’t familiar, Bradley Manning leaked thousands of documents to Wikileaks, including a video that showed US soldiers killing journalists from a helicopter in Iraq.  He was caught because he confided over instant messages to Adrian Lamo, a hacker who is well known to be gay.  Lamo ended up giving the chat logs to the government and Wired magazine, which has published the entire chat log here.  The chat logs definitely show Manning expressing feelings of gender confusion, and he says over and over how much of an emotional mess he is.

This has raised some controversial issues.  An important issue raised by some writers including Jos Truitt at Feministing, is the media’s continued use of male terminology including Bradley and “he” to describe Manning.  Jos and others have written that the media is “ungendering” Manning by forcing him to use the pronouns based on his appearance instead of his gender identification.  I do think that this can and probably will be an issue in the Manning case, but the problem is we don’t have a definite answer from Manning himself yet.  We are going off of a few chat logs, and there are a lot of degrees of transgender.  Deciding that we are going to use female pronouns and his female name is effectively forcing the transition onto Manning, and it’s also forcing him to choose among binary genders.  I do think it’s likely that Manning did want to transition.  He set up a Twitter account, and I’ve read that he also set up a Facebook account under the name Breanna.

But making the jump from setting up an alias online and living your entire life under a different gender and name are very different things, and I think there is often a long road in between the two steps in a gender transition.  Most people who have gone through the gender transition process have probably tried to explore and interact with the trans community online, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted my public transition forced upon me as soon as I made an online profile (even though I think it would have been good for me).  In fact, I needed several years to interact with people online to confirm with myself that I was transgender because online was the only place I could find other transgender people to talk to. The whole point of setting up an online alias that is different from the one you use in real life.  It’s easier to set up the online identity, and it doesn’t involve a lot of the pain that the actual transition process involves.

The media and his lawyers have already made a lot of the difficult decisions for him by outing him, but we have no right to force this upon him.  He may not even actually want to go through with the transition now that the realities are out in the open. This is a decision for Manning to make, and as soon as he does, then we can start the process of convincing the media to use the proper pronouns.  Again, it’s his decision, not ours.

For anyone that hasn’t follow the story, here is a detailed summary at Gawker, but the basic story is that a transgendered teen was shopping with some friends and tried to use the women’s dressing room, but Macy’s employee Natalie Johnson decided that she was a man and could not use the women’s room.  In the Gawker article, she even says she “made sure to keep a close eye out on him because he was shopping for women’s clothing”, and she knew that she was going to have to be a very watchful Dressing Room Police Officer in order to prevent any gender disasters from occurring.

Ok, so I hadn’t written about this because it sounds like a standard case of insensitivity, right?  Educate the employee on some trans issues and the Macy’s policy around them, and we can all probably move on, right?

Wrong bitches!  It’s actually all about Jesus, don’t you see??  That’s why Matthew Staver, founder of the Liberty Council, has been going around giving quotes to media outlets and appearing on Fox News in order to educate Americans on the Jesus’ poignant Dressing Room Prophecies.  Apparently there is a passage in Deuteronomy that says cross dressing is an abomination, but I honestly don’t care enough to quote it.  I’m just amazed that conservative Christian activists think that which dressing room a trans woman uses is even worth their time.  Presumably this is a less blatant version of the bathroom scaremongering that men are going to prey on children or something, but who knows.  It’s kind of a pathetic statement about institutional religion in America because really all that their agenda seeks to accomplish is humiliating lots of transgender people.

Video of the righteous fighters on Fox News in which they all make sure to call the trans woman “he”:

(creepy image via Joemygod)

Frank was also instrumental in pushing ENDA in Congress, and he took a lot of heat from transgender activists for the exclusion of transgender protections from that bill.  To be honest, I didn’t follow the ENDA debate as closely as I should have, so I don’t really want to write about his involvement there.

As far as the bill in Maryland, I will say that it is progress, but the bathroom issue is a huge one.  I have seen some people tire of the bathroom discussion because it is a drum that is continually beat by trans activists, but it is particularly salient one because it is one that can still put transgender people in jail in some parts of the country.  It can also cause students to get suspended, and it caused Crissy Lee Polis to get the shit beat out of her so bad that she had a seizure.  So yeah, bathrooms matter.

I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad move to accept compromise in a bill, but our political system will likely prevent the public accommodations issue from being addressed anytime soon.  It also represents a victory for the bathroom scaremongering, which is probably the most effective way that conservatives have found to gain support for transgender people.  It worked in Massachusetts, and it seems to have worked in Maryland, despite whatever claims they use being utter bullshit.

I also feel the need to point out that there is broad support for transgender rights in America, so there is really no reason for politicians to be afraid to stand up for trans rights.

So is it “politically stupid”?  Maybe.  We shouldn’t demonize politicians that are generally transgender supporters like Barney Frank, but we also shouldn’t stop fighting every single step of the way.

(Image of Frank via Wikipedia)

A new study of minority trans people has found appalling rates of poverty and health among this marginalized community.  Being transgendered and Latino in America gives you 28% chance of living in a household that makes less than $10,000 per year.

Other depressing figures from the report (.pdf) by the National Coalition for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:

• unemployment rate of 20% among Latino/a transgender people (this was back when the national unemployment rate was 7%)
• 47% of Latino/a transgender people have attempted suicide
• 8.44% HIV positive rate, compared to .60% for the general population.  Note the decimal point movement there.

For those that haven’t heard, Neil Patrick Harris, openly gay star of the television show How I Met Your Mother, was recently co-hosting Live with Kelly (apparently Regis Philbin retired or something), and Harris used the word “tranny” to describe how his voice sounded after using a helium like gas to change their voices.  Here’s the vid:

Harris quickly apologized on Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up apologizing on air as well.  The reaction to the comment was quick, with GLAAD calling for the apology and then quickly accepting it.  Some other trans bloggers have been less eager to accept the apology, with a blogger at Trans Femmergy even calling NPH a trans hater, which seems extreme to me.

The thing about all this outrage is, I’ve known plenty of transgender people who used tranny to describe both themselves and others, and they did not mean it as an insult or anything negative.  It was just a shorter way of describing someone as being trans without saying the five syllable “transgender person”.  These people used the word for a diverse group of transgender people, which I think is an important point.  It seems like a lot of the objection to the term “tranny” comes from the connotations that many people already have about it, which mostly seem to involve drag queen like characters or transgender porn stars.  But when I have seen and heard transgender people use it, it has been applied across the FTM to MTF spectrum and everywhere in between.

The way that Neil Patrick Harris used the word was offensive because he was using it to describe exactly that stereotype:  a transgender woman with a deep voice.  That does not make him a “trans hater”, it makes him part of the 97% of America that is not sensitive to transgender terminology issues.  Those 97%ers also probably haven’t met an out transgender person that they know of, and their only exposure to the issue is through the media and drag queens.  A lot of people simply don’t realize that so many transgender are walking around and having boring lives just like them every day.  I’m not excusing Harris’ conduct, but when a mistake is made out of ignorance and not malice it is dishonest to call someone a hater.

Harris apologized quickly, and he likely won’t do it again.  It would be helpful if he could apologize on air in order to help educate, because that is the only way that we are going to make progress on terminology issues.  Like I’ve said in a previous post, transgender issues have come a long way in the past decade, and it’s understandable that some people haven’t kept up.  It doesn’t make them transphobes or trans haters or an enemy.

(image via Heal the Bay on Flickr)

Apparently it’s about two guys who dress up in drag in order to get jobs as pharmaceutical salesman.  Why?  Because it’s so much easier for men in drag to get jobs as pharmaceutical salesman silly!  How did you not know that?

Seriously, this looks beyond moronic.