You need to read this if you consider yourself a feminist, cis and trans alike.
Shit’s getting real.
Smith get your shit together.
Cis feminists, if you care about transmisogyny you should be all over Smith right now, because they are fucking up big time.
- No aspirin before surgery - it’ll make brusing and swelling worse.
- Especially before surgery, take shark cartilage, which helps with leukocyte formation, to fight infection.
- Especially before surgery, take vitamin C 1000 mg w/ bioflavanoids and rutin for tissue integrity.
- Especially before surgery, take vitamin E - only the natural stuff (the synthetic thins the blood) and not more than your surgeon recommends - taking too much can cause your scars to keloid (those thick, rope-like scars that stick out).
- Especially before and immediately after surgery, eat a nutritious, high-protein diet.
- Take button-down pyjamas and button-down shirts with you. You may not be able to get clothing up over your head after surgery, and you don’t want to be raising your arms like that for a while after surgery anyway - keep your elbows below shoulder height for at least a few weeks.
(Source: ftmichael.transboys.info)
In a landmark decision, the IRS has announced its agreement with an historic court ruling that allows tax deductions for medical care related to gender transition.
The decision, announced Wednesday and officially called a “notice of acquiescence,” relates to O’Donnabhain v. Commissioner, a case brought by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders on behalf of a transgender woman who was denied the ability to take advantage of an existing federal income tax deduction for medical care costs because the IRS considered her transition-related care medically unnecessary.
In 2010, the U.S. Tax Court overturned IRS policy disallowing tax deductions for medical care related to gender transition, a policy the IRS defended by citing 2005 guidance from the IRS’s Chief Counsel.
Wednesday’s announcement means that the IRS now agrees with the Tax Court’s 2010 ruling.
Read more here.
Hey. So this is really, really fucking important.
I’m not sure how (if anything) we can help Ophelia De’lonta but she surely needs support. Especially now that she has earned the right to have her case heard.
But. She is a Black trans woman in prison. She deserves not only the support but to have the medical care that she needs.
(Source: girlslikeusnews)
A Washington, D.C. police officer who fired multiple shots into a car with three transgender women and their friends is getting off easy. The officer, 48-year-old Kenneth Furr, was sentenced yesterday “to three years of supervised probation, a $150 fine, and 100 hours of community service,” the Washington Blade reports. The transgender community in D.C. has reacted with outrage.
The D.C. Superior Court Judge, Russell Canan, also sentenced Furr “to five years in prison but suspended all but 14 months of the prison term and credited Furr with the 14 months he already served between the time of his arrest and his trial last October,” the publication reported. The officer was released from jail while he awaits sentencing for his conviction on charges of assault and solicitation for prostitution. Furr was acquitted on the more serious charges of assault with intent to kill with a weapon.
The judge also ordered the officer to stay away from D.C.’s well known areas for transgender prostitution.
“This result is the product of a legal system that constantly devalues trans lives, particularly trans people of color,” Jason Terry, an activist with the D.C. Trans Coalition, told the Blade. “Officer Furr’s defense team actively sought to portray the victims as somehow deserving of this violence, and apparently they succeeded. If roles had been reversed and a black trans woman had gotten drunk and shot a gun at a police officer, the results would be drastically different.”
The case revolves around events that occurred in August 2011. On a Washington, D.C. street, Furr asked one of the transgender woman for sex for money. After the woman refused, Furr followed her to a CVS store and, when he was outside the store, pointed a gun at the transgender woman. After the officer drove away, the group of transgender woman and their male friends followed him, until Furr stopped his car and fired his gun at the car.
Then, “one of the male friends driving the vehicle ducked to avoid being shot and unintentionally rammed the car into Furr’s car, witnesses testified,” the Blade reports. “Furr responded by climbing on the hood of the car occupied by the transgender women and their friends and fired five times through the front windshield, causing three of the occupants to suffer non-fatal gunshot wounds.”
When D.C. police came to the scene, they arrested Furr, who had a “blood alcohol level twice the legal limit under D.C. law,” according to the publication.
The Washington Blade also reports that Furr’s attorney seems to have convinced the jury that Furr was acting in self-defense, which is why he was not convicted on the more serious charges.
While Furr is getting off relatively easy legally, the case will have ramifications for his job. D.C. police spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump told the Blade that Furr “has been suspended without pay and that the department will follow its standard procedure for dealing with an officer convicted of a felony.” The standard procedure, according to the Blade, is that “a felony conviction, especially one associated with violence, usually results in the firing of a police officer.”
1) Be willing to confront instances of transphobia, cissexism, cisnormativity, cis-centrism, cis privilege and other forms of destructive bias where you find them (especially when you find them within feminist, activist or queer spaces), not through “call outs” or other toxic, self-defeating or abusive strategies, but by taking the opportunity for genuine discourse.
2) Don’t take a purely passive, reactive approach. Rather than waiting for things like someone saying something overtly cissexist, or a trans person bringing up a particular concern, be willing to proactively introduce trans issues, or trans-relevant aspects of broader issues, to feminist discourse. Likewise, proactively treat possible consequences, perspectives and concerns relevant to trans people and trans experiences as being not only significant but essential to all feminist issues and conversations.
3) Don’t assume any given issue is strictly, or even primarily, relevant to cis women. All feminist concerns are also transgender concerns, and vice versa. There are no feminist dialogues in which trans voices “don’t belong”, or to which trans voices have “nothing to add”. There are no social issues related to gender that don’t have consequences for trans people.
4) Proactively seek out transgender voices, perspectives and input on all issues, not simply what you regard as “trans issues” or situations where the value of such perspectives is immediately obvious to you. Come to us, rather than waiting for us to come to you.
5) Don’t treat the larger social conflict of gender as being dialectic or binary in nature. Don’t assume a unidirectional model of gender-based oppression.
(Source: loveyourrebellion)
BBC puts up £5k for transgender comedy scripts
A BBC talent search is offering comedy writers up to £5,000 for the best script that promotes a positive portrayal of transgender characters.
The Trans Comedy Award is seeking an original sitcom, comedy-drama or sketch show script that shows ‘transgender characters and the transgender experience in an affirming manner’.
The prize, being put up by the corporation, is designed to help the winner develop a taster or pilot episode for possible television broadcast
The award, launched by the BBC’s acting director-general Tim Davie, is being run by Trans Comedy, a group led by transgendered comedians Claire Parker and Shelley Bridgman and actor Milanka Brooks, through the the BBC Writers Room.
Parker told Chortle: ‘If you look at the representation of trans people across all media, the majority of stories have fallen into one of four buckets – sex worker, drug taking, mental health or murder.
‘To be fair, that doesn’t represent the average trans person getting on with their life with so much comedy in the everyday. And that’s what we’re encouraging people to write about, the everyday stuff.’
US comedies have featured transgender characters more prominently than their UK counterparts, albeit frequently as a chance to cast Hollywood stars in guest roles, as with Kathleen Turner in Friends, Rebecca Romjin in Ugly Betty and Chris O’Donnell in Two And A Half Men.
Lucy Montgomery played a transgender woman in series three of The IT Crowd, Sean Lock made cameos as a transgendered character in Ideal, while The Mighty Boosh’s grotesque, bisexual and ‘polyamorous’ character Old Gregg character has been held up as social commentary on transphobia.
Judging the award are Jon Plowman, executive producer of BBC comedy, Ian Critchley, the corporation’s head of creative resources and Kate Rowland, its creative director of writing, plus a further comedy writer/actor still to be announced.
Entry for submissions opens on January 14 with a deadline of February 28. The winner will be notified at the end of May.
More details can be found at the BBC Writers Room with further guidance available here.
(via @NMamatas)
shouldn’t this basically be all over my dash already? i feel like i know a lot of people who need to know about this…
A reminder that Pakistan isn’t just want you hear in the news everyday.
Completing proceedings in a case regarding transgender rights in the country, presided by Judge Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, SC issued a decision saying that transgenders should be given equal basic rights as all citizens.
The decision said that transgenders should be given equal inheritance and job opportunity rights, amongst others.
During the proceedings, transgenders had requested the court to direct the Town Municipal Administration to allow them to rent halls to celebrate birthdays.
The court has directed that the decision should be sent to all chief secretaries and that the latter were to attend to the complaints of the transgender community.
so awesome
This is great to see. It’s been over a decade since they have provided coverage for surgeries to city employees of San Fran so I’m excited to see that this city is reaching out to all folk and providing them with the MUCH needed assistance.
Tip my hat to San Fran.
San Francisco plans to provide transgender surgeries - CBS News
(via ryansallans)
WE HAVE A TRANS* WOMAN IN THE HOUSE. YES. HELL YES.
!!!
oh dang!!!
what a frickin good election
im so proud of my neighbor state :’)
Okay wow, how did I miss this? FOUR FOR YOU NEW HAMPSHIRE. Now all you gotta do is allow gay marriage. =D
(Source: earlhofert)
I can’t recall the last time I heard a politician talk about trans* issues… until now.
WOW YOU GO JOE BIDEN SHIT WHEN DO BIG FEDERAL POLITICIANS TALK ABOUT TRANSGENDER RIGHTS EVER
wow this is amazing and so great
and i hope people dont get caught up in his totalizing language and really appreciate what a huge thing it is that he said this (not in terms of allyship but in terms of visibility)
I’m starting to love Ol’ Joe. I have never before heard a prominent American politician talk about trans discrimination, much less label it the civil rights issue of our time.
Way to go Joe!
I’m actually somewhat impressed by this. I never expected to hear a major political leader to speak directly about transgender civil rights. Most politicians will just say “LGBT” as if it’s all the same.
And remember, Biden did “force” Obama to publicly endorse same-sex marriage.
So I love me some good Ol’ Joe too.
The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) warns transgender Americans that stringent new voter ID laws could exclude them from casting a ballot this November. Advocates urge transgender people to check and make certain that they are registered and that they have the proper ID needed in their state to vote.
“The right to vote is the right that all the others come from,” NCTE Director Mara Keisling told Raw Story. ”Voting is really, really important for marginalized people, because that’s how we affect change.”
And while Keisling does not believe that the network of stringent new voter ID laws that Republicans have imposed in states across the country is intended to disenfranchise trans people specifically, “I actually think we’re collateral damage. I think there is a party that doesn’t want students to vote, that doesn’t want poor people to vote and doesn’t want people of color to vote,” which they’re trying to accomplish by various means including purging of voter rolls and, in Keisling’s words, “creating an atmosphere of confusion and intimidation” about who is allowed to vote, and when, and where.
She said these suppression efforts include everything “from the confusion of having new laws at the last minute to this organization called True the Vote, whose sole purpose is apparently to intimidate voters. There clearly are efforts this year to keep voting down and trans people are likely to get caught up in that.”
Vincent Villano, also of NCTE, said, “Voter ID laws and laws that require sex reassignment surgery in order to update IDs are barring trans people from voting. Right now, there are nine states with strict photo ID requirements. In nearly all of those states, trans people are being told that they have to undergo medical procedures, procedures that cost 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars, procedures that sometimes trans people don’t want to get, or are medically advised not to get so that they can update the ID that they need to vote.”
The 9 states are Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Tennessee. NCTE has put up an information page with links to each state’s voting requirements and more so that trans people can find out what they need to vote.
Many people don’t realize the difficulties faced by trans people when it comes to obtaining the essential documents necessary to function in society like drivers licenses, passports and social security documents, often the very documents necessary to vote under the new laws. Often, when poll workers are informed that a voter is trans, they immediately ask to know the person’s “real name,” which sometimes does not match the name they currently use.
(Source: sinidentidades)
Among the report’s key findings:
- American Indian and Alaskan Native transgender and gender non-conforming people often live in extreme poverty, with 23 percent reporting a household income of less than $10,000 per year. This compares to the rate of 15 percent for transgender people of all races. It is about three times the general American Indian and Alaskan Native population rate (8 percent), and nearly six times the general U.S. population rate (4 percent).
- American Indian and Alaskan Native transgender and gender non-conforming people had a very high unemployment rate at 18 percent, well over twice the rate of the general population (7 percent) at the time the survey was fielded.
- American Indian and Alaskan Native respondents who attended school expressing a transgender identity or gender non-conformity reported alarming rates of harassment (86 percent), physical assault (51 percent) and sexual assault (21 percent) in K-12; harassment was so severe that it led 19 percent to leave school.
- American Indian and Alaskan Native transgender and gender non-conforming people were affected by HIV in devastating numbers: 3.24 percent reported being HIV positive and an additional 8.53 percent reported that they did not know their status. This compares to rates of 2.64 percent for transgender respondents of all races, and 0.60 percent of the general U.S. population.
- Fifty-six percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native transgender respondents reported having attempted suicide compared to 41 percent of all study respondents.
Kalki Subramaniam: Why she kicks ass
- Kalki is a transgender rights activist, actor, writer and celebrity from Tamilnadu, India. She also holds two Master’s degrees - in Journalism and Mass Communication, and in International Relations.
- She was signed up a film ( ‘Narthaki’) in a lead role. the film is an offbeat film about the life journey of a transsexual woman - her quest for happiness, love and finding her identity. She became the first trans film star in the world to do a lead role in a major feature film.
- She is the Founder of ‘Sahodari Foundation’ an organization working for the social, economic and political empowerment of transgender persons in India.
- She works with in the transgender community on several issues, by creating empowerment programmes like entrepreneurship training which can positively change the poor transgender and intersex people’s livelihood choices, and with the public, advocates against transgender discrimination and hatred and voices for inclusion of transgender and intersex people at all levels. She has lectured in numerous seminars, colleges and universities in India and USA.
- Kalki is also an actress and also makes short documentary films and is also the editor of the Tamil magazine for transgender women called ‘Thirunangai’. She works as an independent Media Specialist, and develops web based projects and is a script writer for documentary and animation films. She is currently working two of her books, a novel and a semi autobiography.
- She was awarded the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by the Lioness Club of Chennai in appreciation of her transgender rights advocacy work, and was also chosen by ‘Ananda Vikatan’ Tamil magazine as the ‘Top Ten Nambikkaikal’ (Youth hopes) for the year 2009.
- In 2010, she was invited by the government of the United States of America for a 16 days Human Rights activism & Awareness program through IVLP. She is the first transsexual foreign national to be invited by the United States government.
“The Office of Human Rights transgender and gender identity non-discrimination campaign will appear throughout DC in Fall and Winter of 2012. The campaign will feature five transgender or gender non-conforming people in a series of five ads. The campaign aims to increase understanding of the community, reduce discriminatory incidents in DC and increase reporting of discrimination when it happens.”
just saw this on facebook https://www.facebook.com/DCOHR
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
