In 1966, three years before the world-famous Stonewall riot in New York, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood and popular queer gathering spot. A trans woman fed up with the harassment and abuse is said to have thrown a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic riot and unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.Full story
Asked about his 2017 decision to ban transgender troops from openly serving in the military, Trump claimed: “They take massive amounts of drugs, they have to. And you’re not allowed to take drugs, you know, in the military you’re not allowed to take any drugs, take an aspirin.
“They have to, after the operation, they have no choice, they have to. You would actually have to break rules and regulations in order to have that.”
Pressed on why he was enacting an anti-transgender policy while claiming to support LGBT+ rights, the president responded: “It is what it is. Look, also people were going in and then asking for the operation, and the operation is $250,000 dollars.
“The recovery period is long, and they have to take large amounts of drugs after that… and you can’t do that. I said, when it came time to make a decision on that, because of the drugs and the cost of the operation.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two LGBT rights activists who took part in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion and founded an organization that helped homeless gay youths, will be honored with a public monument in New York City, officials announced Thursday.
The yet-to-be-commissioned monument is part of an initiative to increase the diversity of the statues and monuments in public places around New York City. It will be paid for out of $10 million allocated for new public artworks.
The monument will be installed in Greenwich Village a block away from the Stonewall Inn, where patrons resisted a police raid on June 28, 1969, and helped usher in a new, militant phase of the movement for gay rights.
Iowa is one signature away from enacting a law that would limit transgender people’s access to necessary health care.
The law would allow government entities to opt out of using public insurance dollars, including Medicaid, to pay for any kind of transition-related care. This language was tacked on as an amendment to a health and human services appropriations bill late in the process, LGBTQ rights advocates said, without any committee hearings or public comment process. Lawmakers approved the legislation on Saturday.
Now, it’s up to Gov. Kim Reynolds (R). The governor hasn’t signed the legislation yet, and LGBTQ groups are talking to her staff to convince her not to do so.
Keenan Crow, director of policy and advocacy at One Iowa, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told ThinkProgress that transgender Iowans are waiting for an answer.
A production of Don Giovanni opening this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stars a transgender woman in the title role.
While operas around trans themes are starting to emerge, Tulsa’s take on Mozart’s classic represents the first time a professional opera company in the United States has hired a trans person to sing the lead in a standard work.
Lucia Lucas, the woman charged with playing one of the opera canon’s best-known protagonists, is a rising star. The 38-year-old singer has performed on major stages in Europe and Asia. Next season, she will make her debut with the English National Opera in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. And all this using the dramatic baritone voice with which she launched her international career, before she transitioned, a decade ago.
“I think I can retrain my voice to contralto, mezzo or soprano. But how long would that take and what’s the likelihood I would get hired?” says Lucas, who was born and raised in Sacramento, California, and calls Karlsruhe, Germany, home. “Whereas I have work in the standard baritone repertoire into 2022. Why would I mess with that?”
According to the policy, military secretaries and the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant can issue waivers bypassing the ban, but it provides no explanation as to what warrants such waivers. Hypothetically, then, a secretary could choose to grant waivers to every single trans person who wishes to enlist and effectively not enforce the ban at all. The guidance clarifies that any individual granted such a waiver will then be treated exactly like the group of openly-serving transgender personnel who are grandfathered in, including having their medical needs met.Full story
Twitter user Kiyoshi Kidd (@KiyoshiTheKidd) was browsing the Xbox store when he decided to look at the one star reviews on the game Apex Legends.
What he found was a review so ridiculous that many other Twitter users just couldn't resist roasting it.
The reviewer, who's screen name is ItzHalo, said:
"My son has been playing this game recently there is only one problem he keeps using the female characters."
"I think this game is turning my son transexual [sic]."
"I am not the only one that thinks this everyone in my Facebook group is having the same problem in this game and others."
Two questions leap to mind:
What is the name of this Facebook group?
How did people turn "transexual" before video games?
It boggles the mind.
The South Dakota House of Representatives voted to approve a bill Tuesday that would erase transgender kids from the state’s schools. Though several states still have “no promo homo” laws that prohibit any discussion of homosexuality in schools, this is the first “no promo trans” bill to actually have traction in the country.Full story
House Bill 1108, which advanced by a vote of 39-30, adds only one line of text to the state’s books: “No instruction in gender dysphoria may be provided to any student in kindergarten through grade seven in any public school in the state.” This simple-sounding legislation could have massive consequences for transgender youth.
Many transgender kids come out at very young ages, and research has consistently shown that they are best served through affirmation, including respecting their names and pronouns. It’s unclear if the legislation would allow schools to accommodate trans kids whatsoever, but it would certainly come into play when a student transitions. Even telling other students what name and pronouns to use for the student might be prohibited, and certainly any education about trans issues to help protect that student from bullying would be a nonstarter.
Several months after giving the world our first live-action transgender superhero Dreamer (aka Nia Nul), Supergirl finally dove into Nia’s origin by delivering a powerful hour of television that somehow managed to work as a poignant transgender narrative as well as a universally queer tale of family acceptance. The kick-butt episode, "Blood Memory," subtly reinforced the still too-often debated fact that trans women are women, while also tackling how trans folks often still feel the need to hide or downplay their identity, even after coming out to the most accepting of families. In fact, this episode marks a distinct high-point for Supergirl, managing to deliver a story both subtle and direct.
Transgender U.S. Army Capt. Jennifer Peace on Wednesday called on fellow service members to speak up, saying “staying silent is the most dangerous thing you can do” in the wake of a Supreme Court decision to allow the Trump administration to temporarily enforce its restrictions on transgender people serving in the military.
“If you’re hiding, you’re scared about the consequences and the impacts, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got to speak because being silent and refusing to share your story is the most dangerous thing you can do,” Peace told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball during an interview on “Rising.”
Peace, who has served in the military for over 13 years and completed two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was outed in 2015 and was forced to officially reveal her new identity and transition while in the Army.
The upcoming summer blockbuster Spider-Man: Far From Home is the first superhero movie ever to cast out trans actors. The popular franchise hired young actor Zach Barack to play a friend of Tom Holland's Peter Parker and placed Tyler Luke Cunningham as a featured extra.
Dana Martin, shot to death Sunday in Montgomery, Ala., is the first transgender homicide victim of 2019.
Police found Martin, 31, in a vehicle in a roadside ditch about 11 p.m. Sunday, the Montgomery Advertiser reports. The newspaper did not mention her gender, and some other media outlets misgendered her, but local activists told The Advocate she was an African-American trans woman. She lived in Hope Hull, an unincorporated area near Montgomery.
While she didn’t win the crown, Angela Ponce broke barriers on Monday in the 67th Miss Universe pageant. The 27-year-old Spanish beauty became the first transgender woman to ever participate in the international competition.Full story
“I never imagined (I would make it to Miss Universe) because I lived in a society where everyone said I couldn’t do that,” Ponce told NBC’s "Today" through a translator. “And I didn’t have the information to realize that my dream to be a woman could ever actually be realized.”
If you just happened to be in the crowd at a super featherweight bout in Indio, Calif., on Saturday evening, you might not understand the importance of that particular boxing match.Full story
But for Patricio Manuel, it represented 12 minutes of triumph. With that fight, Manuel, 33, became the first openly trans man to compete in a professional boxing match in the U.S.
It was moment of joy following a long journey after Manuel first stepped into the ring as a high schooler in Gardena, a small city south of Los Angeles.
Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.Full story
Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F pigeonholes said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.
“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” said Dr. Joshua D. Safer, an endocrinologist and executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. He is also president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health.
But exactly what does determine gender identity — a person’s powerful, core knowledge of who they are — is not so clear.
