Who's That Queer? [Nomi]

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Nomi Ruiz is a Nu-disco and Hip hop singer from New York City who is most famous for being among the cast of vocalists that contributed to Hercules and Love Affair's debut album. Ruiz has also collaborated with dance music trio The Ones.




Nomi Ruiz was featured on the songs "You Belong", "Hercules Theme", and "I'm Telling You" for album Hercules and Love Affair. Pitchfork Media placed "Hercules Theme" at #21 on The 100 Best Tracks of 2008. She toured extensively with the band in support of the album, singing her song contributions as well as those of Antony Hegarty. The Guardian described Ruiz as "boasting the spookily effortless air of a future pop icon."

Nomi Ruiz released her debut album Lost In Lust on her own independent label Park Side Records. The album is a song-oriented downbeat electronic album steeped in the grittier ends of early-'90s hip-hop and R&B production. Since its debut, she had been able to tour with other artists such as Debbie Harry and CocoRosie. She also toured with Antony & The Johnsons and has been apart of their "Turning" project.


Read more about Nomi here.

Is 2010 the Year of the Transsexual?

New York Times on the posh-ness of transsexuality:

Not since the glam era of the 1970s has gender-bending so saturated the news media. The difference now is that mystery has been replaced with empowerment, even pride. Consider a few happenings that have blipped recently on our radar. The blog of a young mother whose 5-year-old son had dressed like Daphne on “Scooby-Doo” for Halloween went viral, initiating a nationwide discussion on the fluidity of gender. (The mother ended up on “Today.”) The performance artist Kalup Linzy became a downtown phenomenon in Manhattan for his gender-bending portrayals of soap-opera divas. Oprah Winfrey welcomed transsexual men to her program.

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Who's That Queer? [Lynn Conway]

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Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community.

Conway is notable for several technical achievements, including the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964. She was soon selected to join the architecture team designing a multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there. The Computer History Museum has stated that "the ACS machines appears to have been the first superscalar design, a computer architectural paradigm widely exploited in modern high-performance microprocessors.

After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment and realizing that a full gender transition was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for transition.

Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role.

Read the rest at Wikipedia.

Who's That Queer [Amanda Simpson]

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Amanda Simpson is a rocket scientist who has run for a state representative seat in Arizona. She is the first openly-transgendered person to earn a presidential appointment.

Born Mitchell Simpson, Amanda transitioned into a woman in 2000. Since her transition, she has fought for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. In 2005, she convinced her employer of 26 years, Raytheon, to become the first major aerospace and defense contractor to add gender identity to its discrimination policy.

Simpson now works at the Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency within the Commerce Department. She helps monitor exports of defense technology in order to assure dangerous weapons do not fall into the hands of U.S. enemies.

Read her full biography here.

For Transgender People, Name Is a Message

Via New York Times:

Katherine used to be Miguel. Olin had a girl’s name. And in October, Robert Ira Schnur, 70, became Roberta Iris Schnur, a Manhattan retiree with magenta lipstick and, she noted the other day, chipped silver nail polish.

“I wasn’t like other men,” she said.

Theirs are among hundreds of names a Manhattan court has changed over the last few years for transgender New Yorkers. That tally, specialists in the relatively new field of transgender law say, may make the borough’s workaday Civil Court one of the country’s biggest official name swappers — male names for female, vice versa and ambiguous.

Changing a name might seem like a minor matter for those who are changing their gender identities and, for some, facing challenges like finding knowledgeable doctors, trying hormones and experimenting with painful hair-removal procedures. But many who have gone through the switch say a name change sends an important message to the world, a message solidified and made official with a court’s approval.

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Trans teen love - love, and gender, aint binary!

Levi Vincent, 19, struggles to keep his voice monotone and deep as he tells me what it’s like to grow up in a girl’s body.

“My entire life I had never felt comfortable with who I was,” he said. “But now I’m slowly starting to get rid of Alesha and bring Levi into the picture.”

He is a straight man birthed into a woman’s body. Trapped – but not for long.

Levi is one of a growing number of America’s trans teens who have realized early in their lives that they were meant to be the other sex. And they’re doing something about it sooner rather than later.

Read the rest in Out & About (Nashville.)