Little Boy Witches

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Jeffery Self

Halloween brings out a lot of upsetting news stories: stories of psychotic people poisoning trick-or-treat candy, Barbara Walters co-hosting an entire episode of The View as Marilyn Monroe, and parents further forcing gender stereotypes on their kids.

The "you can't be a princess, you're a boy" dilemma is as old as princesses themselves.

For every Dracula costume worn this year, there's likely just as many boys who wanted to be a witch instead.

What's crazy to me is the idea of a parent telling their kid they can't be something they want to be.

I grew up in Rome, Georgia, a fairly conservative town, in a family that became very into Halloween thanks to the infectious holiday spirit given off by the Roseanne Halloween episodes.

Like a lot of kids, my sister and I were obsessed with The Wizard of Oz growing up. In her pre-teen years, my sister once claimed she thought she might have actually been Dorothy Gale herself in a past life, which was ironic because as an adult, I've met a lot of guys who think they might have spent their past lives as Judy Garland.

In first grade I knew exactly who I wanted to be for Halloween: the Wicked Witch of the West. Upon telling my mom this news months before Halloween, she immediately enlisted my grandmother to make my costume and took me shopping for green make-up, a wig, a hat, and a broom.

She found her old pair of pointy-toed black boots that were way too big for me, and she stuffed them full of toilet paper. I remember feeling like the most glamorous boy in the world for getting my own mother's shoes.

My grandmother finished my costume weeks before the actual Halloween deadline, and I practiced wearing the costume in the countless nights leading up to Halloween.

It had come together perfectly. I was the Wicked Witch of the West.


Read the rest

When It Comes to Trans Kids, It's Us Who Are Confused

via Advocate, by Diane Ehrensaft

During the past few months, the media has been replete with accounts of both children and adults who do not fit neatly into conventional gender roles: a Canadian baby, Storm, whose parents kept the baby’s gender secret; the child of a prominent celebrity, Chaz Bono, who attracted controversy as a trangender man on primetime television; and two children, Tammy and Mario, who announced to their parents that they were not their biological gender and began living as they wanted to be. 

As a developmental psychologist who spends my days working with both children and young adults who are transgender, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender queer, and more, none of these stories has been a surprise to me.

They simply reinforce my observation, made in my book Gender Born, Gender Made, that it is increasingly difficult to define gender as a strict biological binary.  

What took me more by surprise was the ensuing tsunami of hostile, antagonistic, and hateful responses toward both these individuals and, in the children’s cases, their parents. 

In response to Bono’s casting on Dancing With the Stars, Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-team, offered these words of wisdom: "The last thing vulnerable children and adolescents need, as they wrestle with the normal process of establishing their identities, is to watch a captive crowd in a studio audience applaud on cue for someone whose search for an identity culminated with the removal of her breasts, the injection of steroids.”

For this comment, Albow received 33,000 Facebook recommends. In the eyes of thousands of Americans, it is as though transgender people are a disease that could contaminate and pervert our “normal” children.



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Social Bottom in the Bar, Sissy Top in the Boudoir

[we LOVE this]

You are welcome in this community, sissy or otherwise.

via Philly Gay Calendar, by Nicholas Deroose

Excerpt:

For those that know me, you probably would agree that I am really gay. I out people just walking pass them. I like to tell people I have enough gay to go around so don't be shy. I am so loud that most people can hear me before the see me and I say gurrrlfriend with a pitch that makes people think Mariah is in the neighborhood. I am unapologetically gay with every wrist flick, hair toss and booty shake.

So with all my fabulousness, shooting rainbows and butterflies with every step, most people would automatically assume that I am a bottom, and I don't mind if they assume that, because if being called a bottom means being fabulous, than yes, hand me my B-badge. Plus, I find it so much easier to me funny when you're shamelessly loud. I mean how many gay butch comedians do you know? It seems that we have come to equate camp with taking it up the ass. 

Take it all.

Semenya to Keep Gold Metal, No Matter What!

Even if South African track star Caster Semenya does have both boy and girl parts, she's still a gold medal winner: The International Association of Athletics Federations ruled she can keep the gold medal she won in August in Berlin. But the bigger news? The results of the investigation into Semenya's gender (!) will be kept private. Read the rest at Queerty.

Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?

“It was terrible!” said Ms. Sturgis, an honors student, band president and soccer goalie, who has been openly gay since 10th grade. “If you put a boy in a drape, that’s me! I have big shoulders and ooh, it didn’t look like me! I said, ‘I can’t do this!’ So my mom said, ‘Try on the tux.’ And that looked normal.”

via New York Times, by Jan Hoffman

By now, most high school dress codes have just about done away with the guesswork.

Girls: no midriff-baring blouses, stiletto heels, miniskirts.

Boys: no sagging pants, muscle shirts.

But do the math.

“Rules” + “teenager” = “challenges.”

If the skirt is an acceptable length, can a boy wear it?

Can a girl attend her prom in a tuxedo?

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Last week, a cross-dressing Houston senior was sent home because his wig violated the school’s dress code rule that a boy’s hair may not be “longer than the bottom of a regular shirt collar.” In October, officials at a high school in Cobb County, Ga., sent home a boy who favored wigs, makeup and skinny jeans. In August, a Mississippi student’s senior portrait was barred from her yearbook because she had posed in a tuxedo.

Other schools are more accepting of unconventional gender expression. In September, a freshman girl at Rincon High School in Tucson who identifies as male was nominated for homecoming prince. Last May, a gay male student at a Los Angeles high school was crowned prom queen.

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Dress is always code, particularly for teenagers eager to telegraph evolving identities. Each year, schools hope to quell disruption by prohibiting the latest styles that signify a gang affiliation, a sexual act or drug use.
But when officials want to discipline a student whose wardrobe expresses sexual orientation or gender variance, they must consider antidiscrimination policies, mental health factors, community standards and classroom distractions.

And safety is a critical concern. In February 2008, Lawrence King, an eighth-grader from Oxnard, Calif., who occasionally wore high-heeled boots and makeup, was shot to death in class by another student.

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Black Manhood, Same Gender Love, and Civil Rights

Often when I have these discussions in the Black community, someone gets up talking about reproduction. To reproduce or to not reproduce being the measure of who deserves the most rights or respect. This is not logical because most sex that people have, including heterosexual sex, is not to reproduce.

-- Cleo Manago, founder AmASSI Health & Cultural Centers

Read the article on Echelon.

The Same Old Punch Line

It turns out President Obama is a bit of a jokester after all

by Pistol Pete

President Obama is busy crisscrossing the country in hopes of resuscitating his health care reform plan. He’s staying calm, on message and musing over ludicrous rumors that health care reform will include things like “death panels”, coverage for illegal immigrants and abortions for all. In his speeches (and, incredibly, later aped by Rachel Maddow) he also jokes about covering sex change operations. I’m sure this comment is quite the crowd-pleaser, but as a transgendered man, I am profoundly disappointed by his low-blow comments regarding a much misunderstood and discriminated against group that he simultaneously claims to support.

I wouldn’t have been so shocked by other, less well-informed politicians touting this line, but I expect more from Barack. Unlike many others, Obama knows the veracity of the condition known as Gender Identity Disorder (GID). Throughout his political life, Obama has supported legislation to ban discrimination in employment and housing based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as trans-inclusive hate crimes laws.

Obama knows how serious this condition is: the substance abuse and suicide rates among transgendered individuals are staggering, there is no known cure, and the only effective treatment to date has been the very thing he mocks - sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). Yet still he invokes the same old punch line about gender transition as some sort of outlandish elective procedure that does not address the “real” health needs of Americans.

Perhaps if there were any transgender data collection by our government, or public or private institutions with an interest in actually studying transgendered people, we would have the ability to document how real GID is and how vital SRS is to their survival. Right now, there is a small but growing body of evidence of the brain differences of transpeople, the failed interventions of psychotherapy, and, most importantly, the overwhelmingly positive outcomes in the mental and emotional well being of the few individuals who are able to afford the costly psychological and medical services required by universal GID standards of care.

I understand that politically, SRS in health care reform may be unfeasible, but to use transgendered people as your comic relief is simply cruel. Come on Barack, you’re not George Bush or Bill Clinton - you have a heart and a brain - use them.

Policing Caster Semenya's gender

Athlete forced to undergo "gender verification testing"

via xtra.ca, by Shawn Syms

Hair above her upper lip. The deep timbre of her voice. A muscular build. Her flatter-than average chest. A growing fixation on these corporeal cues is replacing the cheers that first met teenaged South African athlete Caster Semenya when she took the 800m gold medal at the world championship in Berlin last Wednesday.

Eighteen-year-old Semenya, who grew up in the village of Fairlee in South Africa's rural Limpopo province, has been forced to undergo "gender verification testing" at the hands of a team that includes an endocrinologist, gynecologist, internal-medicine specialist and a psychologist.

As a long-time member of the queer community, I've met a lot of women with deep voices and/or facial hair. In fact, across most people I've met I've seen a wide range of behaviour and self-presentation across the spectrum of culturally defined "masculine" and "feminine" traits, regardless of whether a person identified as a man or a woman. Or defined themselves in some other way.

Read the rest.

Who's that Queer? Peaches!

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

You may recognize her as the stylish, loud, electro-clash rock-chic, but before she became Peaches, Merrill Beth Nisker (born 1968 in Toronto, Canada) was an elementary school music and drama teacher. The electronica musician whose songs are notable for use of explicitly sexual lyrics plays her own instruments for her songs, programs her own electronic beats, and produces her own albums. Oh, and let’s not forget her ability to rock a mullet and look darn good doin’ it! That’s an accomplishment in itself.

Gender identity is a constant subject of Peaches' music, as she has suffered from gender identity issues since childhood, and often plays with traditional notions of gender role representation. Her lyrics and live shows consciously blur the distinction between male and female; in 2003 she appeared on the cover of her album Fatherfucker with a full beard. She disputes accusations of "penis envy," preferring the term “hermaphrodite envy”, as she was determined by her physician to have "undescended testicles" in 1995. More recently, she has announced her belief that, “there is so much male and female in us all.”

She released her first album, Fancypants Hoodlum, under the name Merrill Nisker in 1995, and subsequently developed the style and persona that would take her to international fame as Peaches. Her songs have been featured in movies such as Mean Girls, Waiting..., Jackass Number Two, My Little Eye, and Lost in Translation. Her music has also been highlighted on television shows such as Showtime's The L Word and NBC’s Ugly Betty. Peaches performed guest vocals on Pink's album Try This, on the song "Oh My God," and on the Chicks on Speed album 99 Cents, on the song "We Don't Play Guitars."

Peaches’ live background band, The Herms (short for hermaphrodites) was formed in the spring of 2006. They played at small and large venues alike with sex and sex-related themes as the "shock factor" for the audience. "Herms" is also a reference to the 1970's duo Peaches & Herb, and blending of the words “her” and “him.

For her fourth album, 2006's Impeach My Bush, Peaches enlisted guest musicians Joan Jett, Greg Kurstin, Josh Homme, Samantha Maloney, Beth Ditto, Feist, Dave Catching, Brian O'Connor and Radio Sloan to perform on several of the tracks. Her most recent album, I Feel Cream, was released on May 4, 2009 in Europe and May 5 in North America. The first single from the project is a double A-side of "Talk to Me" and "More”.

Source: Wikipedia

Please Consider Justice and Inclusivity for ALL Populations As You Reform Health Care

Dear President Obama,

Please Consider Justice and Inclusivity for ALL Populations As You Reform Health Care

As LGBT Illinoisans, we know your commitment to this cause. Your record in support of civil rights for all and health care reform speaks for itself. You want a more inclusive, healthier world with less health disparities and stronger community health. A world where lesbian and bisexual women do not suffer from disproportionately high rates of smoking, alcohol use, obesity, and lack of insurance that place them at higher risk for breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, addiction, and other chronic, life-threatening illnesses. A world where gay and bisexual men do not suffer from disproportionately high rates of psycho-emotional disorders, addictions, and (most notably) HIV/AIDS. A world where transgender folks are able to be healthy and live free from violence.

With National LGBT Health Awareness Week just past, March 9-14, 2009, and health care reform gaining momentum, we must remember some basic priorities.

The LGBT population must be included in health care reform. When considering the topic of health care reform, you must not ignore the great social injustice being suffered by the groups of greatest health disparity. Therefore, I call on you to ensure that any healthcare reform be inclusive of LGBT folks. For the past eight years, we have had to be present, but invisible in the national health conversation.

By making health care reform inclusive of the LGBT community, healthcare settings could become safe, helpful places rather than venues of shame, stigma, and prejudice. Preventative practices and messages would be appropriate and inclusive, reducing the cost of reactionary treatment to preventable disease. We will not have to use the emergency room as our primary health care provider as so many of us without insurance are forced to do. Instead, we will know that providers have knowledge about our true risks, best practices for how to care for us, and how to be respectful of our families and identities.

The LGBT population must be included in data collection – so that we can understand the truths of our bodies and lives. The need for accurate, inclusive data is two-fold: 1) if we don’t know what is wrong in our community, we can’t fix it and 2) data is the basis for all federal support and funding for health initiatives. Our national surveys don’t include sexual orientation and gender identity questions. We need these tools to accurately understand what problems all of us face so we can solve them. Furthermore, without data about health issues in our population, the LGBT population is consistently overlooked by federal programs.

By making health care reform and research LGBT-inclusive, we will be able to better care for the entire community. These reforms will affect the most vulnerable members of our community – those who can’t choose a health care provider based on what their website profile says, but who delay care until crisis strikes. If health care reform is LGBT-inclusive, our doctors, nurses and staffs will be better able to care for all of their patients and our nation’s health will improve.

Michael C. Cook
President and CEO
Howard Brown Health Center
Chicago

US endorses UN gay rights text

By MATTHEW LEE – via AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration on Wednesday formally endorsed a U.N. declaration calling for the worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality, a measure that former President George W. Bush had refused to sign.

The move was the administration's latest in reversing Bush-era decisions that have been heavily criticized by human rights and other groups. The United States was the only western nation not to sign onto the declaration when it came up at the U.N. General Assembly in December.

"The United States supports the U.N.'s statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity and is pleased to join the other 66 U.N. member states who have declared their support of the statement," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

"The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world," Wood told reporters. "As such, we join with other supporters of this statement, and we will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora."

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the administration would endorse the declaration.

Gay rights and other groups had criticized the Bush administration when it refused to sign the declaration when it was presented at the United Nations on Dec. 19. U.S. officials said then that the U.S. opposed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation but that parts of the declaration raised legal questions that needed further review.

According to negotiators, the Bush team had concerns that those sections could commit the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In some states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military.

But Wood said a "careful interagency review" by the Obama administration had concluded that "supporting this statement commits us to no legal obligations."

When it was voted on in December, 66 of the U.N.'s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration, which backers called an historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with anti-gay discrimination. It was endorsed by all 27 European Union members as well as Japan, Australia and Mexico.

But 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality — and in several, homosexual acts can be punished by execution. More than 50 nations, including members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, opposed the declaration.

Some Islamic countries said at the time that protecting sexual orientation could lead to "the social normalization and possibly the legalization of deplorable acts" such as pedophilia and incest. The declaration was also opposed by the Vatican.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Connecting the Dots - Podcast Series Focuses on Black Gay Men

NASTAD is pleased to release the second installment of its Connecting the Dots podcast series focusing on black gay men. In this four-part podcast, NASTAD explores black gay men’s sexuality through interviews with Patrick Wilson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Medical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and Terrance Moore, Associate Director for NASTAD’s racial and ethnic health disparities program. The questions and answers in this podcast challenge listeners to consider a range of issues, both profound and superficial, that influence the health and wellness of black gay men.

Part one of the podcast, released on February 5, 2009, explored identity, masculinity and femininity and sexual objectification and mystique of black gay men (part one transcript). Part two explores racism, gender identity and sexual roles (part two transcript). Parts three and four will be released over the upcoming month and will explore pop culture and media, self-value, power and privilege and will connect the dots between all issues covered in the podcast series. (Please note: each podcast is approximately 35MB, so please be patient during the download.)

After listening to the podcast, we encourage listeners to visit NASTAD’s blog to leave comments. By sharing insights and ideas, we believe listeners can help one another better understand the contexts in which behaviors occur, in which programs and services are delivered and in which policies are made. To this end, we also encourage you to share this podcast series with your colleagues.

Please watch for additional Connecting the Dots podcasts throughout the year. We also invite you to view other NASTAD publications focusing on Black gay men and other important topics by visiting NASTAD’s website.

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.)