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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Smoking is a Huge Problem in the Gay Community - Will these Warnings Help?

 
via the New York Times Times 

Federal drug regulators on Wednesday unveiled 36 proposed warning labels for cigarette packages, including one showing a toe tag on a corpse and another in which a mother blows smoke on her baby.

Designed to cover half the surface area of a pack of cigarettes and a fifth of any advertisements for them, the labels are intended to spur smokers to quit by providing graphic reminders of tobacco’s dangers. The labels are required under a law passed last year that gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate, but not ban, tobacco products for the first time.

Read the rest at NYT

Giving Voice to the Once-Silent

Via New York Times...

“WE figured we’ll print 500 copies and they’ll take months to sell,” Rocco Kayiatos said the other day, referring to Original Plumbing, a quarterly he started a little over a year ago with a friend, Amos Mac.

“We just thought there was a need because the world is pretty much ignorant of the existence of transmen,” said Mr. Kayiatos, a poet and rapper who performs under the name Katastrophe and who, like Mr. Mac, identifies himself as a transman.

It turned out that Mr. Kayiatos’s assumptions were both right and wrong. It is true that a lot of people remain uninformed, if not about the existence of transmen — to use an umbrella term for someone born female who identifies as male (think of Chaz Bono) — then about the variety of the experiences that fall under the rubric and transmen’s growing cultural presence.

Those people probably don’t live in the Bay Area, where the zine is published, and where transmen have been gathering over the past decade in numbers no official agency has counted. But the scope of the population can be guessed at from its visibility on the local scene.

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Queering Darwin

Can animals be gay?

via New York Times, by Jon Mooallem 

 “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly. To think of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”  

Excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

Read the whole thing.

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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NYTimes: Obama to Address Gay Rights Organization Ahead of Equality March

President Obama will speak to a gathering of gay rights activists this weekend, a day before thousands of people are expected to march on Washington in a demonstration calling for greater legal protections for gays, lesbians and transgendered Americans.

Mr. Obama’s appearance on Saturday at the annual dinner for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay rights advocacy group, represents a significant show of support for gay rights at a time when many prominent gay and lesbian activists have been questioning the president’s commitment to their issues.

Many gay rights activists have become increasingly vocal about their frustration over what they see as tepid support from Mr. Obama. While the president has professed support for overturning the ban on gays in the military and called the law that precludes federal recognition of same-sex marriages discriminatory, he has not engaged on gay rights issues as actively as some had hoped.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Krugman - The Swiss Menace

via New York Times, by Paul Krugman

At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

Let’s talk about health care around the advanced world.

Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.

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Who's that Queer?

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

With ironic wit and spot-on social commentary, David Sedaris has quickly become one of America’s most widely-acclaimed humor writers. As of 2008, his books have collectively sold seven million copies. Much of Sedaris humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, homosexuality, and his life in France with his boyfriend, Hugh Hamrick.


Sedaris was born in Binghampton, New York, and raised in a suburban section of Raleigh, North Carolina. In his teens and twenties, he dabbled in visual and performance art., but was unsuccessful. Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University before transferring and dropping out of Kent State University in 1977. He then he moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1983, graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987.

While working a string of odd jobs across Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered reading his diary (which he has kept since 1977) in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass, who asked Sedaris to appear on his weekly local program The Wild Room. Sedaris later said, "I owe everything to Ira....My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand”. Sedaris' success on The Wild Room led to his National Public Radio debut on December 23, 1992, when he read a radio essay on Morning Edition titled "SantaLand Diaries", which described his experiences working as an elf at Macy's department store during Christmas time in New York.


In 1994, Sedaris released his book of stories and essays titled Barrel Fever. Shortly after, in 1995, Ira Glass began hosting the weekly hour-long PRI/Chicago Public Radio show This American Life, and Sedaris became a frequent contributor. He also began publishing essays in Esquire and The New Yorker, and in 1997, he published another collection of essays, Naked. His next book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, for which Sedaris won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named "Humorist of the Year" by Time magazine, was written mostly in France over a period of seven months, and was published in 2000 to “practically unanimous rave reviews”.

In September 2007, a new Sedaris collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames was announced for publication on June 3, 2008. Although at least one news source assumed that the book would consist entirely of fables, Sedaris said in an October 2007 interview that the collection might include a "surprisingly brief story about [his] decision to quit smoking....along with stories about a Polish crybaby, throwing shit in a paraplegic's yard, chimpanzees at a typing school, and people visiting [him] in France”.


In addition to his career as an author, David Sedaris and his sister, Amy Sedaris, have collaborated under the name “The Talent Family” and have written half-a-dozen plays which have been produced at La Mama, Lincoln Center, and The Drama Department in New York City. These plays include Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz, which was published in book form by Dramatists Play Service.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Kept From a Dying Partner’s Bedside - NYT

via the New York Times, by Tara Parker-Pope

When a loved one is in the hospital, you naturally want to be at the bedside. But what if the staff won’t allow it?

That’s what Janice Langbehn, a social worker in Lacey, Wash., says she experienced when her partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond, collapsed with an aneurysm during a Florida vacation and was taken to a Miami trauma center. She died there, at age 39, as Ms. Langbehn tried in vain to persuade hospital officials to let her visit, along with the couple’s adopted children.

“I have this deep sense of failure for not being at Lisa’s bedside when she died,” Ms. Langbehn said. “How I get over that I don’t know, or if I ever do.”

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DISGUSTING: Act Now to Stop Misleading “AIDS Charity”

via the AIDS Action Committeel blog, by Dan Scanlan

For those who care about the cause of HIV/AIDS, it’s vexing that an issue of such importance, gravity and urgency rarely seems to earn headlines, let alone placement on the front pages of national newspapers. That’s why many of us were surprised to see that HIV/AIDS had finally made it to the front pages of the New York Times website, for well over a week running now. Has there been a revolutionary medical or policy advance? Not exactly. It turns out that all it would have taken to get HIV/AIDS onto these front pages was money. And a blind eye.

Read more, and learn about ways you can take action.

NY Times: Make Same-Sex Marriage a Health Issue

Charles Blow at the New York Times has an interesting article on how to win support for same-sex marriage in the African-American community: make it a health issue. According to exit polls, African-American women were the strongest supporters of Prop. 8. If the gays can win the argument with this group, they can overturn Prop 8., and the sexual-health crisis in the African-American community may be the way to do it.

Blow's reasoning is quite sound:

For instance, most blacks find premarital sex unacceptable, according to the Gallup data. But, according to data from a study by the Guttmacher Institute, blacks are 26 percent more likely than any other race to have had premarital sex by age 18, and the pregnancy rate for black teens is twice that of white teens. They still have premarital sex, but they do so uninformed and unprotected.

That leads to a bigger problem. According to a 2004 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women have an abortion rate that is three times that of white women.

More specifically, blacks overwhelmingly say that homosexuality isn’t morally acceptable. So many black men hide their sexual orientations and engage in risky behavior. This has resulted in large part in black women’s becoming the fastest-growing group of people with H.I.V. In a 2003 study of H.I.V.-infected people, 34 percent of infected black men said they had sex with both men and women, while only 6 percent of infected black women thought their partners were bisexual. Tragic. (In contrast, only 13 percent of the white men in the study said they had sex with both men and women, while 14 percent of the white women said that they knew their partners were bisexual.)

You can read the rest of the piece here.