T-Notes
It seems that people who post trans blogs and commentaries — me included — are always writing about discrimination, hate crimes, health care and bathrooms. Granted, each is critically important and potentially life altering. Only after the tragedy of someone taking their own life, however, do we usually write about [...]
My experiences have not been unusual. Sadly, they are more common, by far, than those whose personal experiences have not been subject to workplace discrimination. Whether it’s loss of work, the inability to get hired or intolerable workplace conditions, trans individuals have consistently been on the losing end of the [...]
I think one thing many will agree upon is the critical need for change — personally, publicly, politically and socially. If these times seem to portend great decisions, a fork in the road perhaps, I think many of us have felt it coming. I don’t mean this in any kind [...]
Regarding the issue of nomenclature and labels, there are many opinions on this particular subject. Invariably, few agree. I suggest a compromise, based on the acceptance that we have differences, as well as similarities and shared experiences. Confusion abounds in many minds regarding the words transgender, transsexual and intersex. All [...]
As I write this, it’s Saturday of Thanksgiving Day weekend — the so-called beginning of the holiday season. People are out and about, spending money— online too, not really giving thanks, but more or less perpetuating the myth or reality of the unholy dollar. For some, however, this time of [...]
There are several fundamental themes that always seem to repeat themselves in trans matters: if the bathroom issue is most insidious, then the battle over language and nomenclature is surely close behind. In his latest book, Dan Brown has drawn attention to the latter. Although I am neither a freemason [...]
Given increased press coverage trans issues have garnered over the past five years, I remain skeptical regarding the media’s ability and/or desire to report fairly and objectively. Any fiction that much of the collective press desires objective reporting or that it isn’t exhibitionistic is destroyed in the wake of the [...]
Healthcare debate in this country hasn’t gone from the ridiculous to the sublime; rather, it’s become progressively and inexorably more insane: death panels, euthanasia and eugenics. Of course, trans people have not escaped the foray unscathed. In the course of dealing with Neo-Christian fundamentalist zealots, we encounter many vitriolic and [...]
Forty one years after the first hate crime legislation was passed, and 11 years after Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder, the U.S. Congress is poised to pass hate crime legislation. It’s the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (generally referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act) and the Senate version [...]
The bad In May, Sacramento’s KRXQ radio station was caught in a maelstrom of its own making. Two of the three morning “shock jocks” spewed a tirade of transphobic vitriol, not only hateful, but also tantamount to incitement toward violence and directed at children who express gender diversity. Rob Williams [...]
The “hairpin drop heard round the world” — that is how New York’s Mattachine Society, and others, 40 years ago described the June 28, 1969, events at Stonewall, a gay and queen bar in the heart of Greenwich Village. The name “Stonewall” has come to symbolize the beginning of gay [...]
Sarah Gronert’s desire to play tennis isn’t complicated. Unfortunately, for her, everything else about the game is. You may have heard her story. A number of LGBT and/or alternative papers have covered her travails — even the New York Daily News ran an item about her. Briefly, Gronert had been [...]
Almost two years ago, I started assembling a database of items culled off the net. Seventy-five percent of this material is attributable to the painstaking work of archivists over at Transgender News; the other 25 percent comes from a variety of sources: referrals, articles uncovered during research and newsgroups. I’ve [...]
I am a subscriber to Parabola Magazine. I recently read an article by Patrick Laude published in summer 2008. Laude offered an interesting perspective on the question of how we, as trans individuals, define ourselves and how we are defined by the rest of the world. Is there really a [...]
Well, here we are again — back to the nitty gritty, the foundation and rock of transphobia, that issue which continually insists upon rearing its ugly head, or more accurately, having its ugly head reared, by the ever vitriolic religious right. We are, of course, talking about the bathroom issue. [...]
I wasn’t really sure what to address in this first column of 2009. I’ll be honest — I’ve had easier years than the last, emotionally. I’d be willing to bet that most, if not all, of us have faced depression at one time or another. Being trans tends toward isolation [...]
This concludes a four-part series on the DSM, gatekeeper mentality, reparative therapy and other fallacious theories, such as autogynephilia. Conformity to a rigid and myopic world structure, viewed through the lens of patriarchy, found its zenith in the male dominated professional clinics that first set out to define and understand [...]
It’s 3 a.m. in the morning — Wednesday, Nov. 5 — and I am still in a daze from last night’s election results. History was made and Nov. 4, 2008 will forever be recorded in history as the beginning of a new era. An overwhelming majority of both electors and [...]
Within the past four weeks, two events point toward significant progress in the fight for trans equality. The first comes as a result of the District of Columbia District Court’s finding in the case of Schroer v. Billington. We spoke of Ms. Schroer previously this summer in the context of [...]
Ed. Note — In deference and with all due respect to Gwen Smith, who has, for years, been writing under the name of Transmissions, this column will hereafter be called T-Notes. Why are we trans? We really don’t know. There have been many theories for the etiology of being trans, [...]
