Sunday, June 28, 2009

Bangalore makes a queer pitch

Siddharth Narrain
First Published : 27 Jun 2009 10:15:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 27 Jun 2009 10:47:13 AM IST

Karnataka Queer Habba: This year, Bangalore has given Pride celebrations a distinct local flavour with a week-long celebration titled the Karnataka Queer Habba. It began with a bang with an innovative cricket match. Titled “Queering the Pitch”, the match saw teams from different LGBT organisations pitted against each other. A live and humorous commentary interspersed with messages about LGBT rights and safe sex practices, ensured that no one was bored even for a minute. The Sangama team emerged the undisputed winner and was handed a trophy designed with queer symbols.

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Russian man kills girlfriend after learning she was born male

Moscow:

A Russian man has shot his girlfriend dead and tried to commit suicide after learning that his beloved was a male by birth, police said on Wednesday.

Vladimir of southern Russian city of Volgograd shot Kamilla dead near a railway station after he learned that his partner had undergone sexual reassignment surgery at an Australian clinic, they said.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

Review: Be Like Others

Be Like Others
Created by: Tanaz Eshaghian

Regular airtime: Wednesday, 9pm ET (HBO)
Cast: Dr. Bahram Mir-Jalali, Anoosh/Anahita, Shahin, Ali, Ali Askar, Vida, Farhad, Hojatol Islam Kariminiya

US release date: 24 June 2009

Review by Cynthia Fuchs

PopMatters Film and TV Editor

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Disposable Income: How Gender and Sexuality Don't Add Up to Equal Pay

John Caldon
Posted: June 25, 2009 03:33 PM

June marks Pride Month, an annual celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community's struggle for full equity. Despite the huge strides made toward this goal over the last few decades, there remains much work to be done. The historical patterns of workplace discrimination and pay inequity among LGBT and women workers still persist. On June 24, Representative Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts introduced the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that would protect all workers from discrimination regardless of their sexual or gender identity.

A careful look at the earnings and workplace experiences of LGBT and women workers clearly illustrates the need for this legislation. Gender and sexual identity are intrinsically linked to pay.

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

New Protections for Transgender Federal Workers

By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: June 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.

The guidelines will be in an updated federal handbook for managers and supervisors to be distributed and posted online in the next couple of months, and they could also be included in other materials for managers. They will list transgender people — those who identify their gender differently from the information on their birth certificates — as among several groups protected by antidiscrimination laws.


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Sunday, June 21, 2009

Prosecutors: Colorado man accused in transgender slaying knew woman was biologically male

By: P. SOLOMON BANDA
Associated Press
06/20/09 3:50 PM PDT

GREELEY, COLO. — A man accused of beating an 18-year-old transgendered woman to death with a fire extinguisher "snapped" after finding out the teen was biologically male, a defense lawyer argued Thursday as the murder trial began.

But a prosecutor contended Allen Andrade knew Angie Zapata's secret for at least 36 hours before the slaying — and killed her not in a sudden rage but because he disliked gays and transgenders.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Laos tackles transgender taboos

A new drive to contain the spread of HIV/Aids in Laos is forcing officials to recognise a marginalised group - transgender men known as "katheoy". The BBC's Jill McGivering went to meet some of them in the capital, Vientiane.

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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Ugandan activist punished for transgender identity

Victor Juliet Mukasa chosen as international grand marshal by Pride for human rights work

Jun 18, 2009 04:30 AM

Elvira Cordileone
Staff Reporter

Grace and persistence under almost unendurable circumstances have earned Victor Juliet Mukasa a place at the head of this year's Pride parade.

Still, for someone who's been punished because of his gender identity, "a transperson," as the 33-year-old Ugandan calls himself, the prospect of serving as Pride Week's international grand marshal is scarey.

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Girls Don't Cry

An HBO documentary explores the growing number of transsexuals in Iran

By Ann Lewinson

Be Like Others
Premieres June 24 on HBO

Much of the best science fiction posits a society operating under a set of rules that cast our own society's unexamined assumptions in relief. Let's just say, for example, that homosexuality was a crime, punishable by death. And what if, in this same society, transsexuality were merely seen as an illness, curable with an operation partially funded by the state? But this is no Ursula Le Guin novel — this is Iran, which is second only to Thailand in the number of sex-change operations performed each year. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran, but estimates of transsexuals run as high as 150,000. What happens when gender is mutable but sexual orientation is not? When science produces a medical solution for what religion prohibits? Tanaz Eshaghian, an Iranian-American filmmaker, set out to find out in Be Like Others, which premieres on HBO on June 24.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Ottawa: Ladyfest confronts hot topics

LOCAL / Discussion explores women-centered spaces and gender identities
Ariel Troster / Ottawa / Wednesday, June 17, 2009

UP FOR DISCUSSION. Evan Hazenberg will be facilitating a discussion about the place of trans folk in women's spaces Jun 20.

Butch dykes and trans men are a diverse bunch. Some identify as one but not the other, some both. Some lesbians come to identify as trans, and some of them decide to transition.

Transitioning is the process of switching from living and presenting as one gender to living and presenting as another. For some it involves hormones and surgeries, for others no.

All of which complicates the definition of women's space.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

China: Sex change surgery guidelines drafted

By Shan Juan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-17 08:03

China is set to issue its first clinical guideline on sex-change surgery, according to a notice put on the website of the Ministry of Health Tuesday.

The ministry is now soliciting public and professional opinions on the draft guideline. The coming guideline aims to regulate and standardize sex reassignment surgery, part of a treatment for gender identity disorder in transsexuals.

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Group: Gay bias killings highest since 1999

By MARCUS FRANKLIN – 9 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — The number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people killed in bias-motivated incidents increased by 28 percent in 2008 compared to a year ago, according to a national coalition of advocacy groups.

Last year's 29 killings was the highest recorded by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs since 1999, when it documented the same number of slayings, according to a report released Tuesday by the coalition.

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Monday, June 15, 2009

Women and Transgender Individuals Pleased at Cerrah's Departure

As Istanbul is preparing for a new Chief of Police, many segments of the city are happy that Celalettin Cerrah is going.
...
Women in Istanbul recall the annual harrassment of women at New Year in Taksim, accusing the police of remaining inactive.
...
Another group of people who are glad that Cerrah is leaving is the transvestite and transexual community of Istanbul.

According to transexual Beren, "During the six years that Celalettin Cerrah has been Istanbul Chief of Police, the violence against transvestites and transexuals (TT) has risen very noticably. His time in office has been a turning point for the worse."

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Trial set in transgender civil case that alleges discrimination at Park Central in Appleton

June 15, 2009

(Wisconsin) Sierra D. Broussard, 28, of Appleton, filed a civil suit against Park Central, a downtown Appleton nightclub, claiming she was denied admission June 21 because she is black and a transsexual.

Broussard said she was twice denied entrance to Park Central, 318 W. College Ave., and said an employee told her if she "used either bathroom it would cause confusion for the other patrons," and that she should go to a club that caters to "her kind."

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Friday, June 12, 2009

Jamison Green Commentary: Chastity, 'Good luck, brother!'

By Jamison Green
Special to CNN

Jamison Green is an educator, adviser and advocate on transgender issues, and the author of "Becoming a Visible Man" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

Welcome, Chaz!

Before the word "transsexual" had been coined in English, an intrepid young person whose family belonged to the British nobility set out to transform herself from female to male. He received a medical school education, obtained hormones -- relatively new substances that were poorly understood at the time, and independently began living as a man in the early 1940s.

Eventually, he found a plastic surgeon to help him, and his physical changes were complete by 1949, but his family rejected him. The British tabloids hounded him. To escape publicity, he was forced to carve out a life for himself virtually alone. He became a Buddhist monk, and died in Tibet in 1962 at the age of 47.

His name was Michael Dillon, and he one of the Western world's first transsexual people, that is, someone who changes sex and/or gender by medical means. His extensive writings were suppressed and destroyed by his family -- only fragments survive.

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