caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Motown stars Mary Wells and Stevie Wonder. Enjoy!

Transgender model Geena Rocero has joined forces with the cable network Logo to produce a video series which will highlight transgender young people. The series will be called Beautiful as I Want to Be and will consist of four part episodes which will be introduced by Rocero and "focus on partnering young trans people with successful trans leaders to explore how they define beauty and identity. Young trans people share their backstories, their identity journeys and their dreams for the future. Their mentor/coach then readies them for a transformative photo shoot and offers life advice."

I am excited to share with trans youth the ways that I’ve used modeling and art to creatively express myself and to realize my dreams. This project is to affirm our youth’s potential, their beauty and the possibilities when we celebrate and allow them to be their most authentic selves.

Lies beget more lies. A liar must create bigger lies in order to cover for previous lies.
The bigger the lies, the easier they are to spot.
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to war.

""The first casualty when war comes is truth"
- Hiram W Johnson

Until yesterday, injection of transgender issues into the 2016 presidential campaign had been solely the province of Mike Huckabee and his fantasies about invading women's locker rooms.

That has now completely changed.

Hillary Clinton spoke at a Human Rights Campaign breakfast yesterday morning...and Joe Biden spoke to the same group of people last night.

Transgender people are valued, they are loved, they are us.

--Hillary Clinton

...from nearly 23 years of writing about transgender issues on the Internet...

...is that cisgender people who deign to write about trans issues (overall, a rarity) are likely to have their voices heard by a much larger audience than transgender people. It is just so easy to write off anything that arises from our mouths or pens or keyboards as self-serving claptrap...because, you know...

...we're trans.

We're the voices that don't actually exist in the minds of too many religious fundamentalists and their ilk. A recent study of Fox News by Media Matters showed a concerted effort to villainize our community. People don't listen to the words of villains.

So it is with heart felt gratitude that I welcomed Wednesday's ope-ed in the Detroit Free Press by Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign and Judy Shepard, cofounder of the Mathew Shepard Foundation, End epidemic of violence against transgender women.

I'm supposing they published this in Detroit because that has been one of this year's hotbeds of anti-trans violence. Other hotbeds...over the past few years...have been Washington, DC, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Houston.

Washington is in a tizzy that Russia is bombing rebels in Syria.

An article published Monday in the Journal of Emergency Nursing will hopefully change the treatment of transgender people in hospital emergency rooms. The article was submitted by Ethan Collin Cicero, BSN, RN and Beth Perry Black, PhD, RN, from Chapel Hill, NC and was entitled, I was a Spectacle...A Freak Show at the Circus: A transgender Person's ED Experience and Implications for Nursing Practice

The article offers a case study for Brandon James (not his real name), a transgender man who visited an Emergency Department in the southeastern US a few years ago, expecting to be treated like any other patient.

Instead, he was treated like a "freak show at the circus" by hospital staff when the female marker on his driver's license and medical record did not match up with his masculine appearance and preference to go by male pronouns.

The authors point to one recent study, which found that about 19 percent of transgender patients reported having been refused care because of their gender status, and 28 percent said they experienced harassment in a medical setting.

Unfortunately, this is fairly common. From a nursing perspective, those are very alarming numbers to learn about, so that's why we wanted to look a little more closely into this community's health care experiences.

--Cicero, a doctoral student at the Duke University School of Nursing

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues guitarist and singer Guy Davis. Enjoy!

Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot and sunny. On the prairie outside the Republic Steel's Chicago plant the strikers and their families began to gather for picnics. Women were dressed in their holiday best. Children could be seen riding on their father's shoulders.

Two weeks ago I posted about a trans teen in Kansas City, Landon Patterson, who was elected to be homecoming queen at Oak Park High School: The difference support makes.

Soon after her election, Landon started receiving hate from the Twitterverse.

Everything was such a fairy tale and the world stopped for a minute. People, like, hate me. And now there is a group that hates me, going out of their way to be mean to me.

--Landon

We might have guessed. The folks at Westboro Baptist have decided they need to picket OPHS...and that was on for today. They spout something about landmarks...which I completely don't get.

Do these people not work? How do they go to these protests all over the place? I’ll be working, but Landon knows I’ll be there with her.

--Debbie Hall, Landon's mother