Tuesday April 10, 1906
San Francisco, California - Police Attack Protest of Workingmen

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garceti announced a newly created nine-member Transgender Advisory Council will advise city officials on various issues affecting the transgender community.

Today, the City of Los Angeles sends a clear message to transgender Angelenos: your voices matter and your experiences count.

The nine members of our Transgender Advisory Council will bring a new and important perspective to City Hall that will help empower trans Angelenos to lead stigma-free, productive, and meaningful lives.

--Mayor Garceti

Back in January...January 22 to be exact....police found the body of Jasmine Sierra, a 52-year-oldtransgender woman of color, was found in an apartment in Bakersfield, CA. According to the police report, the body showed signs of trauma and foul play.

While police reportedly interviewed neighbors and witnesses about hearing gunshots and fighting, they won't release further specifics about the circumstances of Sierra’s death. Calls to Bakersfield police were not returned by press time.

Unfortunately, at the time the coroner and media identified Jasmine as a male and used her birth name, while asking "anyone with information helpful to the investigation to call police."

Because of the deadnaming, none of Jasmine's friends and acquaintances could help out because they didn't know she was dead.

Los Angeles-based sculptor Heath Satow has been commissioned by the Transgender Community Coalition to create a tribute to transgender victims of violence to be displayed as public art somewhere in Palm Springs.

The original rendering of the statue was created by coalition director Thomi Clinton and R. J. Taylor.

The original iteration of the transgender sculpture illustrates a life-size figure, made of steel butterflies, lying on its side. Where exactly the statue will find a permanent home in Palm Springs is still to be determined.

A group called Privacy for All announced yesterday that it had failed in its attempt to qualify the so-called Personal Privacy Protection Act for the November 2016 ballot.

The PPPA would have forced transgender and gender nonconforming people to use public facilities reserved for our birth sex.

Anti-trans activists needed to get 365800 signatures to place the initiative on the ballot but fell short. They are not saying by how much.

Juliet Owen is a veteran. She served in the Marine Corps 1993-94, working in aviation electronics, until being honorably discharged after being diagnosed with chondromalacia (runner's knee). She is currently unemployed and homeless. Being a veteran she has managed to score housing in Long Beach's Villages at Cabrillo.

The reason for her jobless state is a sore point, however. Juliet has filed a wrongful termination complaint October 1 claiming gender identity discrimination against Australian Swim Schools, an Orange County swimming school with students aged three months to adult.

Owen said she had never experienced discrimination because of her transgender status until she moved from Virginia Beach, VA to southern California and began work as a swim instructor in May at Australian Swim Schools Anaheim location. After informing her boss that she is transgender, she was laid off a month later. She was told that not enough students had signed up for summer water safety classes, but when she visited the facility two weeks after her termination, she discovered three new employees.

I'm sure that very few of you have ever heard of Denair, CA. It's a "census designated place" in Stanislaus County, CA. Not enough of a hint? It's near Turlock. Doesn't help? That's between Modesto and Merced. Central Valley.

Population was 4404 in 2010. The town encloses a grand total of 2 square miles.

It really epitomizes the phrase "small town." Except the part about the government not thinking it is large enough to be called a town.

Denair calls itself "The Oasis of the San Joaquin Valley."

In 2010 Denair had 10 same-sex married couples/domestic partnerships. 22% of the residences were rentals. 32% of the residents identify as Hispanic or Latino. In 2000 16% of the population lived below the poverty line.

As the Wikipedia entry for Stanislaus County says,

Stanislaus County is not a great place, it's just a place in the Central Valley.

Anry Fuentes lives in Denair. She is a transgender teen. When she she told her mother last year that she was going to come out, her mother kicked her out of their home.

Well my mom kicked me out. I’m not mad at her or hate her. I understand where she’s coming from. She was raised differently, and I can’t judge her for that. If I did regret [coming out] then I wouldn’t be this happy. It's much harder to hide than to come out as yourself.

--Anry

Last Tuesday court-appointed receiver who has managed health care for California prisons under federal court order since the Scwarzenegger administration announced new guidelines which authorize surgical procedures for transgender inmates suffering from severe gender dysphoria who desire surgery.

The guidelines call for panels of state health professionals to review appeals for sex-reassignment surgery from inmates whose doctors say their patients are under significant distress because of a mental condition known as gender dysphoria. The inmate must have been taking hormones for at least a year and have consistently expressed a desire to change his or her biological gender before an operation can be approved.

Prison officials have estimated the cost of the state-funded operations as high as $100,000. But the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which has represented two inmates in suits against the state, says each operation would cost $15,000 to $30,000.

California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says it has about 385 transgender inmates, most of them male-to-female, who are currently undergoing hormone therapy.