It's Transgender Awareness Week, which will culminate on Friday with Transgender Day of Remembrance. That's the day we put aside to enumerate or losses through murders over the past year.

The truth, which we sometimes try to avoid, is that we lose just as many to suicide every year. We try to avoid it because, as Bynn Tannehill puts it, "Those who want to drive transgender people into the closet, legislate against us, and stigmatize us, talk about it all the time in order further marginalize us. It is literally a matter of life and death."

People know that transgender people are at a higher risk of suicide, but why this risk is higher is often not understood by the public, or misused by people who wish us further harm. The statistic that 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide is used all the time to justify all sorts of things that have absolutely zero basis in science.

--Tanneyhill

The mother of the trans girl at the center of the controversy in Palatine, IL has posted an essay by the title name at the ACLU-IL website.

The ACLU of Illinois is representing the family in their dealings with the school district. The mother writing the essay says that her daughter's friends call her "the most famous anonymous student." Her daughter is "Student A" in the legal proceedings.

[O]ur daughter is “Student A” at the center of the recent controversy over whether a girl who is transgender should be permitted to use the girls’ locker room. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights says yes. Our school district — Township District 211 — insists that students “of the opposite sex” should not be permitted in the girls’ locker room.

For the record, we agree with District Superintendent Daniel Cates about not permitting students of the opposite sex in the locker room. But the inconvenient fact for Mr. Cates and his supporters is that our daughter is not “of the opposite sex.”

She is a girl.

The district wrongly assumes what many who are not educated about the issue assume: That what makes a girl a girl and a boy a boy is simple anatomy. We believed this, until our daughter came along. Despite early signs — from as young as four, when she declared herself a girl, to the fact that she had mostly girlfriends growing up, played with dolls, begged to wear girls’ clothes, insisted on wearing a Hannah Montana wig while she danced around the living room, and was heavily distraught over the male characteristics of her body — we were still shocked and ill-prepared when, at the end of seventh grade, our daughter again told us that she was a girl and had to live openly as one.

Sam Melrath, 22, is a trans guy who now lives in Northeast Philly. He came out as trans during 11th grade at Abington High School. He says his classmates were very supportive, as has his family been.

When his junior year ended, Sam got a summer job as a bagger at Giant Food Store in Huntingdon Valley. At the time he was living as a man, dressing as a man, and had chosen the name "Sam," which also happened to be a short version of his birth name.

After he began working there, store management began pressuring him to dress and act like his sex at birth. He says he was pressured to change his name tag from Sam to his given name at birth, even though other employees were allowed to use shortened versions of their names on their name tags, including one female employee named "Samantha" who used the shortened version "Sam."

A ceremony was held today in the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center to announce the opening of the GIVE (Gender Identity Veteran Experience) clinic.

The clinic will have an initial enrollment of 20 transgender veterans, aged 21 to 75. GIVE will be open on a half day each month and will be supervised by Dr. Megan McNamara, who began working with trans veterans two years ago. Dr. McNamara is a primary care and women's health doctor. She will be the clinical lead physician. The treatment team will also include a nurse, a psychologist, and a social worker.

It felt like a good fit for me, professionally, and I felt that a lot of patients could use this service.

--Dr. McNamara

Yesterday The administration officially endorsed the amending of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect LGBT Americans from discrimination.

As of yet, there is no federal law that explicitly prevents people from being fired, evicted, or refused service on account of their sexual orientation or gender identity. A proposal just to ban employment discrimination for LGBT Americans (ENDA) has been continuously stymied since 1994.

The Equality Act, which the White House announced it would support Tuesday, aims to provide a wider range of protections, and in the most direct way possible. The bill would insert language about gay and transgender people into legislation created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the historic measure that banned many forms of discrimination by race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

You may not be familiar with Greg McGoon. Personally, I'd never heard of him until yesterday. I'm told he's an actor and a children's author.

IMDB tells me he has appeared in Pulp Art with Ed, Waiting Room, and No Way Out. I've actually heard of the last of those.

As an author, he's been known (but not by me) for Out of the Box.

When Devin finds an empty box in his new house, his imagination immediately takes off running...but his friends can't seem to see the magic in Devin's cardboard box. Undeterred, Devin continues to play out wondrous adventures and journeys--all stemming from the seemingly empty box. Out of the Box is a heartwarming story of the power of one boy's imagination and the limitless places our creativity can take us. Join Devin on his exciting adventures!

For a second book, he wanted to write about self worth and transformation.

Carla Lewis is a transgender woman from Antioch Tennessee. She was discharged from the Air Force in 2010 for being gender dysphoric.

The 44-year-old's Facebook selfie from Friday has gone viral, with 11,000 likes and 14,000 shares.

The sentiment seems perfect for this Veterans Day.

Every time the LGBT community suffers a significant political loss, such as HERO in Houston or California's Prop 8, or ENDA in the US Congress, one can count on a campaign to drop the T from the end of LGB.

This time it takes the form of a Change.org petition. The petition so far has 1229 signatories.

We are a group of gay/bisexual men and women who have come to the conclusion that the transgender community needs to be disassociated from the larger LGB community; in essence, we ask that organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, Lambda Legal and media outlets such as The Advocate, Out, Huff Post Gay Voices, etc., stop representing the transgender community as we feel their ideology is not only completely different from that promoted by the LGB community (LGB is about sexual orientation, trans is about gender identity), but is ultimately regressive and actually hostile to the goals of women and gay men.

So far there have been public rejections from GLAAD, HRC, and the Advocate.

There is a six-year-old boy in Katy, TX who is transgender. His parents, who happen to be a gay couple, informed the Children's Lighthouse Learning Center that their child now should be referred to as a boy and disclosed his new name.

The school administrators were okay with that. Indeed, they appear to have been prepared for their first transgender child. A set of guidelines entitled How to Handle Transgender Students was distributed to staff members.

Two "Christian" staff members objected. They were fired.

As you might imagine, this has caused an uproar from certain sources.

The District of Columbia has had anti-discrimination laws protecting transgender people for quite some time (since 2005). But a new study, qualified and transgender", by the Office of Human Rights, reveals that nearly half of D. C. employers prefer less qualified cisgender applicants to more qualified trans applicants.

Five employers will face director's inquiries from the Office of Human Rights for their results—two in the restaurant industry, two in the administrative sector, and one university. These investigations will determine whether the actions were discriminatory and could become public documents.

OHR submitted resumes to openings in various sectors from February to July.