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.

This past Thursday evening, ay a dinner for the Empire State Pride Agenda Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that, through executive action, he had added transgender and gender nonconforming people to New York's Human Rights Law of 1945.

Put a microphone in front of a conservative talk show host and an adjunct professor of statistics from Cornell who also claims to study the philosophy of science...while seeming to specialize is climate denial...and you shouldn't expect anything good to happen.

So Joe Miller had a guest named William Briggs. The subject du jour was recent research by psychologists at UCLA and the University of York that indicates that both religious belief and nativism can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.

The researchers targeted the posterior medial frontal cortex, a part of the brain located near the surface and roughly a few inches up from the forehead that is associated with detecting problems and triggering responses that address them.

In the study, half of the participants received a low-level “sham” procedure that did not affect their brains, and half received enough energy to lower activity in the target brain area. Next, all of the participants were first asked to think about death, and then were asked questions about their religious beliefs and their feelings about immigrants.

NJ.com reported that trans girl Jae Irizarry was crowned homecoming queen last Saturday at Trenton Central High School.

I wanted to make a difference, to show not only the city and world that it's 2015 and things are changing and progressing. I am so happy that I won, it's been amazing.

Jae credited the friends and teachers who convinced her to run and a supportive school community.

They're making my dreams come true.

But there were some who doubted the outcome could happen legitimately ot that it shold have been allowed to happen.

Penny Rae, writing for the Trentonian on Sunday reported that "sources with intimate knowledge of activities at the school say the vote was a fraud."

Penny wrote that an anonymous source who feared retribution said the teacher in charge of the voting process "failed to properly oversee the votes, which allowed students to stuff the ballot box as an alleged practical joke."

Then Penny wrote

But other sources say the teacher was involved in stuffing the ballot box and did so because she wanted to “make history.”

Because, you know, how else could the tranny have won?

The World Medical Association held is annual Assembly this past weekend in Moscow.

If you are like me, you've barely heard of the WMA, if at all. Established in 1947, the WMA's purpose is "to serve humanity by endeavoring to achieve the highest international standards in Medical Education, Medical Science, Medical Art and Medical Ethics, and Health Care for all people in the world." The organization had 106 constituent members and 1013 Associate members as of 2014.

Delegates from 60 national medical associations voted on Sunday to adopt new guidelines for physicians to increase their knowledge about, respect to and sensitivity towards "transgender people and the unique health issues they face."

The delegates from nearly 60 national medical associations adopted guidelines saying that being transgender is “not a disorder”, that “everyone has the right to determine their own gender, and that the WMA rejects “coercive treatment or forced behavior modification.”

Furthermore the WMA agreed that "every effort" should be undertaken to make available "individualized, multi-professional, interdisciplinary and affordable transgender healthcare."

The guidelines were proposed by the German Medical Association, which said they acknowledged the inequities faced by the transgender community and the crucial role played by physicians in advising transgender people and their families about treatment.

Delegates said they were aware of the cultural sensitivities in some parts of the world about this issue, but also said it was important for the WMA to stress that cultural, political or religious considerations must not take precedence over the rights, health and well-being of transgender people.

Vanessa Baird, co-editor of the New Internationalist. has created a video intended to promote that magazine's October issue. I decided to bogart it for my own purposes, because the video provides a fairly good summary of where the transgender community stands at this particular time.

It has been ten whole days since I wrote about the murder of a trans woman of color.

The respite couldn't last.

In the early evening on Thursday Zella Ziona, 21, was walking in an alleyway between two shopping centers in Montgomery Village, Maryland when she was surrounded by four or five teenagers. According to a witness, one of the youths pulled out a gun and shot Ziona in the head.

Zella was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Police initially identified the victim as a woman, but by later in the evening insisted on misgendering and dead-naming her. As usual, the media followed suit.

An impromptu vigil took place last night.

The Journal of the American Medical Association's online Medical column for October is Laura Buchholz' Transgender Care Moves Into the Mainstream

Despite the name of the article, Ms Buchholz highlights the difficulty transgender people have in obtaining competent medical care.

Trans people have been excluded from medical care, and their issues have been deemed not medical and not important.

--Joseph Freund, MD, a primary care physician at Franklin Family Practice in Des Moines, Iowa

Dr Freund recounted his struggles with insurance companies over reimbursement for transgender care, yet another barrier that transgender patients encounter.

The Edmonton Catholic School District has been trying to come up with a policy about transgender students, as required by the Alberta Ministry of Education.

The result, as you might imagine, has been a lot of screaming and shouting.

Lead transphobe has been Trustee Larry Kowalczyk. Back in September his statement about the possibility of a policy was:

I see that as a mental disorder, my faith sees it as a mental disorder.

My stand is with that of the church. God has not made a mistake in the gender of me, or you, or anyone else.

--Kowalczyk

In the earlier interview, he compared transgender people to those suffering from schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.

Township High School School District 211 in Palatine, iL has a transgender student. In 2014, the girl was allowed to play sports, but has been forced to change in a separate room located a long way away from the gym.

The ACLU assisted the student to file a complaint with the DOE, calling the district's stance "blatant discrimination, no matter how the district tries to couch it."

We're talking about somebody who is being denied fair and equal treatment as compared to the other students, only because she is transgender.

--John Knight, ACLU of Illinois

Federal officials responded to the complaint, which was filed about a year and a half ago with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, by saying the school is in violation of the Title IX gender equality law, according to the ACLU and district officials. A representative of the civil rights office could not be reached Monday.

Following precedent in two similar cases in California, DOE's Office of Civil Rights informed District 211 in a not-yet-public decision that depriving the student of equal access to facilities violates Title IX’s sex nondiscrimination protections, calling such treatment "inadequate and discriminatory."