Perish the thought these kids should have the same teenage life as  normborns, that would negate so many of the womyn born womyn gender feminist arguments.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/09/transsexual-kids-wait-for-then-delay-puberty-to-treat.html

Booster Shots

ODDITIES, MUSINGS AND NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF HEALTH

Treating transsexual kids: wait for, then delay puberty to treat

September 17, 2009 1:33 pm

The nation’s oldest and largest organization of endocrinologists has recommended that physicians treating children with gender identity disorder intervene to delay puberty at its first signs and wait until a child is at least 16 before offering hormonal therapy that would begin his or her gender transition.

In a new clinical practice guideline unveiled today, the Endocrine Society < http://www.endo-society.org/ > tackled some of the most ethically sensitive decisions endocrinologists face in the treatment of those who are born of one gender, but identify themselves strongly with the opposite gender. Indeed, the society urges that its physicians rely on a mental health professional to render a diagnosis of transsexualism, which is termed gender identity disorder in the psychiatric profession’s current diagnostic manual.

The new practice guidelines also recommend that no action be taken to intervene in the hormonal balance of a young child who identifies as the opposite gender of his or her birth. “A diagnosis of transsexualism in a child who has not gone through puberty cannot be made with certainty,” the group concluded.

At the first signs of puberty, however, the new guidelines recommend that physicians use hormone therapy strictly for the purpose of suppressing pubertal changes until an adolescent has reached the age of 16. At that point, the group concluded, “cross-sex hormones may be given.”

Those guidelines come at a time when many of those with “gender dysphoria”–persistent distress over one’s gender at birth–are asking to begin gender reassignment hormonal therapy and/or surgery at an earlier and earlier age. While surgeons have been reluctant to do gender reassignment surgery on a patient under 18, endocrinologists often face pressure from would-be transsexuals to offer earlier, interim treatment. The new guidelines are likely to set a standard that many endocrinologists will follow in such cases.

“Transsexual persons experiencing the confusion and stress associated with feeling ‘trapped’ in the wrong body look to endocrinologists for treatment that can bring relief and resolution to their profound discomfort,” said Dr. Wylie Hembree, a Columbia University endocrinologist who chaired the committee drafting the guidelines. The new guidelines, he added in a news release, are intended to provide “science-based recommendations” for practitioners to provide “safe and effective treatment” to those diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder.

The transgender community has advocated for changes < http://www.gidreform.org/dsm5.html > in the psychiatry’s approach to the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which is now being revisited in drafting sessions for the profession’s diagnostic manual. Among the transgender community’s concerns: that current definitions of Gender Identity Disorder lump the diagnosis under “paraphilias,” contribute to stigmatization, and fail to support the goals of gender transition and access to surgical and hormonal therapies in treatment of GID.

The new practice guidelines are published in the September issue of the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism < http://jcem.endojournals.org/ >. For a somewhat dated discussion of the ethical issues involved, check out this < http://www.antijen.org/Articles/Ina/Ina.html > article from Salon. And if you feel you were born into a body of the wrong gender, here< http://www.glnh.org/index2.html >‘s a place to seek help and support.

– Melissa Healy

Don’t you just love the misogynistic experts?  Why fucking hormone blockers instead of actual hormones and castration so that these little transkids actually get to grow-up and enter female puberty at the same time as their assigned female at birth peers?

Oh I freaking forgot Dr. Richard Green and the mind fucking reaparative therapists think there is still a chance to torture these kids into being normal cis-sexual/cis-genders.  So cave to the Taliban Christers and other religionists rather than do the right thing.

Kids know before they can articulate it, the idea of waiting until 16 is cruelty and ignorance at best.  Giving them hormone blockers instead of actual hormones reflects nothing more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/hormone-blockers-could-be-offered-to-under16s-seeking-sex-change-1790451.html

Hormone ‘blockers’ could be offered to under-16s seeking sex change

By Victoria Richards

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Sex-change experts are considering reviews to current UK guidelines that could see treatment with “hormone blockers” extended to under-16s and transgender surgery to under-18s.

The moves, if approved, would be taken as a positive response to campaigning led by Kim Petras, currently the world’s youngest transsexual, who at 16 succeeded in lobbying the German government to allow her to undergo a sex change.

The British Society for Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes has said it is looking at its rules, after it was revealed that a 12-year-old British boy hopes to become the world’s youngest gender reassignment patient.

Born “Tim”, the German teen said her birth as a boy in Cologne in 1992 was an “accident of nature”. She won the right to become a woman last November.

But she is aware of how hard the fight for gender reassignment is. “I was bullied, especially by people who I didn’t know or from other schools. I had to fight to be myself for my entire life.”

However successful, her story is likely to be scant consolation for the two British children who were “outed” last week by their schools as suffering from “gender dysphoria” – feeling trapped in the wrong body.

One, aged 12, from West Sussex, attempted to make the transition from primary to secondary school while going from schoolboy to schoolgirl, before being recognised by former classmates.

Another, only nine years old, was presented to peers as a “new girl”, having returned to school after the holidays in girl’s uniform and with a long ponytail.

–

Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited

From Women’s E-News
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/4145/context/cover/

By Molly M. Ginty – WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)–The words rang like gunshots in many women’s ears.

“Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions,” President Obama told a joint session of Congress in a televised speech about health care reform on September 9.

His pledge is fueling the fight over women’s access to abortion under any form of government insurance that might survive lawmakers’ protracted and intense battles over health care reform.

Three days after Obama’s speech, tens of thousands of protestors swarmed the U.S. capital in a rally that organizers touted as the largest-ever outpouring of political conservatives. Many carried anti-choice placards and chanted slogans that blasted the inclusion of abortion services in the public plan.

Pro-choice activism is also revved up.

Last weekend, the New-York based Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health sent 18 doctors to Capitol Hill to talk to lawmakers about abortion’s prevalence and the need to cover it in a public insurance plan. One million U.S. women need abortions each year, and one-third require this procedure at some point in their lives, according to the New York-based Guttmacher Institute.

Via their Web sites, Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, both with large presences in Washington D.C., are enabling supporters to circulate petitions; to pen letters to the editors of local newspapers; and to lobby their Congressional representatives.

Eliminating Field of Battle

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) threatened to short-circuit the skirmish by eliminating the entire field of battle. On September 16, he introduced a spinoff of the Obama-favored plan that excludes a government program and the abortion politics that go along with it.

Pro-choice supporters argue that covering abortion is necessary to maintain women’s health and women’s rights and is already part of current government policy.

Many point to a July opinion poll by the Washington-based National Women’s Law Center, which indicated that 71 percent of voters favor including reproductive services in health care reform.

Abortion is permitted by law as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and is a standard part of insurance coverage in 80 percent of employer-sponsored health plans, according to the Web site Polifact.com.

Under the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, laid-off workers can remain on their former employer’s group health plans for 18 months. Federal funding supports COBRA coverage, including abortion services.

“When the President made this announcement, he traded many women’s futures away,” said Stephanie Poggi, executive director of the Boston-based National Network of Abortion Funds. “The poorest women must scrape and skimp–forgoing food, electricity and even risking eviction by delaying rent–to afford abortion services. And now, the President is recommending that we expand this inequality to millions more women.”

Under the 1976 Hyde Amendment, Medicaid (the government’s health plan for low-income Americans) does not pay for elective abortions, but does pay for them in the cases of rape, incest and medical concerns that threaten the mother’s life.

Changing the Hyde Amendment

“We would love it if all poor women were able to get abortions, which would require repealing or changing the Hyde Amendment,” said Dr. Suzanne Poppema, chair of the board for Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. “That’s one of pro-choice advocates’ longer-term goals. But right now, we’re fighting to ensure that the reform bill provides access for women’s health care and that it does not roll back coverage for the reproductive health services that many women already have.”

In his speech, Obama noted that private insurance is three times as expensive as employer-sponsored insurance; that premiums have gone up three times faster than wages; and that 14,000 Americans lose the coverage they need every day due to unemployment and rising health care costs.

To address these problems, Obama recommends creating a public insurance plan that would coexist and compete with private insurers, in the same way that public colleges and universities share their market with private schools.

Americans who could not afford his plan would get need-based tax credits so they could buy coverage.

Obama’s proposal is outlined in H.R. 3200 (America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009)–one of a dozen health-reform proposals now before Congress, and the one with the most support. Legislators may vote on the bill this month.

Though Obama appeared in his speech to soften a long-held pro-choice position, reproductive rights activists are encouraged by the August amendment proposed by Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.). This legislation, absorbed into the official text of H.R. 3200, protects public-option abortion services by cordoning them off from federal funding.

Instead of coming from tax dollars, the money would come from the premiums that individuals pay to join the public plan.

Striking Common Ground

In another pro-choice feature, the amendment says that elective abortion in the public plan could be funded at the discretion of the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Current Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has a long-standing pro-choice record.

But the amendment strikes common ground by requiring every state to offer two types of public plans: one that provides abortion coverage and one that does not.

Since Capps introduced her amendment, anti-choice groups have ramped up their media activism.

The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group based in Washington, D.C., ran ads in five states. The ad showed a couple sitting at a kitchen table and grimly commiserating over the man’s inability to get needed surgery through his public Medicare plan while “Planned Parenthood is included in the government-run health plan and spending tax dollars on abortions.”

The Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-choice female candidates and is headquartered in Arlington, Va., launched ads in Nevada, home of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, attacking him for “pushing a massive government-run health care system requiring taxpayer funding for abortions.”

Students for Life of America, also in Arlington, asked high school students to wear white T-shirts with the slogan “Abortion is not health care,” while Priests for Life, based in New York, asked people to “pray that the current health care reform bills being debated in Congress do not result in an expansion of abortion.”

Taking effect in 2013 and costing $900 billion over 10 years, H.R. 3200 would necessitate that every citizen carry health insurance and would require companies to cover their employees. The bill would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions and prohibit them from dropping policyholders when they became ill.

The bill would also create an insurance exchange in which individuals and businesses can shop for coverage at competitive prices.

“The exchange would work much like Orbitz or other travel Web sites,” said Tait Sye, a spokesperson for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which is the largest provider of abortion services in the United States. “People shopping for insurance would be able to review the listings in the exchange and then approach representatives from private insurers or the public plan to get details about signing up.”

Molly M. Ginty is a freelance writer based in New York City

We have about twice the number of people on the planet as it can sustain without going into a systems crash.

Rather than celebrate big families we should be celebrating those who opt to remain child free.

For one we should start transkids on hormones prior to their entering puberty.  No sperm storing, no egg harvesting.

For that matter no artificial insemination or artificial conception.  If you are infertile you should be rewarded for remaining child free.  Perhaps an animal adoption and free veterinary care.  I may be snarky but my cats are all sterile and will not reproduce.

As a reward for transkids not reproducing they should get all their SRS expenses paid by the government as well as having all their transhealth care needs met.  Including extra income and pensions for those whose families throw them out.

No more pregnant F to Ms.  Once was a cool trick, the second time the whole routine jumped the shark and now it has turned into an act of egocentric fuckwittery.

But I’m nothing if not egalitarian.

I would exted the idea of special rewards to anyone willing to undergo any form of permanent sterilization although not any sort of reversible one.

Reward gay and lesbian people who remain non-reproducers as well as anyone naturally sterile.

Make infertility into a socially recognized blessing to be celebrated rather than something shameful.

Deny tax exemption to any religious organization that is anti-birth control or anti-abortion.

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/study-45000-americans-die-each-year-for-lack-of-insurance/

“Britain – Boy, 12, has sex swap during summer holidays… [2009-09-18 Daily Mail]“

When ever I read articles form the so called British press I get the feeling they write according to the Benny Hill wink, wink, nudge, nudge,  Style Book.

Not that the American Press, especially what with so much of it being owned by that Nazi Aussie, Murdock is a whole lot better.

But WTF?  “Sex-swap!” WTF,WTF?

Many, perhaps most transkids who come out young either as children or young adult already are so in-between the sexes that to call them “boys” or “girls” as the case may be, prior to their transitioning makes a mockery of the highly regarded laws of gender not to mention the standards of sex assigning.

Transkids, especially those who transition young are often the ones who make the case for there being an intersex component to the condition of transsexualism.  As Sarah Seton pointed out in her book, these kids are already physically feminine or masculine as the case may be, but from here forward I am going to stick with T to F because this is the area I have studied most.

PAIS, partial androgen insensitivity rather than the complete which produced a girl lacking the internal female organs is quite probably common in the obvious transkids who are feminine from infancy and come out young.  This is often accompanied with hypogonadism i.e. very under developed genitals.

So what we are talking about is more a matter of reassigning an intersex kid from male to female than a “sex-swap”.

But the very term “sex-swap” is so freaking tabloid.  Like I went out and found a T to M person  and we traded sexes.  Get freaking real.

Call these morons on their wink, wink, nudge, nudge Style Book.  Language can be a tool for oppression or liberation and as long as these fuck control that language kids like this child are more likely to get stuck in reparative therapy for a few years of abuse and torture than get the treatment that they need>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1214314/Boy-12-sex-swap-summer-holidays.html

Boy, 12, has sex swap during summer holidays

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

18th September 2009

A 12-year-old boy is preparing to have a sex change operation after returning to school following the summer break as a girl, it was revealed today.

The boy, who has now had his name changed to a girl’s by deed poll, arrived at school in a dress and pigtails.

Teachers had to call an emergency assembly to explain the transformation to confused pupils and tell them they must now treat the child as a girl.

‘We are committed to ensuring the best for our child. We are working with other agencies to ensure our child’s welfare is protected,’ his mother told the Sun.

But other parents reacted angrily and said the head teacher should have warned them before the school’s announcement to their children.

‘They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents,’ one mother said.

‘Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we’d had a chance to be involved.’

Another added: ‘This girl, as she now is, has been through hell because of how this has been handled.’

They claimed the decision not to inform them in advance had opened up the child to bullying and taunts because other children do not understand.

It had been hoped the transformation might go unnoticed because the initial sex swap was done as the child moved from primary to secondary school.

But former classmates realised and spread the news, prompting taunts from other pupils who asked: ‘Are you gay?’

Teachers then decided to step in and warn them of disciplinary action if they did not treat him as a girl.

During the special assembly, some confused pupils burst into tears. The sex swap child was not there and has not been at school since the announcement was made.

His family have also been threatened and are now under police protection. The school insist the child will return to class but not while there is any risk to his safety.

His primary school head teacher is said to have insisted he was treated as a boy despite his girlish behaviour.

He wore a bikini for swimming lessons, had Barbie towels, put ribbons in his hair and rode a pink scooter, according to The Sun.

Experts have said it is highly unusual for a child of that age to be sure about such a huge change in their lives.

The boy, who has for years told his friends he wants to be a girl, could now become the world’s youngest sex change patient.

After taking the decision to return to school as a girl, he is preparing for hormone treatment and ultimately surgery.

Under UK law, this cannot happen until he has passed puberty.

German Kim Petras became the world’s youngest transsexual at 16 earlier this year, changing her name from Tim.

Over the last 10-15 years of talking with transsexual and transgender people I have witness a surreal clinging to a chimera called “identity”

I say chimera because way to often I am called upon to relate to and give credence to an “identity” claimed that is devoid of the action that would give that claim of identity substance.

In what seems like a lifetime ago on a stage at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood I saw Tim Curry and cast sing “Don’t Dream It, Be It”.  a song that capture a multitude of different imagined realities in 1974.

A very existential message of of being through doing.  In those days it often meant if you were gay or lesbian live it out and proudly.

It was a show that made me a tad uncomfortable on one level yet on another level I had stopped dreaming about being and had become through doing.

Now some 35 years later, we have endured the crushing of the freedom of those days under the jack boots of Reaganism, Thatcherism and Taliban like religious thugs who would love nothing more than to shove LGBT/T folks back into the closet or worse with persecution and deny women the right to have agency and control of their own bodies when it comes to reproductive rights.

Lately because I have declared a personal end to calling people with transgenderism nasty names and have declared support for their civil rights many assume I also buy their ideology of gender and identity.

Honestly I don’t.  I won’t and trying to sell it to me will only piss me off.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about your identity.  It is your choosing to deal with your transgenderism or transsexualism that I care about and that I am willing to defend.  Not your right to claim it as an “identity” but rather your right to live it.

You see I’m not real big on thought crimes.  I’m an atheist so the idea of  “thinking about a sin is the same as committing the sin” is a concept I find entirely alien.

From my point of view if you say you are transsexual you take steps to change your sex.  Now I realize the hard fact of economics creating gaps in the bridge from one place to the other but you proceed in that direction to the best of your ability.  If you claim to be transgender you live 24/7365 and you also take the steps that would make revoking that commitment difficult.  Including most of the same steps people who get SRS take.

The idea that you are because you claim that as an identity comes off as a sort of weird post-modern idea tied in with Gender Studies and Queer Studies, an identity divorced from the concreteness of reality.  An extension perhaps of Judy Butler by someone who is overly enchanted with Judy’s fractured syntax and gibberish of coined words.

One of the main aspects of the fighting over these last few years has been regarding the primacy of “identity” over the reality of actions and real physical changes of sex under taken by people with transsexualism

Post-SRS people have an investment in the irreversibility of their actions.  It is the sort of investment one finds in people who have done acts of courage or great cost and the resentment that is felt towards others who claim to have done the same or be the same while not having paid the same price.

None of this has to do with calling names or human rights.  Indeed we would all be better off is such discussions were to retreat to the coffehouses, the bars, the pot smoke filled rooms best suited to discussions of philosophy.

After all it’s about humanity not ideology.

From Women’s E-News
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/4142

By Frederick Clarkson – WeNews commentator

Editor’s Note: The following is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women’s Enews.

(WOMENSENEWS)–Rev. Steven L. Anderson is the pastor of the man who made national news for carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at an August protest outside a hall where President Barack Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Phoenix.

Anderson made news himself when it turned out during what is termed an “imprecatory prayer,” he had, the night before, repeatedly called on God to kill the president because, he believes that among other things, Obama is leading the nation away from God’s laws; has “wrought lewdness in America” and especially, because by virtue of being prochoice, Obama is a “murderer.”

Nationally known anti-abortion militant Neal Horsley, of Carrollton, Georgia, thinks Anderson has the right idea — except that he thinks Christians shouldn’t wait for God to do the job.

On a new Web site called ImprecatoryPrayer.com, apparently launched last week, he links to the audio of the inflammatory sermon on Anderson’s Web site, encourages readers to click on it. “Listen here, to Pastor Steven Anderson,” Horsley writes, “as he tells people what God wants His people to do about Barack O’Bama (sic).”

“Don’t Listen To This,” Horsley warns, “Unless You Want To Do the Will of God.”

Anderson doesn’t actually exhort people to assassinate the president, although he may come close. But no matter.

Horsley is busy updating the tactics of threat and intimidation he has used for more than a decade against abortion providers, pro-choice activists, presidents and judges.

This time he’s featuring Obama, and possibly, in his sense of timing, exploiting the political hailstorm over health care reform.

Horsley is nothing if not a showman and he knows an opportunity when he sees one. Thanks in part (but not only) to Anderson, imprecatory prayer, calling on God to smite his enemies, as King David did in the Bible, has become fashionable on the far religious right–and the national media is suddenly paying attention.

Horsley is requesting people to send him video or audio imprecations against the president, or other of God’s enemies that he will place on his new Web site. “All you need to do,” he writes, “is speak the prayers into a microphone, or better yet, into a videocam recorder, and then send them to me…

“Be as specific as possible” he urges, “in defining who you believe God must destroy and as specific as possible in the means God should use in implementing that destruction.”

‘Destroying God’s Enemies’

He calls this a way of bringing “the power of God to bear on this present abomination of desolation, restoring God’s law by utterly destroying God’s enemies in our midst.”

Horsley has a long history of issuing threats that straddle the line of the law, in collaboration with the most militant elements of anti-abortionism, and generating enormous media attention, using the Internet as his soap box.

In the 1990s, Horsley launched his Web site “The Nuremberg Files,” in which he listed the names of abortion providers and others he deemed culpable in what he called the abortion holocaust. The names of those killed were crossed out; those wounded were grayed out.

Doctors who had been the subject of “UnWanted” posters in their areas, and who had been targeted by Horsley, sued to stop the threats and won a judgment of $107 million.

Horsley was ultimately required to take down the threatening material

Horsley next launched what he called the Live Web Cam Project, which received considerable national news coverage. This site featured thousands of photographs and some videos of patients, clinic workers and clinic defenders.

Apology for a Murder

In August, Horsley published an essay on his Web site that he describes as an “apology,” for Scott Roeder, the man accused of assassinating abortion provider George Tiller on May 31.

Horsley argues that “the pro-life movement incites people to kill abortionists because the pro-life leaders and the pro-life movement–all together–have been so utterly ineffectual as to leave no alternative to any person aroused by the specter of legalized abortion like Scott Roeder was aroused.” He calls the failure to stop abortion “the most powerful, driving force in the urge to assassinate abortionists today.” Horsley’s essay was promoted on Covenant News, which caters to militant antiabortion activism.

Horsley has long been involved in the antiabortion Army of God, and was featured in the 2001 HBO documentary “Soldiers in the Army of God.” In the film, Horsley recalled his reaction to the assassination of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian in Amherst, N.Y. Pointing to Slepian’s crossed-out name on his computer screen, he said, “When I drew a line through his name, I said ‘See, I told ya. There’s another one. How many more is it gonna take?’”

“The evidence is at hand,” Horsley declared. “There are people out there who [will] go out and blow their brains out.”

Horsley’s new site seems to be in an early stage of development. If past is prologue, there is likely to be much more.

Frederick Clarkson has written about politics and religion for 25 years. He is the author of “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy;” and most recently, editor of “Dispatches from the Religious Left: the Future of Faith and Politics in America.”

From Alternet

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/reproductivejustice/142623/anti-choice_floridians_peddling_constitutional_amendment_to_criminalize_birth_control_pill_

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on September 14, 2009, Printed on September 17, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/142623/

This post originally appeared in PEEK.

Florida has done it again, folks.

Yes, the state that brought you Bush v. Gore, the sex offender colony under the bridge, and the shoot-first-ask-questions-later legislation known as the “Stand Your Ground Law” has another idea up its sleeve. And this one’s for the ladies.

Tampa Bay Online reports:

TALLAHASSEE – Anti-abortion conservatives are proposing a new constitutional amendment that critics claim would make it a crime to take birth control pills in Florida.

The “Personhood Amendment” that conservative activists are filing today in Tallahassee would add language to the state constitution that defines someone as a “person,” regardless of age or health status, “from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.”

This, of course, is just another twist on the conventional argument by anti-choice groups that birth control pills are basically murder weapons. “The pill will irritate the lining of the uterus so that the newly formed human being cannot attach to his/her mother’s womb and dies,” reads an explanation on the website of the American Life League, which is supporting similar efforts in other states. “This is called a chemical abortion.”

This is the same group that runs thepillkills.com, a site that “focuses on blood clots and other health risks that birth control pills pose to women.”

Even if these people manage to collect the 676,811 signatures they need to get by Feb. 1 in order for this idea to be considered by Florida residents, even anti-choice politicians seem to be a bit ambivalent about the idea of criminalizing birth control.

“Even candidates who call themselves ‘pro-life’ stopped short of fully embracing the ‘Personhood’ proposal,” according to Tampa Bay Online.

Attorney General Bill McCollum, presumptive Republican candidate for governor in 2010, said through spokeswoman Shannon Gravitte that he is firmly “pro-life” but would not comment “on hypothetical issues.” If the proposal wins enough petition signatures, she said, “voters will certainly know where General McCollum stands.”

In the U.S. Senate GOP primary, Gov. Charlie Crist said “no and no” when asked whether he knew of the proposal or would comment on it.

One person who did share her thoughts is Pat McEwen, a Palm Bay resident who is described as “one of two leaders of the loose collection of activists, collectively known as Personhood Florida.”

“In the original Florida Constitution in 1885, they gave Floridians the right to enjoy and defend life,” she said. “This amendment defends the unborn, and it also gives older people like me – a retired college professor – the right to make my own decisions and not have someone override it.”

Which is sort of funny, because that’s exactly the opposite of what this amendment would do for younger women who, you know, might actually get pregnant.

Read more about this here.

(H/T Jessica Valenti via Twitter.)

Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet’s Rights and Liberties and World Special Coverage.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/142623/

As I have been saying for a while now the murders of people with either transsexualism or transgenderism are disproportionately suffered by people in the lumpen prole class and more often by people of color than by white people.  Also with for the most part these crimes are suffered by our sisters and not by our brothers.

As unpopular as Monica Roberts is with some of us she has spoken the truth about how more attention is paid to the murders of sisters further up the economic chain who are also either white or Latina.

Damn I hate it when I have to give credit where credit is due to some one who has so pissed me off in the past.  But Ms. Roberts has been doing some powerful speaking truth to power lately.

From The Edge Boston

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=96405
by Michael K. Lavers
National News Editor
Wednesday Sep 16, 2009

Tyli’a “Na Na Boo” Mack’s murder late last month highlighted the problem of anti-transgender violence in the District of Columbia.    (Source:Metropolitan Police Department)

As local police to investigate Tyli’a “Na Na Boo” Mack’s murder, transgender activists and others in the District of Columbia continue to demand an end to anti-trans violence in the city.

An unknown assailant stabbed Mack to death and critically injured a friend on Q Street, NW, on Aug. 26. Mack’s mother joined members of Transgender Health Empowerment, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, DC Councilmember David Catania [I-At Large,] Gays & Lesbians Opposing Violence co-chair Chris Farris, DC Center executive director David Mariner and more than 200 others at a vigil two days later at the spot where the two women were attacked.

The Metropolitan Police Department continues to offer a reward of up to $25,000, but Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told EDGE she feels Mack’s death underscores the fact anti-trans violence remains a serious problem in the District.

“It is really, really clear to me, it’s really bad here,” Keisling said.

The MPD does not compile statistics of crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity, but the Web site Remembering Our Dead indicates at least half a dozen trans Washingtonians have been murdered over the last decade. These include Stephanie Thomas and Ukea Davis, who were shot to death on Aug. 12, 2002, while they sat in their car in a Southeast intersection. Antoine Jacobs shot and killed popular entertainer Bella Evangelista on Aug. 16, 2003. And an unknown assailant bludgeoned Tyra Henderson to death in Northwest in April, 2000.

Acting Lt. Brett Parsons, the MPD’s LGBT liaison, told EDGE the department has not seen an increase in anti-trans violence in the city, but he conceded transgender Washingtonians “tend to be a community at risk for victimization all the time-and that’s a sad statement.” There have been 96 murders in the District so far this year. This statistic represents a 26.7 percent decline in homicides compared to 2008, but Keisling maintains race and class remain a motivating factor behind the majority of anti-trans murders in Washington and elsewhere.

“The kind of trans people getting murdered are not white, middle-aged transsexual women like me,” she said. “It’s almost always lower income, trans-women of color. If you’re any of those things in the United States, you’re at the greatest risk of violence. It’s horrible.”

Ethan St. Pierre, a long-time trans activist who sits on the International Foundation for Gender Education’s Board of Directors, agreed. He noted he feels violence is one of the many forms of discrimination trans people of color in particular continue to face.

“If you are a trans person of color, you’re in deep shit,” St. Pierre said. “It’s not going to be easy to get a job. Racism is horrible. It still exists in society.”

He further categorized Mack’s death as horrific. St. Pierre added he feels educating trans people and others about the prevalence of anti-trans violence is one of what he described as many necessary steps to prevent it.

“Education is always so important, but there are just people out there who hate so much they don’t care,” he said. “If I knew the answer, believe me I would be shouting from the rooftops.”

Michael K. Lavers has written for the Advocate, the Fire Island News, the Village Voice, WNYC and other media outlets. He has also provided commentary on LGBT and other issues to the BBC and the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. He blogs at Boy in Bushwick [www.boyinbushwick.blogspot.com]

http://www.amazon.com/Transsexuality-Late-20th-Century-Wasnt/dp/1440455813/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253112602&sr=8-5

$3.99 on Amazon

By Sarah Seton MD, MA

A short book, actually an extended pamphlet in the traditional usage extends the argument for the innateness of transsexualism.

Sarah Seton is the pen name of Rachel Tortolini yet another example of a person with extraordinary gifts and a multitude of scholarly interests. A woman who by simply being extends the argument that many of us who manage to navigate our life passages through the obstacle course society sets out for those born some where in the gray area between the ideological black and white of sex and gender are by nature gifted.

As I said it is a short book, a feel positive about ourselves sort of work that does mention that some of have it much easier than other due to being really pretty.

I’m glad I added it to a recent Amazon new book purchase.

Legislators seek repeal of federal marriage law

From SF Gate:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/16/MN6M19NHTS.DTL

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

(09-16) 04:00 PDT Washington - — Impatient with the piecemeal approach to gay rights adopted by Democratic leaders, 90 House liberals, including Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee, introduced a bill Tuesday to repeal the central federal law governing same-sex couples.

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act denies federal marriage benefits to such couples, including Social Security, estate and other tax laws and spousal immigration rights.

Leading the effort is Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who said that when the law was signed by former President Bill Clinton 13 years ago, same-sex marriage was hypothetical, but today tens of thousands of gay and lesbian couples are legally married under the laws of four states.

The repeal, called the Respect for Marriage Act, would affect 18,000 same-sex couples married in California last year before voters approved Proposition 8, which overrode a state Supreme Court decision granting them marriage rights.

“Discrimination against committed couples and stable families is terrible federal policy,” Nadler said.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont now marry same-sex couples, and New Hampshire will begin doing so in January. Voters in Maine will decide in November whether to allow same-sex marriage there.

The Respect for Marriage Act would allow all legally married same-sex couples access to what advocates say are more than 1,000 marital benefits under federal law.

The law was passed during an election year when Clinton and many Democrats in Congress feared a voter backlash. Clinton issued a statement Tuesday saying, “the fabric of our country has changed, and so should this policy.”

President Obama has said he would sign a law repealing the act, but many activists have been disappointed that he has not moved to revoke the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays in the military, allowing gays and lesbians to be dismissed on his watch.

Notably absent from the repeal bill’s sponsors is Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., an openly gay member of Congress who usually takes the lead on gay rights legislation. Frank and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco prefer a more incremental approach that they believe has a better chance of enactment, including a hate crimes bill that passed the House in April and a bill to prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The repeal would not impose same-sex marriage on any state. But it would allow couples living in states that do not recognize their marriages access to federal benefits. Nadler said repeal would simply return jurisdiction over marriage law to the states where it has traditionally resided.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said the speaker wants the law repealed but is “focused on legislative items that we can enact into law now.”

In California, gay activists are split about whether to mount another ballot-box challenge to Prop. 8 in next year’s elections for governor and Congress, or in 2012, the next presidential election.

Chronicle staff writer Joe Garofoli contributed to this report. E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/16/MN6M19NHTS.DTL

From:

http://medindia.net/news/Gender-Row-Runner-Semenya-Placed-On-Suicide-Watch-58003-1.htm

South African runner Caster Semenya, who is at the center of a gender row, has been placed on suicide watch amid fears for her mental stability.

The Daily Star quoted officials as saying that psychologists are caring the 18-year-old round-the- clock after it was claimed tests had proved she was a hermaphrodite.

Leaked details of the probe by the ­International Association of ­Athletics Federations showed the 800m starlet had male and female sex organs – but no womb.

Lawmaker Butana Komphela, chair of South Africa’s sports committee, was quoted as saying: “She is like a raped person. She is afraid of herself and does not want anyone near her. If she commits suicide, it will be on all our heads. The best we can do is protect her and look out for her during this trying time.”

South African athletics officials confirmed Semenya is now receiving trauma counselling at the University of Pretoria.

Caster has not competed since the World Athletics Championships last month when the IAAF ordered gender tests on her amid claims she might be male.

Source-ANI

Posted on Advocate.com September 16, 2009

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2009/09/16/Ohio_House_Passes_Non-discrimination_Bill/

By Julie Bolcer

Perhaps I was too harsh calling Cassandra and others on classism for not realizing that often, but not always it is money and access to SRS that makes the difference.  I actually think there is something else that often makes the difference in those of us who overcome our situations and those who do not.

I was born poor.  My father was an iron worker, who I rarely saw during the first 10 years of my life.  My mother was at times on welfare and at other times worked for minimum wages.  But she read and imparted a love of books and knowledge to me.  She liked movies and taught me how films could broaden my range of understanding.

I was seriously oppressed by the abuse I endured in school and only sporadically studied yet I had an IQ that was way up there and an ability to make high enough grades to pass with minimal effort.  Instead I put my real efforts into self education of subjects not touched upon in school.

For me that meant philosophy, history and literature.

I was given a left world view by my mother and having a father with a union card.

As a working class kid with mediocre grades I wasn’t expected to go to college, but I won a scholarship to any New York State College I could get into.  I wasn’t planning on going and hadn’t applied yet they found a school to take me.  I deliberately failed out.

When I left home I didn’t wind up in the Tenderloin trap even though that would have been the logical place for a transkid like me to end up.  I saw what was going on there as sort of deadend and a trap, a ghetto that could contain our lives.

Instead I wound up in Berkeley across the Bay.  Close enough to SF to access the doctors and clinics but far enough away to not get caught up in the drag queen/transie tizzy.

I was gifted with an ordinary girl prettiness and enough charm that people bent over backwards wanting to help me.  As a friend reminds me we were the divas, back in the day.

At one point a bunch of us from the office (NTCU), the divas and scholars had a dinner at one sister’s house.  Over wine and much pot we got into a discussion about how easy it was for some of us and how hard it was for others.

The dumb luck of being born looking more like a girl than a boy played a big role in the days before widely available FFS, as did being smaller and having a naturally feminine build.  Being one of those that the doctors said were definitely “born that way”.  You see even in those days we had the stupid and ungainly and those of us who knew them could tell they often wanted SRS as badly as any of us even though it would not do much to change their lives the way it would change ours.

Some of us amassed our money through hard work and borrowing, others by the dumb luck of having someone pay the tab.

But one thing the divas had in common was that they tended to be smarter, quicker witted and prettier with reasonable organizational skills.  They succeeded because of the combination of these factors.  You see the same in some of the kids today.  Ariablue and Anonymous-T-Girl have that same sort of quickness and the intelligence that lets them succeed when others fail.

What really often makes “classic transsexual” different from “classic transgenders” is the ability to focus on attaining goals.  If we get knocked down we get up again and we don’t get side tracked.  Transgender politics are often an energy side track as are addictions, self -pity and the blaming of others. Not to mention the tendency for people with histories of childhood abuse to wind up in self destructive life patterns that include self-defeating behaviors and substance abuse.

Now this accounts for people who are probably really transsexual settling for living transgender lives.

Humanity doesn’t fit in rigid ideological boxes because individuality promotes a personal anarchy that defies such neat and simple boxes.  People fall into ruts, some societally manufactured and some the result of their own actions.

Perhaps those who would have SRS were the situation different are not transgender but are actually the perpetual pre-op that so many of them claim to be.  As an old hippie woman filled with questionable wisdom I am faced with the rhetorical question of: “Who am I to judge?”

On the other hand we do have the true transgenders or if you will the classic transgenders including the often self invented and reinvented Lowman/Prince, whose worst sin of all was his/her (depending on time frame) being taken as the authoritative expert.  There are people who do want to live as the gender not commonly associated with their present genitalia and to not get SRS.

As an old hippie, the adage of “Do as you must, just so long as you don’t feel the need to crap in the space where I live.” applies.  It isn’t any skin off my ass.  Hell I’ll even work to pass laws to guarantee your civil rights and protections just so long as you don’t try to define me.

After all queens have a long history as part of the hip and alternative bohemian culture.  If I’m going to throw rocks at people I’d rather throw them at misogynistic right wing supporters of religious fascist persuasions who oppress women, LGBT/T folks, people of color, the poor and working classes and do so indiscriminately.

They are my enemy not some other poor oppressed person muddling their way through a life made more difficult by laws and customs that also oppress me as a working class woman holding alternative social views.

I’ve been offering an alternative to wasting our energies fighting each other.  It isn’t coming from anything I am reading from either transgender activists or the classic transsexual/HBS faction.  Rather it is grounded in the idea of unifying to fight a common shared oppression that makes life harder for everyone who has to negotiate their paths through these various forms of oppressions.

When I look back at where I came from and what I lived through I can see that I succeeded due to being extraordinarily gifted, both physically and mentally.  Also I was extremely lucky and escaped situations that prove lethal to many.  Including not dying when I over dosed a couple of times and talking my way out of getting murdered a couple of times.

Luck too is a random extraordinary gift.

From Women’s E-News

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/4140

09/15/09
By Rebecca Harshbarger
WeNews correspondent

Rioters attacked and stripped about 20 Ugandan women who were wearing trousers last week during deadly riots in Kampala. The humiliations were part of a major confrontation between a traditional kingdom and President Yoweri Museveni’s government.

KAMPALA, Uganda (WOMENSENEWS)–Male rioters in a suburb here on September 11 attacked about 20 women wearing trousers.

The men, in Rubaga, a Kampala suburb, began detaining women during their protests, police spokeswoman Judith Nabakooba said at a press conference that took place that same day.

Women wearing skirts were allowed to pass, Nabakooba said, but those wearing trousers were forcibly undressed and left to walk home in their underwear.

The abuse occurred amid violence in the Ugandan capital, which officials say has claimed 14 lives and injured about 70.

Women’s rights advocate Jackie Asiimwe denounced the rioters for using the clash to abuse women and commit criminal acts in New Vision, a Kampala-based newspaper. “It is an invasion of women’s privacy,” the newspaper quoted Asiimwe as saying.

Trousers a Western Thing

“Traditionally, trousers are not acceptable and are a Western thing,” Rizzan Nassuna, a writer and human rights advocate in Kampala told Women’s eNews. “In (the kingdom of) Buganda, you are supposed to wear long skirts. This is coming out of a local belief that women are not supposed to wear trousers, but this has never been formalized or really come out in the open. They violated their dignity as women, making them walk naked, because they are wearing trousers.”

In neighboring Sudan, journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein was recently arrested for wearing trousers in Khartoum before being released on September 8.

Nassuna, however, said she doubted any direct connection between the two incidents. Instead, she viewed the attack on women wearing pants as a byproduct of a larger effort by protesters to assert the customs of their Buganda kingdom, a pre-colonial cultural and political structure that, with 5.5 million members in a country of 30.9 million, is the largest of Uganda’s traditional communities.

The riots were sparked on September 10 when the Ugandan government blocked an advance team for the Kabaka, the king of the Buganda kingdom, from entering Kayunga, a district in central Uganda.

The inspector general of police, Major General Kale Kayihura, said in a press conference on September 12 that the clashes spread from the city center to more than 11 suburbs of Kampala, a city of about 1.6 million people. He said that so far 14 people have died in the disturbances and more than 70 have been injured.

Kayihura said that the police had arrested 550 people since Thursday and charged 83. “Investigations are still on,” he said at the press conference.

Some Unnecessary Force Used

He said some police officers had used unnecessary force after they were instructed by their commanders and the Ugandan president to kill looters on sight. “I know that some police officers mistreated civilians during the riots,” said Kayihura. “This should stop immediately.”

Two minority ethnic groups in Kayunga, the Banyala and Baluuli, have been demanding this month to secede from the kingdom to establish cultural autonomy.

On September 9, President Yoweri Museveni, citing fears that the king’s visit might trigger violence in the district, said that the Kabaka could not visit Kayunga unless leaders from the minority groups, Buganda representatives and government officials met beforehand.

In the ensuing violent backlash to that decision, a mob burned two people to death in the suburb of Ndeeba on September 10. One woman was almost lynched by a mob in Namirembe, a neighborhood in Kampala, after youth declared her not to be a Muganda, or a member of the Baganda people. She was saved by police.

Justine Busulwa, an accountant who works in Kampala, gave Women’s eNews an account of barely surviving the riots.

She said in an interview that when news of the riots first broke last week her boss initially locked the office to protect the workers. She eventually left her office late and had a motorbike driver take her home to avoid using public transport. On her way home, she passed through Wandegaya, a Kampala neighborhood, and saw riots erupting.

A Ugandan soldier stopped her, but rather than protecting her, she said he asked her to lie down on the ground and began taunting her for not being a Muganda, or member of the kingdom, even though she belongs to that ethnic group.

Mob Begins Harassment

After begging for the release of her driver and herself, the soldier let her go. But then Busulwa said she was stopped by a mob that had formed in another section of the city, which began harassing her. She said she only got away by giving the rioters money.

“I was almost killed,” Busulwa said. “My son came home at midnight when the riots almost reached his university, too afraid to stay in his hostel.”

She waited until Sunday before entering town again.

The government called on the police, military and the Presidential Guard, raising hope that the violence would be curbed. But gunfire began in Kampala early on Friday, September 11. Public transport was paralyzed and rioters began humiliating women and attacking Indian merchants. Many Indian business owners closed their stores on that day to prevent attacks, and some Indian families took refuge at police stations.

Although the riots subsided somewhat on Saturday, gunshots were still audible throughout the city.

The crisis could be one of the biggest tests of Museveni’s career.

The president, an ethnic Ankole from southwestern Uganda, took power in 1986 and is up for re-election in 2011.

Although praised initially for his regime’s efforts to both empower women and reinstate the cultural kingdoms, his government has clashed with Buganda officials in recent years over land issues in Kampala, positioned at the heart of the traditional kingdom.

Museveni said he has tried to communicate with the Kabaka for the past two years, but the cultural leader refused to take his phone calls.

“Whenever any controversy came up, I would telephone His Highness, the Kabaka, but he would not answer my telephone as usual,” said Museveni, who took a hard line against rioters harassing and humiliating civilians, in a press statement. “The ring leaders are being hunted down and some have been arrested. Looters will be shot on sight, as will those who attack other civilians.”

Rebecca Harshbarger is a journalist based in Kampala, Uganda. You can visit her Web site at http://www.ugandabeat.wordpress.co

Statement of NOW Executive Vice President Bonnie Grabenhofer

September 15, 2009

The National Organization for Women is proud to stand with Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) in support of legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — a discriminatory law that is deceptive and harmful. Under DOMA, same-sex couples who legally wed are still denied federal marriage benefits, and other states may refuse to recognize their unions. NOW thanks Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) for cosponsoring this important legislation.

Loving couples and their families deserve the same recognition and legal protection as their neighbors. NOW applauds Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine for legalizing same-sex marriages.

Last month, the Obama Administration strongly denounced and defended DOMA, placing itself in a neutral position and forcing Congress to take up the fight.

Rep. Nadler is doing what the Obama administration has failed to do: take a hard line on DOMA and say discrimination and bigotry do not belong in the law. The right to marry has been recognized by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution. DOMA singles out a group of people and categorizes them as second-class citizens. NOW urges Congress to support this bill and remove one more barrier to fulfilling the promise of equality and justice for all.

Before Transgender became the dumping ground for all sorts of unrelated groups from panty wankers to “gender queers”, bois and “gender fucker”, an umbrella covering transsexuals, transgenders, transvestites and even occasionally intersex people it was a term with a specific meaning.

Now I know in the post-modern world the idea of words actually having such quaint traits as meaning is somewhat passe.  But the era of neo-con and neo-lib are over and I still remember that at one time Camile Paglia wrote a brilliant essay titled “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf”..

I am at heart an existentialist.  I believe in actions and that people who opt to do something about having been born with transsexualism or transgenderism must act in order to create themselves from that need.  Having the “identity” is in and of itself meaningless, in existential terms.  A thought crime perhaps in religions that impart guilt and shame for even feeling something but the unrealized act of being if left unacted upon in my world.

In the world of the 1970s transgender people committed themselves to the act of living full time as the gender not associated with their current sex.  Sometime due to economic considerations or other reasons.  If their circumstances changed and they got SRS they were no longer considered transgender.  But the important element was the commitment to full time and included everything except SRS including hormones and perhaps top surgery either mastectomy or implants.

Most of these people are not all that “gender transgressive.  Indeed they are as often committed to the “gender binary” as folks who get SRS.

Celebrate diversity rather than erase it.  The different groups associated with the various trans prefixed words have different cultures and identities.  Just as women born transsexual have moved to reclaim what is theirs perhaps it is time for transgender folks fitting the classic description to reclaim that label.

The Rights of Gay Employees

September 13, 2009
Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13sun2.html?tntemail1=y&_r=1&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print

It is remarkable how little progress gay people have made in securing the basic protection against discrimination on the job. In 29 states, it is still legal to fire workers for being gay. But momentum is building in Congress for the first federal law banning such discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Federal law has lagged behind the reality of American life. There are now openly gay members of Congress from between-the-coasts states like Colorado and Wisconsin. And according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights advocacy group, 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies have policies protecting gay employees from discrimination.

But gay rights advocates have for years faced opposition to a federal civil rights law from the religious right, and from parts of the business community, who argue that it would lead to a flood of litigation.

Bipartisan bills have been introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, modeled on existing civil rights laws that cover race, religion and sex. Unlike some past bills, these include gender identity, protecting transgender people from discrimination.

The bills were written to meet some of the concerns of opponents. The law would not apply to religious organizations, or to businesses with fewer than 15 employees. It would not allow for quotas or “disparate impact” lawsuits, which generally use statistical disparities to prove discrimination.

There is reason for cautious optimism. In 2007, the House passed a nondiscrimination law that did not cover transgender people. The current Congress is more Democratic, and even in the past two years, gay rights have made significant strides. As states and localities have passed antidiscrimination laws, it has been clear that they do not disrupt the workplace, and they have not resulted in an enormous number of lawsuits.

Supporters in the House think they have the votes. The biggest hurdle is likely to be winning the support of 60 senators, the de facto number now required for most legislation because of filibuster rules.

People who believe in workplace fairness should lobby senators to get on board. It is unacceptable that in a nation committed to equality people can still be fired in more than half the states for being gay. Congressional leaders should make passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act a top priority.