Women Born Transsexual

From Time Magazine: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/12/transgender-the-next-frontier-in-human-rights/

Being fired for “gender non-conformity” is a violation of the constitution, an important court recently found

By Adam Cohen
December 12, 2011

When Vandiver Elizabeth Glenn was fired from a state job in Georgia, she filed a lawsuit saying that she had been discriminated against for being transgender. Georgia civil rights laws do not cover transgender people, but a powerful federal court ruled last week that Glenn’s firing violated the U.S. Constitution. There was also a second major piece of transgender news last week: a new study shows that a growing number of major American companies are paying for their employees’ gender reassignment surgery. Taken together, the ruling and the study are strong indications that transgender rights are starting to enter the mainstream.

The backstory behind the court ruling: Glenn, an editor with the Georgia General Assembly, was born a biological male but long believed herself to be a woman. After being diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, an American Psychiatric Association-recognized condition, she began making the transition from male to female under medical supervision. Glenn was preparing for gender-reassignment surgery by living as a woman outside of work and presenting as a man at work. Eventually, she informed a colleague that she would soon begin coming to work as a woman, and when Glenn’s supervisor found out, he fired her.

From Bitch Magazine: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-99-what%E2%80%99s-funny-about-being-poor-roseanne-and-working-class-humor-feminism-TV

by GretchenSisson
December 14, 2011

Can being broke be funny, after all?

Monday’s post on 2 Broke Girls generated a lot of comments—from fans of the show who felt I was being too harsh, and from others who felt I was too forgiving of the show’s many flaws.  One commenter said, “You can’t expect a comedy to be so heavy and grounded in real life struggles.”

Well, yes. I can.

One of my favorite Friends episodes deals directly with socioeconomic difference within the friend group.  Yes, the friend group was all white people from middle to upper-middle class backgrounds who live in preposterously large apartments in Manhattan.  But back on season two, there was an episode that specifically explored the clash between the friends who had more disposable income—Monica, Ross, and Chandler—and the three who didn’t—Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey.  The friends with less money comically order side salads when they go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, protesting the suggestion to split the bill evenly.  Later, the three who can afford more buy concert tickets for all six of them to celebrate Ross’s birthday, and the others are made to feel like charity cases.  A lot of the humor is derived from the awkwardness of having to talk about money.  The line, “OK…. we can… talk about that” is delivered with the hesitancy of friends that know they’re venturing into a sensitive discussion, but are willing to address the issue openly.  The zinger, of course, is that Monica loses her job at the end of the episode, showing how tenuous financial stability can be.

While Friends may have made a brief acknowledgement of difference within the group, economic disadvantage was certainly never a recurring theme in the show.  I use it only as example to show that entertainment that, superficially, has nothing to do with class doesn’t need to ignore these issues.  Roseanne, though, was about finding the humor in the hardship.  And there was no one better at it.

Roseanne never shied away from real issues families face: social class, of course, but also gay family members, working conditions and job insecurity, birth control and unplanned pregnancy, divorce, domestic violence, mental illness, abortion, and alcoholism.  In fact, not only did it not shy away from these issues, but it embraced them as critical to the show’s comedy and the “working-class domestic goddess” persona of the title character.

Continue reading at:    http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-99-what%E2%80%99s-funny-about-being-poor-roseanne-and-working-class-humor-feminism-TV

From Common Dreams:   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/17-1

by Michael Winship
Published on Saturday, December 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Have you heard about the great brown cloud? No, it’s not a new nickname for Donald Trump (his cloud is more an intergalactic nimbus of Aqua Velva and Tang), or the ominous menace in a new Stephen King novel. It’s almost as nasty, though.

The Atmospheric Brown Cloud, formerly known as the Asian Brown Cloud, is a mass of air pollution hovering over northern India along the southern Himalayas and down across Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. The cloud began growing shortly after World War II, a smoggy mass of soot and sulfates from diesel emissions, wood fires and other burning stuff that’s almost two miles thick.

A new study by scientists from a number of research organizations – including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – finds that the cloud’s pollutants are making cyclones in the Arabian Sea more intense.

This is a very big deal, because, as Dean Kuipers writes in The Los Angeles Times, “After the apparent recent increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, including the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, climate watchers everywhere have speculated whether these storms were made stronger by industrial or man-made emissions. This is reportedly the first study to indicate that human activity may, in fact, affect large storms.”

Wind shear turbulence can help break up cyclones and keep them from becoming bigger storm systems. But shade created by the great brown cloud lowers water temperature, which in turn cuts down wind shear, allowing more powerful storms to form. Since 1998, according to NOAA, there have been five storms in the region with winds greater than 120 miles per hour – killing more than 3500 people and generating $6.5 billion worth of damage.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/17-1

From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/18/vaclav-havel-dies

Dissident playwright who led velvet revolution and became first post-communist Czechoslovakian president dies