Today a friend of mine told me that the University where she works is going to provide a health care policy for her that covers SRS.

This is common decency and has been something transsexual folks have fought for years to get covered.

Sex Reassignment Surgery isn’t implants and it isn’t facial surgery, things that can honestly be classified as cosmetic.  (Although the cosmetic nature of reconstructive surgery shouldn’t automatically preclude coverage.) It is about changing one’s sex based on the one universal standard used in determining if one is male or female, the visible genitalia that are between a person’s legs.

That thing the Transgender Borg claim is really trivial.

Be that as it may.  The fact that more and more corporations as well as state and local governments are finally adding coverage of SRS to their health plans after years of denying coverage based on the the idea of SRS being experimental or a pre-existing condition.

Thanks To President Obama’s Health Care Reform the pre-existing condition clause goes away.

That right there should be reason enough for all TS people to support the Democrats.

But there is a real shit storm looming.

This whole objection to abortion, contraception and women’s health care coverage is a huge bomb sitting in the room.

We know the Republican and the pseudo-Christian Dominionists hate women.  Look at the lengths they are going to to totally fuck women over.

They think women should be subservient, paid less for equal work, and denied opportunities.  They are using their pseudo-Christianity and self-righteousness like a club, depending on liberals to be nice and polite, to not really fight back and certainly not to put an end to the ultra right wing “Christian” bullshit.

Look around.  How many hospitals have the name of a saint in your city, how many actually have the name of a church or religious organization?

They get money from the government, your tax dollars and my tax dollars yet they get to decide which service they will provide and to whom.  They get to discriminate based on the “sacredness of their religion”.

It is time to demand America start acting like it claims to be in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Pledge.  I want to see my country live up to its ideals of liberty and justice.  I want equal treatment for all and equal opportunity.

Equality is a birthright it shouldn’t require wealth to have.  Health care should be guaranteed and not a privilege reserved for rich white men.

Get the government out of the business of controlling our sex parts and back to preventing corporate criminals from destroying the nation and its people.

Oh yeah… If religious organizations do not want to provide health care and health insurance coverage to all their employees and include stuff like birth control perhaps it is time to have the government take control of those businesses and provide the treatments the churches find repugnant.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-cho/am-i-ugly-videos_b_1300411.html

Margaret Cho
02/27/2012

You’re not ugly.

Not in the least, so don’t make those videos. Take them down if they are up. You don’t need people to tell you how beautiful you are on there. You don’t need to put yourself in the position to be judged that way. You are better than that, and you deserve the very best in life. If I could come through this screen and tell you and show you and bolster you and buoy you up and raise you high above all the bad sh*t you are going through, so that your spirit is free and you feel like you are flying, I would. I’d give anything if I could find a way to show you how lovely and perfect you are. If you’d believe me when I say that you are amazing, that you are the only you in the world, and that that makes you special and precious and holy, truly one of a kind, it would make me the happiest.

I thought I was so ugly for so long, and I wasted so much of my life on this dumb notion. I punished myself and avoided my reflection in mirrors and any windows. I would see myself reflected back, and I would look away, trying to pretend I didn’t exist, because I hated myself so much. I hated the way I looked, and it started early on. My father found a school project from first grade where I had written on a photo of myself that I looked like a flat-faced mummy. Firstly, how does a kid that young know what a flat-faced mummy is? Secondly, I cry at my own self-judgement, and thirdly, I was such a cute kid. Imagine my face, and then miniaturize it in your mind until the age of 6. I know, f***ing adorable.

One day I looked at myself and thought: Sh*t, this is it. This is what I look like. No amount of self-hatred is going to change my appearance. I am who I am. I am stuck with this, and I have to love it, or else I am going to die early from my own suffering and idea that I got shortchanged in the looks department.

Why go through life feeling cheated? It does nothing but make you bitter. I don’t want to be bitter. I want to be better. I want you to be better. I don’t want you to waste all those years like I did. I didn’t get to the point of feeling really good about myself until my 40s. That was pretty much 40 years of uninterrupted self-loathing that I had no need for. I never got to enjoy my youth; I was a gorgeous kid, and I missed it because I hated myself for no reason. I am kicking myself because I missed out on so much happiness because I had this idea that I was ugly that I couldn’t shake, partly because others — people who had their own issues with self-hatred and took it out on me — supported it. I don’t want you to miss out on a minute of your fantastic lives.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-cho/am-i-ugly-videos_b_1300411.html

From Metro Weekly:  http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/02/breaking-republican-sen-olympi.html

Posted by Chris Geidner
February 28, 2012

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) will not be seeking re-election, confirm Maine news outlets, meaning the loss of one of the most pro-LGBT equality members of the Senate Republican caucus — and a possible pick-up for the Democrats.

According to The Portland Press Herald, Snowe said in a statement that “this was not an easy decision. My husband and I are in good health… I have no doubt I would have won re-election.”

But, according to her statement, Snowe says she’s frustrated “that atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive.

“Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term. So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.”

Complete article at:  http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/02/breaking-republican-sen-olympi.html

From Color of Change:  http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/protectgirls/?source=coc_website

Please go Here and Sign the Petition:

XXL Magazine has published a video of a 45-year-old rapper encouraging teenage boys to force themselves on underage girls. The graphic monologue is disturbing. So is the willingness of Harris Publications, which owns XXL, to give this kind of dangerous rhetoric a platform.

Join us in calling on Harris Publications to fire XXL Editor-in-Chief Vanessa Satten, who presides over the workplace culture that allowed such a grave misstep. When we do, we’ll send a message to the entertainment media industry that we won’t be silent when it broadcasts commentary that promotes sexual violence against girls and women.

From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/corporate-immunity-supreme-court-shell-kiobel-human-rights_n_1306825.html

From The Nation:  http://www.thenation.com/article/166481/newts-last-prayer-christian-dominionists-go-gingrich

Four days after Newt Gingrich scrambled the Republican primary race with his surprise South Carolina win, a man named Dutch Sheets came forward to endorse the former House speaker, saying he was the only candidate with the “heart, experience, backbone, Constitutional brilliance and intellectual strength to defeat Obama and lead America back to greatness.” It was the kind of embrace that tends to make politicians skittish. After all, Sheets is a self-proclaimed apostle and a leading figure in a radical Christian movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which teaches that Christians must infiltrate and take control of government and other worldly institutions to pave the way for Jesus’ return. And that’s just the beginning. Sheets also believes, among other things, that his prayers led directly to Saddam Hussein’s capture and that Washington is controlled by “antichrist” forces. As for Barack Obama, Sheets insists that he is Muslim and that his presence in the Oval Office is a sign that God has “turned us over to our enemies” as part of his “judgment on America.” His ultimate goal is to “raise up” an army of “kingdom warriors that are ready to do whatever it takes to bring forth [God’s] kingdom rule in the earth.”

During the last presidential race, both Obama and John McCain struggled to tamp down furor over their links to pastors with inflammatory teachings, so you might expect that Gingrich would be scrambling to distance himself from Sheets. In fact, the opposite is true. Gingrich has appointed Sheets co-chair of his Faith Leaders Coalition, the group charged with rallying the faithful behind his candidacy, and has been appearing with Sheets’s fellow apostles at events across the country—part of wide-ranging effort to forge ties with Dominionist leaders who believe America was founded as a Christian nation and that our government should be rooted in biblical law.

Gingrich didn’t always ally himself so closely with spiritual warriors. While he made common cause with religious conservatives during his reign as Speaker of the House, he was better known for his small-government, anti-tax policies and his bare-knuckle political wrangling. But as he has laid the groundwork for his presidential campaign, Gingrich—a onetime Southern Baptist turned devoted Catholic—has forged deep inroads with conservative Christians, particularly those who want our government to be infused with Biblical principles. In his 2006 book, Rediscovering God In America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future, Gingrich made the case that our founders never intended church to be separated from state and that “the secular left has been inventing law and grotesquely distorting the Constitution” to push faith from government and the public square.

Continue reading at:  http://www.thenation.com/article/166481/newts-last-prayer-christian-dominionists-go-gingrich

From Think Progress:   http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/02/28/433972/americas-top-magazines-still-not-hiring-women/

By Alyssa Rosenberg
Feb 28, 2012

Vida, an organization devoted to examination and discussion of the roles women play in literature, has released its latest survey of the articles and reviews published by women in major magazines in 2011, and the results aren’t encouraging.

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

Complete article at:  http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/02/28/433972/americas-top-magazines-still-not-hiring-women/

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/28-8

by Jeff Biggers
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by Common Dreams

Besieged residents living amid the fallout of the mountaintop removal crisis in the central Appalachian coalfields are descending on Washington, DC today, as part of a new emergency health campaign calling for an immediate moratorium on “the toxic coal acquisition process that has been shown to be associated with heart-breaking birth defects, cardiac problems, lung problems and systemic failures in other human organs.”

Carting along reams of shocking peer-reviewed scientific studies that have been ignored by their own elected officials, the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) marks the launch of a weekly frontline citizens initiative in Washington, DC with national human rights and health organizations to prod the Obama administration to enact a moratorium on mountaintop removal operations until a federal study and long-awaited Congressional hearings are carried out on the spiraling mountaintop removal mining health care crisis.

One of the most unnecessary environmental and human rights violations in the nation, mountaintop removal mining provides less than 5-7 percent of national coal production, while detonating millions of pounds of daily explosives that have ruined historic communities and watersheds in West Virginia, Kentucky, southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee.

On the heels of a major new study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy on the “stalled out” environmental movement, which urged major funders and foundations to support similar community-based groups most impacted by environmental injustice, the ACHE campaign is also a breakthrough effort of frontline coalfield groups to “kick start” environmental and civil rights groups and ramp up the movement to abolish devastating mountaintop removal mining operations.

“My generation deserves a healthy life,” said Ferg Kincaid, a 16-year-old from Fayette County, West Virginia who was joined by former coal mining families and afflicted community members with the Christians for the Mountains, Coal River Mountain Watch, and Mountain Health & Heritage Association, among other groups. “As long as Mountaintop Removal is going on, we don’t even have a chance.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/28-8

From Natural Society:   http://naturalsociety.com/monsanto-pays-93-million-to-victims-in-settlement/

Cassandra Anderson
February 27, 2012

Monsanto tentatively agreed to a $93 million settlement with some residents of Nitro, West Virginia. Nitro is a small town that got its name from manufacturing explosives during WWI.  It was also the site of a Monsanto chemical plant that manufactured 2,4,5-T herbicide that was half of the Agent Orange recipe. Herbicide 2,4,5-T was contaminated with the caustic by-product dioxin. This settlement may open the floodgates to successfully suing Monsanto for its poison.

Nitro Settlement

Herbicide 2,4,5-T was phased out in the late 1970′s. Dioxin is the most dangerous chemical known and has a 100 year half-life when leached into soil or embedded in water systems. The Veteran’s Administration recognizes and pays out on Agent Orange injury claims that include cancer, birth defects in children of exposed victims, leukemia, liver disease, heart disease, Parkinson’s Disease, diabetes and chloracne.

Despite an explosion in the Nitro plant in 1949, not a single penny has been paid to residents of Nitro for dioxin injuries, per an attorney that worked on a previous dioxin case. After 7 years of litigation, and on the heels of the EPA releasing part of its dioxin assessment report,  Monsanto has made a tentative agreement to settle a class action suit with some Nitro residents for a total of $93 million.  Here are the proposed settlement figures:

• Medical Testing:  $21 Million
• Additional Screening:  $63 Million
• Cleanup of 4500 homes:  $9 Million

Bloomberg reports that this settlement will reduce Monsanto’s 2012 net income by 5 cents per share, but Monsanto may face additional lawsuits and fines. There are potentially 80,000 property damage claims alone that could cost Monsanto $3.9 billion in cleanup costs. Dioxin has contaminated soil and has been found in dust in residents’ homes at very high levels.

From Daily Kos:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/28/1069138/-TBagger-Doctor-Indicted-In-Largest-Medicare-Fraud-In-History

By Stu Hunter
Tue Feb 28, 2012

Justice Department officials announced that Dr. Jacques Roy was arrested in Texas and faces life in prison as well as fines of more than $250,000 if convicted.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Doctor Roy and his assistant, who was also charged, sent “recruiters” door-to-door in the Dallas area to get people to sign bogus medical forms that were then used in the alleged scam. The pair even went as far as to pay homeless people $50 each to sign the forms, according to the DOJ accusations.

Washington— Federal law enforcement officials announced what they called the largest healthcare fraud case in the nation’s history, indicting a Dallas area physician for allegedly bilking Medicare for nearly $375 million in billings for nonexistent home healthcare services.

Top Justice Department officials, working for several years to stem a rampant rise in healthcare fraud around the country, also revealed Tuesday that 78 home health agencies that were working with the physician, Dr. Jacques Roy, will be suspended from the Medicare program for up to 18 months.

FBI agents in Texas arrested Roy, of Rockwall, Texas, a physician for 28 years, and asked a federal judge in Dallas to keep him in custody until trial, citing his vast “bank accounts, a sailboat, vehicles and multiple pieces of property” as indications he may attempt to flee.

Facing life in prison and a $250,000 fine, as well as restitution of the vast sum of money he allegedly cost the federal government, Roy is to appear in court in Dallas later Tuesday.

Continue reading at:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/28/1069138/-TBagger-Doctor-Indicted-In-Largest-Medicare-Fraud-In-History

I often wonder why the Transgender Borg glommed onto the Gay and Lesbian Movement like a bunch of parasites looking for a host.

Opportunism I guess.

They grew out of the homophobic heterosexual transvestite movement.

But on top of that at least half of post-op transsexuals are straight and often homophobic while many of us who are lesbian or gay after SRS are just lesbian or gay without much need for the whole transgender schtick.

The entire Transgender Borg political correctness number has become not only tired but stupid and boring.

The homophobic attacks on the  Gay and Lesbian Movement regarding people prioritizing marriage equality disgust me.

It feels like a bunch of largely heterosexual people have invaded and colonized the Lesbian and Gay Movements.

It started with the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, which compromised and said post-op women who weren’t there to disturb could attend.

But that wasn’t good enough because according to the Transgender Borg if you claim to have a female identity you are female.  Even if you have a beard and fully functional penis and testicles.  Even if you have never taken a single hormone.

Now people who enjoy heterosexual privilege of marriages to women get to claim they are married “lesbians” even though I’ve never ever known a lesbian to have a penis that she couldn’t remove and put in a drawer.

I’ve watched the steadily moving political correctness crap about how I’m transgender because they decided to define me as transgender.  The angels on the head of a pin debates about the grammatically proper usage of transgender.

I’ve watched the banning of “tranny”, a word that was in use before I came out and which should probably be treated with the caution of usage that other in-group terms for members of various sub-cultures merit.  But I’ve also watched how this word is being used to savage anyone who hasn’t gotten the latest proper usage memo issued by the Transgender Borg Collective.

Oddly enough the Transgender Borg Collective is absolutely mute about the Porn Industry and its objectification, abuse and degradation of transgender women.  Where is the glitter bombing of transgender porn stars who lend their bodies and names to such forgettable trash as “Tranny Shemales in Heat”?  How come they aren’t glitter bombed?

Now I actually like Dan Savage. I don’t expect infallibility from him. But he sure as hell isn’t an enemy, unless you are a total homophobe.  When he is mistaken he corrects himself.  How many Reich wing Christo-Fascists apologize?  Nah… They double down and spew more hate.

Dan is a writer not some sort of great spiritual leader.  I happen to like his politics better than I like the politics of a lot of conservative transgender people.

I think the “It Gets Better” campaign is more positive than almost anything the Transgender Borg have ever come up with.

And I think he is 100% correct in what he said in an Advocate Interview last week.

You’ve said that the way trans activists have dealt with this issue, with the glitter bombs, is making people want to talk about trans issues less. Why do you say that?
You can go to Bilerico Project and read the “trans mafia” post. We are reaching a point where no one feels they can get it right. You talk to gay bloggers and they say they are just going to avoid the issue. Because if I get a noun wrong or a pronoun wrong, I am going to get called Hitler and glitter bombed and screamed at. I get letters about trans issues and I think maybe I shouldn’t write about that, maybe I should leave that alone. Is that what they want? I write the most widely read sex column in America, and if I stop writing about trans issues or addressing them or using letters where trans is raised for fear of getting it wrong, then that’s going to add to the trans invisibility problem.

You can’t win. That’s the problem with some of this. It’s not about people who are all on the same side honestly hashing shit out. It’s about a tiny sort of batshit wing of the movement blowing its stack and wanting to be the victimy-est victims in the room by claiming to be victimized by their allies. It’s a stupid waste of time. You know, somebody throws glitter at me and there are 900 people at the event. We still have a great event. We talk about trans issues. I answer some trans questions on top of everything, and all anybody comes away with is, you know, he got glitter bombed. [Laughs]

The whole Transgender Borg victimy-ist victim mob makes it hard at times for me to be bothered with even offering the support of writing letters or signing petitions.  I tend to avoid transgender specific demonstrations because of the claiming and demand I  embrace the “transgender identity” number.

Tonight I went through the links on my sidebar and deleted those blogs which haven had any new posts in several months.  I also got rid of some links to sites that haven’t had any new information in over six months.

This was not done out of malice.  I didn’t delete anyone’s blog because I was angry with them.

I simply wished to free up some space to possibly add other links.

If your blog has moved make a comment and tell me.  If it is simply on hiatus contact me when you start publishing again.

Suzan

Prescribed medications kill far more people each year than illegal drugs do.

It is impossible to over-dose on marijuana via any reasonable means of ingestion.

Why are drug companies allowed to kill upwards of a half million people a year while pot dealers get 20 years in prison?

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/27/sleeping-pills-increase-risk-death-study

Doctors call for rethink after large study finds prescribed pills could be associated with up to 500,000 extra deaths a year in US

Sarah Boseley, health editor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 February 2012

Doctors are calling for a rethink of the use of sleeping pills after a large study showed that the drugs carry a substantially increased risk of death for those who are prescribed them.

Commonly used sleeping pills, or “hypnotics”, such as temazepam and zolpidem, which is prescribed for short-term insomnia, are associated with more than a fourfold risk of death, according to the study published in the BMJ Open journal.

The study was carried out in the US, where up to 10% of the adult population took sleeping pills in 2010. The authors estimate that sleeping pills may have been associated with 320,000 to 507,000 extra deaths in the US that year.

The researchers, led by Daniel Kripke from the Scripps Clinic Viterbi Family Sleep Centre in La Jolla, California, studied the population served by the largest rural integrated healthcare system in America, in Pennsylvania.

Over a two-and-a-half-year period, they compared the death rates among more than 10,500 people who received sleeping pill prescriptions with those of more than 23,600 others – matched for age, state of health and other factors – who had not received such medication. The average age of the study group was 54.

The scientists in the study found that even at a relatively low rate of prescription – fewer than 18 doses a year – those who were given the pills had a 3.5 times greater risk of death compared with those who were not prescribed them. Individuals who were given pills more frequently – between 18 and 132 doses in a year – were more than four times more likely to be dead at the end of the study. The risk of death for those on the most pills – 132 doses or more a year – was more than five times that of those on no pills.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/27/sleeping-pills-increase-risk-death-study