Women Born Transsexual

Press Release from The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

April 25, 2012

Imagine being beaten up by your partner and trying to get help from a domestic violence shelter only to be turned away. Just because the person who hurt you is the same gender or because your orientation or gender presentation aren’t what they’re used to, you get no help and are put at risk of being hurt again. The fact is that LGBT people experience domestic violence at the same rate as the general population — 25-35% of anyone in a relationship runs the risk of violence.

But there’s a solution at hand. For the very first time, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) includes explicit language that ensures that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people can get the services they deserve at their local shelter or precinct. Contact your senator right nowand make sure they KEEP the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) protections in the bill when they vote on it this week.

Every victim of domestic violence deserves access to these life-saving protections and should not be afraid to ask for them. In a 2010 study, 96% of victim services and law enforcement agencies said that they did not have specific services for LGBT victims. And right now, only one in five survivors of same-gender sexual assault and intimate partner violence receive victim services.

We can change this. Act now to ensure that all survivors have services they can turn to when the worst happens.

From The Advocate: http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Washington_D_C_/Landmark_Employment_Ruling_Protects_Against_Anti_Transgender_Discrimination/

In a decision described by one legal expert as “game-changing,” the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that existing federal law protects transgender individuals from sex discrimination on the basis of their gender identity.

By Andrew Harmon
April 24, 2012

When Mia Macy was passed over for a position at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, that she said had been promised was hers, the Phoenix police detective’s investigative prowess kicked in.

More than a year ago, Macy, who is transgender, had contacted the director of an ATF crime laboratory in Walnut Creek, Calif. about an open position as a ballistics forensic technician. At the time, she presented herself as a man. But Macy soon informed the hiring agency that she was transitioning from male to female. Five days later, she was told the Walnut Creek position had been eliminated due to federal budget cuts.

Only it hadn’t. Someone else had been hired for the job, and Macy suspected she had been dropped from consideration after revealing she was transgender. She filed a complaint in June 2011 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that she was discriminated against on the basis of her gender identity.

Now, in a decision described by Macy’s attorney as “game-changing,” the EEOC has ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects transgender individuals from sex discrimination.

Title VII does not simply prohibit discrimination based on biological sex, the EEOC, an independent agency that enforces federal workplace discrimination laws, ruled in a 16-page decision issued April 20.

Rather, the law’s “protections sweep far broader than that, in part because the term ‘gender’ encompasses not only a person’s biological sex but also the cultural and social aspects associated with masculinity and femininity,” the commission ruled. Macy’s case has now been remanded for further investigation.

The EEOC decision confirms a trend in federal court decisions interpreting Title VII to protect transgender individuals from sex-based discrimination.

Continue reading at:  http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Washington_D_C_/Landmark_Employment_Ruling_Protects_Against_Anti_Transgender_Discrimination/

From The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:  http://thetaskforceblog.org/2012/04/23/new-study-finds-genderqueer-people-face-unique-patterns-of-abuse-and-discrimination/

Genderqueer people face distinct patterns of discrimination and violence according to a new study based on the dataset gathered for Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality.

The study, A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, was just published by the LGBTQ Policy Journal at the Harvard Kennedy School. It examines the experiences of genderqueer individuals and others who clearly identified as neither a man nor a woman.

A Gender Not Listed Here found that, when compared to transgender-identified respondents surveyed in Injustice at Every Turn, genderqueer respondents said they were more likely to be unemployed (76 percent vs. 56 percent); suffer physical assaults (32 percent vs. 25 percent); experience harassment by law enforcement (31 percent vs. 21 percent); and forgo healthcare treatment due to fear of discrimination (36 percent vs. 27 percent). There were other measures in which transgender respondents suffered higher levels of discrimination or harassment.

“These findings aren’t just groundbreaking for our academic understanding of the genderqueer experience,” says study author Jack Harrison of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Policy Institute. “As with Injustice at Every Turn, they are a call to action. No one should have to get up in the morning fearing they will be denied a job, abused by police, mistreated by a doctor or attacked while walking down the street simply because of their gender identity and expression. For genderqueer people, this is a harsh and unacceptable reality.”

Harrison authored A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey along with Jaime Grant of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and Jody L. Herman of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

The study also found that genderqueer individuals had distinct demographic characteristics. Compared to other Injustice at Every Turn respondents, they were more likely to be people of color (30 percent were people of color vs. 23 percent who were people of color in the overall sample) and young people (89 percent vs. 68 percent were under age 45). These demographic findings mark a crucial new development in the understanding of the way race and age affect gender identity/expression-based discrimination.

To download: A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey

To download: Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey

From Yes Magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/occupy-the-99-percent-spring-and-the-new-age-of-direct-action

Collaboration or cooptation? Expansion or dilution? Mark Engler on what to make of the 99% Spring.

From The New York Times:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/wendell-berry-american-hero/

By Mark Bittman
April 24, 2012

The sensibility of Wendell Berry, who is sometimes described as a modern day Thoreau but who I’d call the soul of the real food movement, leads people like me on a path to the door of the hillside house he shares with his wife, Tanya, outside of Port Royal, Ky. Everything is as the pilgrim would have it: Wendell (he’s a one-name icon, like Madonna, but probably in that respect only) is kind and welcoming, all smiles.

He quotes Pope (“Consult the genius of the place in all”), Spenser, Milton and Stegner, and answers every question patiently and articulately. He doesn’t patronize. We sit alone, uninterrupted through the morning, for two or three hours. Tanya is at church; when it’s time, he turns on the oven, as she requested before leaving. He seems positively yogic, or maybe it’s just this: How often do I sit in long, quiet conversation? Wendell has this effect.

Tanya returns around noon, and their daughter, Mary, arrives shortly thereafter. (Mary lives nearby, runs a winery, and is engaged in enough food and farm justice issues to impress Wendell Berry.) We eat. It’s all local, food they or their neighbors or friends or family have grown or raised, food that Tanya has cooked. There’s little fuss about any of that, only enjoyment and good eating. I note that I can’t stop devouring the corn bread, and that the potatoes have the kind of taste of the earth that floors you.

And we chat, and then Wendell takes me for a drive around the countryside he was born in and where he’s lived for most of his life. As he waves to just about every driver on the road, he explains that the land was once home to scores of tobacco farmers, and now has patches of forest, acres of commodity crops and farms where people do what the land tells them to. That’s one of Wendell’s recurring themes: Listen to the land.

Continue reading at:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/wendell-berry-american-hero/

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next

How a protest movement without a programme can confront a capitalist system that defies reform

Slavoj Žižek
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 April 2012

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

“They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, “capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next

From Truth Out:   http://truth-out.org/news/item/8687-why-you-should-still-care-about-chicagos-nato-summit

By Allison Kilkenny
Tuesday, 24 April 2012

When it was announced in March that the G-8 summit would not take place in Chicago as scheduled, but instead Camp David, Occupy Wall Street activists declared victory. After all, it was Occupy that had been making waves all fall, threatening to tarnish some of the glossiest public facades of the most powerful companies and figures in the world, and it is Occupy that is working to organize thousands of protesters expected to flood Chicago next month in anticipation of NATO and (at the time) G-8.

Suddenly, there was Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for President Obama’s National Security Council, admitting that the G-8 was high-tailing it from Chicago, Obama’s hometown, because of “political, economic and security issues.”

But real victory for activists was far from secure. The NATO and International Security Assistance Force meetings are still scheduled for the third week of May, and Occupy Chicago, along with other protest groups, are prepared to demonstrate despite Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s police state-esque transformation of the Chicago Police Department.

Even though the G-8 will now be held in a friendly-sounding bunker, the world should still watch Chicago this May, if only to bear witness to the clash between forces bearing wildly different styles of armor. Protesters will be armed with, well, nothing. Signs, maybe some banners. These activists will face a police force on steroids and a mayor wielding unprecedented levels of power, who essentially has full carte blanche to crush protest actions under the guise of maintaining security.

As of right now, it seems authorities in Chicago still expect a large turnout, despite the transfer of the G-8 summit. Chicago Police Department Chief Debra Kirby, head of the department’s international relations office, told the media that the removal of the G-8 from Chicago has done nothing to curb the interest from protesters intending to demonstrate during the summit weekend and police still expect large crowds of demonstrators to descend upon the city.

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/8687-why-you-should-still-care-about-chicagos-nato-summit

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/23/school-vouchers-religious-subversion

Under the pretext of parental ‘choice’, the right is using vouchers to establish religion in public education – with Romney’s blessing

Katherine Stewart
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012

“Choice” is such a nice word that everybody wants to have it on their side.

“Choice” is also a fuzzy word, which may be why Mitt Romney is willing to call himself a supporter of “school choice”. In the strange language of education politics, “choice” sometimes means advocating the partial privatization of school systems through charter schools – which Romney supports. It can also indicate support for voucher programs, which is another thing altogether – and which Romney is said also to support.

Charter schools are constrained by the same laws and policies that, for example, prohibit public schools from endorsing religion. Vouchers, on the other hand, allow parents to use public money to pay for private, mostly religious schools that are largely unaccountable to the public. So, for example, a voucher school may use your taxpayer dollars to teach its students that the earth is 6,000 years old. And a number of such schools now do just that.

You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

The strategy of calling something what it isn’t begins at the top. In the Zelman v Simmons-Harris decision of 2002, the conservative majority of the US supreme court lined up in a 5-4 decision to rule that an Ohio vouchers program did not violate the clause of the first amendment that prohibits the government from establishing religion, even though 96% of the students in the program wound up in religiously affiliated schools. The majority claimed that since the parents were free to choose among a variety of schools, the state was not involved in any establishment of religion. In his dissent, Justice Souter observed:

“This result violates every objective the establishment clause has ever been thought to serve.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/23/school-vouchers-religious-subversion

From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/24/california-cow-infected-with-mad-cow-disease/

By Andrew Jones
Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed Tuesday afternoon that a cow in California was infected with mad cow disease.

USDA Chief Veterinary Officer John Clifford released a statement on the finding.

“As part of our targeted surveillance system, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has confirmed the nation’s fourth case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a dairy cow from central California,” Clifford said. “The carcass of the animal is being held under State authority at a rendering facility in California and will be destroyed.”

Clifford noted that despite the report, the cow’s meat did not enter the food chain and that food products are safe.

“It was never presented for slaughter for human consumption, so at no time presented a risk to the food supply or human health,” he said. “Additionally, milk does not transmit BSE.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/24/california-cow-infected-with-mad-cow-disease/

From Counter Currents:  http://www.countercurrents.org/alvarez240412.htm

By Robert Alvarez
24 April, 2012
Institute for Policy Studies

The radioactive inventory of all the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools at Fukushima is far greater and even more problematic than the molten cores.

In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.Fukushima’s devastation two weeks after the tsunami.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why:

•  Each pool contains irradiated fuel from several years of operation, making for an extremely large radioactive inventory without a strong containment structure that encloses the reactor cores;
• Several pools are now completely open to the atmosphere because the reactor buildings were demolished by explosions; they are about 100 feet above ground and could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake;
• The loss of water exposing the spent fuel will result in overheating can cause melting and ignite its zirconium metal cladding – resulting in a fire that could deposit large amounts of radioactive materials over hundreds of miles.

Continue reading at:  http://www.countercurrents.org/alvarez240412.htm