This And That In The News

"This And That In The News" is about articles in the news that have caught my eye and I want to share or comment about. These are the articles that caught my attention this week, this week topic is trans-students…

USA Today had an article about a proposed law for trans-students using bathroom…

Calif. lawmaker seeks rights for transgender students
Lisa Leff, Associated Press
March 4, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A California lawmaker has introduced legislation aimed at guaranteeing transgender students the right to use public school restrooms and participate on the sports teams that correspond with their expressed genders.

The bill reflects the accommodations that a number of U.S. schools are being asked to make as Americans start identifying as transgender at younger ages.

If approved by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano's AB1266 would give young people the right "to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities" regardless of what sexual category exists on their school records.

Moving to the other end of the spectrum, an article in Think Progress was about the backlash to the Massachusetts Department of Education’s guidelines for gender variant students…

Massachusetts Lawmakers Retaliate Against Youth With ‘Transgender Issues’
By Zack Ford
Mar 5, 2013

Several Massachusetts lawmakers are not happy with new guidance from the state’s Department of Education advising on how to respect transgender students in school, based on nondiscrimination law passed in 2011. Notably, they believe that allowing them to use the appropriate restroom is somehow going to infringe on other students’ privacy. To correct that, they are taking the brash step of proposing a bill that define students’ gender by their anatomy instead of by their actual identities.

This bill will cause trans-student to be bullied and harassed and most trans-students cannot have surgery until they are at the age of consent.

However, some trans-students have surgery at an earlier age…

About a Boy
Transgender surgery at sixteen.
New Yorker
by Margaret Talbot
March 18, 2013

For high-school seniors like Skylar—who live in prosperous suburbs, have doting parents, attend good schools, and get excellent grades while studding their transcripts with extracurricular activities—the hardest part of the college application is often the personal essay. They’re typically asked to write about some life-changing experience, and, if their childhood has been blessedly free of drama, they may find themselves staring at a blank screen for a long time. This was not a problem for Skylar.

Skylar is a boy, but he was born a girl, and lived as one until the age of fourteen. Skylar would put it differently: he believes that, despite biological appearances, he was a boy all along. He’d just been burdened with a body that required medical and surgical adjustments so that it could reflect the gender he knew himself to be. At sixteen, he started getting testosterone injections every other week; just before he turned seventeen, he had a double mastectomy. The essay question for the University of Chicago, where Skylar submitted an early-action application, invited students to describe their “archnemesis (either real or imagined).” Skylar’s answer: “Pre-formed ideas of what it meant to have two X chromosomes.” No matter what people thought they saw when they looked at him, Skylar wrote, he knew that he “was nothing along the lines of a girl.”

Some more good news about students, but this time at a college; last week there was a story about a fraternity helping to raise money for one of their brothers to have surgery, well now the college has changed their insurance policy to cover Gender Confirming Surgery.

Surgery covered for transgender student
Boston Globe
By Jeremy Fox
March 07, 2013

A transgender student whose Emerson College classmates rallied to help him raise money for transition surgery says his insurer will cover the procedure, after all.

Donnie Collins’s story went viral last week, after Out.com reported that his fraternity brothers had created an online fund-raising page for Collins ­after an insurance company ­declined his claim. Readers learned of the support Collins received from members of Phi Alpha Tau, a professional communications fraternity, and donated many times the fraternity’s $2,000 goal.

By Thursday, they had raised more than $20,000 for the surgery, which will remove breast tissue and construct a masculine chest for Collins, who was born female but began living as a male before graduating high school.
[…]
Emerson said in a statement that it contacted ­Aetna, its student insurance provider, for clarification after Collins’s request was rejected. The college said its policy has included benefits for transgender medical care since 2006, but “the policy language had ­inadvertently not been updated by Aetna on their internal documents.”

“Aetna has since updated their internal documentation to accurately reflect the college’s policy,” the statement said.

Now the fraternity has said that they will donate the money that they raised to the Jim Collins Foundation.