The Times

The New York Times has had a number of trans articles, some bad but most of them good. The latest is about trans history and they have a great video, the article “Beyond Caitlyn Jenner Lies a Long Struggle by Transgender People” covers a synopsis of our history,

The Jenner story is a jumping-off point for the latest installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining major stories of the past and their enduring effects. The video, though, goes much farther back, to the 1960s and gay rights protests in San Francisco and New York. Transgender men and women, people whose sense of identity did not match the body they entered life with, played significant roles. But over the years they bore burdens unique to them, in part because they were unfamiliar to most Americans.
[…]
Life in prisons or in homeless shelters, never pleasant for anyone, can be a nightmare of rape and other abuses for transgender men and women. Lourdes Ashley Hunter, executive director of the Trans Women of Color Collective, left Detroit in 2002 to put down roots in New York. Homeless on her arrival and turned away by a women’s shelter that would not accept her gender identity, she had no choice but to go to a men’s shelter. There, she told Retro Report, she was raped in the shower by a man holding a razor blade.

Here in Connecticut we had an incident where a trans woman was put into a men’s shelter even through Connecticut law and HUD guidelines require trans people to be placed into a shelter of their gender identity. When I was giving training in a homeless shelter and got to the law and HUD policy their mouths dropped, they had a trans woman in their men’s shelter.

One goal of advocacy groups is to take control of their own narrative. “Language is power,” Ms. Boylan said, echoing an understanding among political groups that a national debate on, say, a topic like the estate tax is shaped mightily by whether one calls it “a death tax” or “a Paris Hilton tax.” The rights group Glaad, formed in the 1980s as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has issued a guide for news organizations filled with explanations about which words are acceptable and which are not. “Transgender,” this advisory makes clear, is an umbrella term that can encompass various forms of identity. It may be applied to those who alter their bodies with hormones or through surgery and to those who make no physical changes.

But RuPaul hasn’t learned that yet, in the Guardian he says,

Last year, RuPaul found himself under fire from an even less likely enemy. A number of people from the transgender community objected to the show’s use of the phrase, ‘You’ve got she-mail’ following a challenge called Female or She-male? There were complaints to its US network, Logo, which dropped the line for the new season. “I would not have changed it, but that’s their choice,” he says now. “Our intention was always coming from a place of love. On paper, you cannot read intention, so it was actually hurtful. First of all, drag is dangerous. We are making fun of everything. But when someone doesn’t get the joke or feels offended by it, it’s a lose-lose situation, because you can’t explain a joke. It isn’t funny if you explain it.”

Words have power is something he hasn’t figured out yet, but that is another blog.

The NY Times video is well worth watching…