Firsts!

There were two firsts today.

The first, First is about a mariachi band,

How the first transgender mariachi woman makes her LGBTQ audience feel ‘special’
‘When I get onstage, I kind of feel untouchable,’ Natalia Melendez, a professional musician with Mariachi Arcoiris de Los Ángeles, told Moneyish.
Market Watch
By Meera Jagannathan
Published: Dec 17, 2018

Natalia Melendez got her introduction to mariachi music as a young kid at her grandmother’s backyard birthday party. She watched, transfixed, as her uncle and other musicians performed with the late mariachi icon Laura Sobrino.

“The whole two-hour set that they did, I didn’t leave,” Melendez, 38, told Moneyish. “I just sat there on the sidelines just watching.”

Decades later, Melendez is in the game as the first transgender woman to work as a professional mariachi musician. The Mexican-American performer, who grew up in a family full of musicians in southern California, learned the violin at age 8 and went on to play with several mariachi groups throughout her teens and adulthood. She now plays violin and sings with the ensemble Mariachi Arcoiris de Los Ángeles (Rainbow Mariachi of Los Angeles), which bills itself as the world’s first LGBTQ mariachi.
[…]
While the group strives for authenticity, Melendez said, it also plays with the traditions of mariachi music — common themes of which include heartbreak, betrayal and love triangles — by bending gender norms. “A man will sing to a man; I sing to a man; a girl will sing to a girl,” Melendez said.

The point, she added, is to make members of their LGBTQ audience “feel special.” “We wanted to give that to the gay community. We wanted the gay men to feel a man sing to them. We wanted another lesbian to feel, ‘Oh my God, this girl just sang to me. I never had that before — this is different, but it was so beautiful.’”

And the second First you all probably heard about…

In a first, transgender woman competes in Miss Universe competition
Miss Spain, 27-year-old Angela Ponce, broke barriers in the 66-year-old competition, which this year was held in Bangkok, Thailand.
NBC News
By Tim Fitzsimons
December 17, 2018

While she didn’t win the crown, Angela Ponce broke barriers on Monday in the 67th Miss Universe pageant. The 27-year-old Spanish beauty became the first transgender woman to ever participate in the international competition.

“I never imagined (I would make it to Miss Universe) because I lived in a society where everyone said I couldn’t do that,” Ponce told NBC’s "Today" through a translator. “And I didn’t have the information to realize that my dream to be a woman could ever actually be realized.”
[…]
Hailing from southern Spain, Ponce won her first pageant in 2015, just three years after the Miss Universe pageant rejected Jenna Talackova from Canada’s Miss Universe pageant because she was not a “naturally born” female. Talackova threatened legal action, and the organization — then owned by Donald Trump — relented and changed the rules to allow transgender women to compete.

It was an uphill battle: Ponce said she faced discrimination as a model and was rejected from jobs because of her gender identity. Fortunately, Ponce said her family embraced her identity and supported her decision to live openly as a woman.

Congratulations to all the Firsts, not only these two trans people but all the others who are the first to come out in their employment, the first to come out in their social group, or the first to blaze a new trail.

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This morning’s meeting went very good, as usual I was the only trans woman there at the meeting, I knew many around the table but for some I was the first trans woman they met.

The attendees were from non-profits, for-profit, and state agencies and we discussed assisted care, long term care, and home health care for the aging LGBTQ community.

The Forgotten Minority, Intersex

Most people think a gender and sex as a binary but we know it is really a continuum, a spectrum.

Many times doctors think they know best, they tell the parents you must “correct” the problem in order for them to have a happy life but in reality they are creating a lifelong nightmare.

Intersex People Deserve Proper Healthcare — So We Created a Hospital Policy Guide
The Intersex-Affirming Hospital Policies guide lists ways the medical community can improve healthcare for intersex people.
Them
By Hans Lindahl
September 14, 2018

I have never had a medical experience that was not traumatizing. And I am not alone. Intersex people like me often have nowhere to go to receive proper medical attention.

In late 2015, I moved to San Francisco with the naively optimistic belief that I could find an intersex-competent doctor in a city renowned for its LGBTQ+ population. If not here, then where? My search began by reaching out to trans clinics in hopes that they’d have seen intersex patients like me before. I found a doctor, herself a trans woman, who claimed to have experience treating intersex patients. She arrived to my routine checkup with a chilling bedside manner. The first words out of her mouth, before even seeing my records, were to ask why I hadn’t considered having an invasive surgery. She then told me to return in one week for a consultation on a hysterectomy. I don’t have a uterus.

Luckily, I know how to call these types of bluffs by now. Most people may not realize just how little most doctors know about intersex bodies. To this day, many medical professionals push damaging cosmetic surgeries — such as clitoral reductions — on intersex newborns. Panicked families have no reason not to believe that doctors would only advocate for their child’s best interests, but in reality, these surgeries are unnecessary, and are proven to compromise sexual function.

I’ve long since given up on trans clinics, and have settled for a queer women’s clinic in the city. My doctor, a trans man, is warm and welcoming despite having no prior experience with intersex patients. Together we used a pen to cross out “transgender woman” and write in “intersex” on the clinic’s hormone replacement therapy (HRT) forms. There were no options on the forms for intersex people to begin with.
[…]
In 2016, Lambda Legal released a widely successful transgender-affirming hospital policy guide, listing concrete policy instructions for the respectful treatment of transgender patients. This year, interACT, a national intersex advocacy organization, for whom I serve as Communications Director, teamed up with Lambda Legal and Proskauer Rose LLP to produce an intersex edition: Intersex-Affirming Hospital Policies. For the first time, I can see a path toward non-traumatizing care.

The guide, a free download for any institution interested in improving its practices, centers intersex voices and includes quotes from our actual experiences with medical professionals. Top medical, legal, and ethics experts weighed in on how the medical community can do right by intersex people.

The conservatives attack trans youth because they are “too young” to know that they are trans and complain about medical treatment that are giving to trans youth; but do you ever hear them criticize “corrective surgery” on intersex babies?

Last month, the state of California passed the first legislation in the U.S. that acknowledges the harms of non-consensual intersex medical interventions. Several prominent medical policy organizations have issued statements in support of sensitive and affirming intersex care, including Physicians for Human Rights, GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality, and the American Association of Family Physicians. Despite this, not one U.S. hospital has issued a firm written statement or policy condemning the practice of performing cosmetic “normalizing” surgeries such as clitoral reductions, orchiectomies, and vaginoplasties on intersex infants.

No surgery should be done on anyone until they are old enough to understand what is being done to them.

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This morning I am doing training for Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing Course at a local college with a friend, who is a retired psychologist.

Resources

On the WPATH Facebook page someone posted the American Psychological Association website…

Best Practices for Mental Health Facilities Working With LGBT Clients
Because LGBT people are members of a minority group that is the target of social stigma, mental health facilities and their personnel who serve people with serious mental illness face important challenges in addressing the needs of LGBT clients. These challenges include the following:

• Educating staff to foster inclusive behaviors 
• Addressing harassment and intolerance of peers who are also in the treatment program Implementing training requirements for personnel 
• Developing program policies that recognize the needs of LGBT clients 
• Acknowledging the emotional and sexual lives of LGBT clients

The following list of resources below is provided to assist people who work with LGBT clients in addressing these issues.

• They go on to list some very good resources on the internet, the topics that they list include,
• Understanding the Concerns of LGBT Clients
• Recommendations and Policies for Developing Affirmative Therapeutic Environments
• Program Models for LGBT Clients
• General Resources on Serious Mental Illness

I am going to be posting them on the CT TransAdvocacy Coalition website shortly.