All Change for a 12 Year Old!

“That drag queen looks young” I said to a work colleague the other day when I was out on the scene and the drag queen doing the turn looked like he, her, it should have been in nappies/diapers!

Maybe it because I’m getting older that the female impersonators, drag queens and trannys around the place seem to be getting younger and younger. But nothing could have prepared me for the strange, bizarre and shocking news that greeted me from the local and the national newspaper here in England “Boy 12 Turns Into Girl”

It was the puzzling, yet touching story of a boy of 12 years of age turned up at school for the first day of term as a girl. His parents had supported his choice and he’d had his name legally and plans to undergo hormone treatment and eventually a full gender reorientation operation later in life.

He arrived on the first day of school wearing a dress and pigtails according to The Sun newspaper. It reported that the teachers, at the southern England school had called an emergency assembly to try and explain the sex change and to instructed students to begin treating their classmate as a girl. According to other media reports, some confused children reportedly burst into tears. The child in question was not at the assembly and has not returned to school since the announcement was made, after there was a fair amount of jokes, jibes and name calling.

“We are committed to ensuring the best for our child,” his mother told The Sun newspaper when it broke the story on Friday. The family had apparently hoped the transformation might go unnoticed since the initial gender switch was done during the summer vacations and as the child transferred from primary to secondary school. The article then also detailed how the boy, was often telling his friends that he wanted to be a girl, that he should have been a girl, and would often wear ribbons in his hair and also wore a bikini to swimming lessons.

Following the fallout from the assembly, the family has allegedly been threatened, and is under police protection. They are keeping the child home until they feel her safety is no longer at risk, the paper said.
Then on Saturday, I was even more surprised to see another headline, regarding another transformation from boy to a girl, this time the headline was “Now boy 9, is a girl”! What’s happening here in the south of England What’s in the water, changing our little boys to little girls – ANOTHER boy has turned up at school as a girl!

Parents have criticized the primary school for not alerting them, and for telling pupils at a special assembly. Classmates of the nine year old gender swap boy were told he had left and been replaced by a girl. The child returned to school the next day – in female uniform, with long hair in a ponytail, tied in pink ribbon. The same newspaper, The Sun, one of Britain’s top selling daily newspapers, broke the news of how Parents faced a flurry of questions from their bemused kids after school – and blasted staff at the primary for not informing them of the switch. One concerned mum said: “My son came home from school and asked why one of his friends had become a girl. I thought he was joking, but he kept asking – that’s when alarm bells began ringing.
It’s unclear at this stage, what’s going to happen to the two children concerned, how things will develop and proceed, but one thing has to be paramount and that is the welfare of these two individuals, from different schools, here in the south.

This is just the start of a very long road for them, in England you can not undergo hormone treatment for sex change operations until you are at least 18years of age. It’s also the start of a very long life of abuse and discrimination, which the majority of gender realignment or transgender people face in their daily lives.
I knew one such person, who from an early age thought and believed he’d been born in the wrong body, that he was a boy that should have been a girl. During his teenage years, he’d talk to people about this, but no one took it seriously, there was little help and even less understanding at the time he told me. He has been so depressed at times during his late teens and early 20’s that suicide was not far from his mind, as he became more and more awear that he was born as the wrong sex. He’s now in his late 30’s, has had some surgery and lives as a woman on the outskirts of Brighton.

I only hope that things have moved on and are a little easier for these two very young children, who are embarking on the same journey as my friend, it’s going to be hard. However, it’s also a testament to how broadly our society has changed, that these two lads, we able to express their feelings and desires in this matter.

DNC Platform’s Stand on LGBT Issues, A Transgendered View

Yesterday, the Platform Committee of the Democratic National Committee met in Pittsburgh to review and amend the draft platform.  In July, community meetings were held all across the country to gather input from people of all walks of life.  Those of us in the 2nd Transgender Caucus stepped up in our own way to ensure that the concerns of the Transgender community were heard and ncluded.  Amanda Simpson of Arizona met with her Governor, Janet Napolitano, who was the Chair of the Drafting Committee.  Several others, including me, met directly with Platform Committee members from our respective states.  Tennessee has three members on Platform and I met or talked with all three.  In our meetings, we expressed the desire to have language calling for Democrats to support only a fully inclusive, employment non-discrimination act.   We also urged passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, access to health care for all Americans, and expressed concern over various ID laws at the federal and state levels.  For Transgender Tennesseans, this includes the right to change gender on Birth Certificates, and opposition to the Real ID Act and new voter ID’s.

Read more at avalonfarmblog.com.

Transgender Teen Faces Hate and Abuse Daily

Michael Arone has been called every pejorative someone could direct at a transgender teen.

But, while most harassment the 16-year-old West Haverstraw resident faced has been short-lived, Arone reached a breaking point at a summer school program in Clarkstown South High School.

Arone, a North Rockland school district 10th-grader, is a male transgender teen who publicly goes by Melissa Andrews and prefers to be referred to as a female.

Arone said classmates have routinely called her “faggot,” “she-male,” “it” and “queer” in response to her wearing eye shadow and lipstick, straightening her shoulder-length brown hair and carrying a purse to school.

“He’s dealing with a hate crime,” said her mother, Patricia Arone, 37, who often refers to Arone as Michael. “That’s the only way to say it, it’s hate.”

In one instance at Clarkstown South, a female student tried to punch Arone and said, “Come fight me, you faggot,” according to a Clarkstown police report.

Arone said she had a dating relationship with this girl, but the girl began instigating much of the harassment against Arone after they broke up, Arone said.

Read the rest at lohud.com.

Religious Right Targets Transgendered Community

Religious conservatives are hoping a referendum on a Montgomery County law protecting transgender people could become a template to repeal similar measures across the country.

Montgomery County Council members unanimously approved a measure last fall that prohibits discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, public accommodations, and taxicab and cable service. Council members included an exemption for “personal and private” places, but nonetheless drew the ire of local conservatives, who said they feared men would be allowed in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.

A local group, Citizens for Responsible Government, ran a successful petition drive to get the 25,000 signatures required to put the law on the county’s November ballot for possible recall.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for national conservative group Focus on the Family, said his organization is tracking the Montgomery issue.

Get the rest of this story from examiner.com.

Transgender: Changing the Face of Feminism

In 1991, Nancy Jean Burkholder was expelled from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF), the world’s largest annual women-only event, because festival workers suspected that she was a trans woman — that is, someone who was assigned a male sex at birth but who identifies and lives as female. That incident sparked protests from a burgeoning transgender movement to challenge what eventually came to be known as the festival’s “womyn-born-womyn”-only policy, which effectively bars trans women from attending. The protests evolved into Camp Trans, which continues to take place just down the road from MWMF each year, and which has become a focal point for a much broader push for trans-inclusion within feminist and queer communities.

Despite more than 15 years of petitioning, and a growing acceptance of trans identities in both mainstream society and within queer, feminist and other progressive circles, the festival still officially maintains its “womyn-born-womyn”-only policy, and countless other lesbian- and queer-woman-focused groups and events continue to harbor dismissive, if not outright disdainful, attitudes toward trans women.

Read more at alternet.org.

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