POTUS Is TIME Magazine's Person Of The Year

And yep, he earned it. 

Since 1927, TIME magazine has chosen the person who for better or worse, has made an overpowering impact on the nation and the world for the year.

Runner up for the internationally renowned honor was Pakistani teen blogger Malala Yousafzai.   She lives in the Taliban infested Swat region of the country and is an advocate of girls attending school.   The ideas that this 15 year old girl voiced on a blog so threatened 'the menz' in the Taliban they tried to kill her.  

She's recovering from her wounds in a British hospital and sentiment is building around the world for her to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013.  

The POTUS had the bigger impact on the year news wise.  In addition to winning reeelection in a blowout and becoming the first Democratic president since FDR to win in consecutive elections with more than 50% of the vote (read that and weep conservafools), he was the first president of either party since 1940 to win re-election with an unemployment rate above 7.5 percent.

As TIME editor Rick Stengel wrote:

“We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America."

“For finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union, Barack Obama is Time’s 2012 Person of the Year.”
President Obama is the fourth African descended person after Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1937, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977 to be honored with TIME Person of the Year..   The POTUS also won it after his historic election in 2008.

It's Already December 21st....

for my readers west of the International Date Line.

Those of you who east of the International Date Line who presume December 21 is the last day our planet will be around you have until the end of the day to send me your valuables for safekeeping.  I'll give them back to you after the Christmas holidays, minus a 10% administration fee.

There's something happening on the 21st, but it happens every year.  It's called the winter (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) or the summer solstice.  It's the shortest day of the year for those of us in the Norther hemisphere and the longest day for those of you in the Southern one.  

If you're north of the Arctic Polar Circle, you'll now get 24 hours of darkness while those of you below the Antarctic Polar Circle will get 24 hours of sunlight.

For those of you clinging to gloom and doom scenarios, we already had the 3 mile wide (5 km) asteroid 4179 Toutatis zip within 7 million kilometers (4.3 million miles) of Earth yesterday.  

Once again I point you to the words of astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

Beyond Althea Garrison-Run Black Trans People Run!

The 2012 election cycle is rapidly receding into the history books and the winners during these hard fought campaigns across the country will begin to be sworn into their offices and go to work in January.

But this completed election cycle also reminded me that it has been twenty years since stealth trans woman  Althea Garrison was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992.

The major reason we found out about the historic piece of Black trans history was because Eric Fehrnstrom, the person who outed her at that time when he was a columnist for the conservative leaning Boston Herald, was the communications director in the failed Mitt Romney presidential campaign

I've seen an increase since 1992 of open trans politicians running for and winning offices around the world. Three transwomen, Georgina Beyer in New Zealand, Vladimir Luxuria in Italy and now Anna Grodzka in Poland won seats in their national legislative bodies while others in several nations have tried and fallen short of doing so. .

I've seen several trans people run for and win public offices in the United States from mayors to small town city council seats.  Kim Coco Iwamoto twice won election to the Hawaii state school board in 2006 and 2010 and Vicky Kolakowski that same year won a Alameda County, CA judicial seat.  Others have run for office and lost.  Some have done so multiple times for different offices like Vermont's Karen Kerin.  

But unfortunately the common thread in all those American trans people who have run for and either won or lost races is that they haven't been African descended trans people.

And that needs to change.

It's been painfully obvious to me over a decade of lobbying at the local, state and federal level that in addition to getting current legislators up to speed on the issues that affect trans people and voting  for politicians who are supportive of our issues, we also are in dire need of transpeople sitting at the table helping to formulate the policies and write the laws that govern us.

I'm happy for the trans people in various states that have stepped up, run and won or lost their various political races and broke barriers in the process.  We need more qualified trans people to run for public office if we're going to get the trans human rights coverage we deserve. 

Some of those qualified people running from office must be African descended ones.   One of the reasons why is because in a lot of cases, our chocolate transition journey is not like a white transperson's transition journey because of cultural factors and the deleterious impact of race and class on it.

And it's not like we don't have support in the Democratic Party.   There were thirteen trans delegates in Charlotte for the DNC convention last summer, and two of them were African-American.. 

Even Vice President Joe Biden has recently verbalized that trans rights are human rights, and one of the ways to make them a reality is get political power so we can write good laws for our community and be in a position to block bad ones.

Some of our Black gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are already running for and winning public office and have been for several years now.  

I said it during that OUT on the Hill trans panel that it was past time for us to do the same if we are going to have the issues that impact us as African descended transpeople dealt with.

It's also clear that we need to build upon what Althea Garrison started in 1992..

We need to run Black transpeople to send the message to the world trans community that American trans community leadership is not monoracial and we are stepping up, ready and willing  to take our rightful place on the world trans leadership stage.   

It's increasingly becoming clear that we will need to have politicians who are boys and girls like us, and that can only happen if we're in the political game to win it. 

So run Black trans people run!  

Trans Model Connie Fleming Strikes A FLOTUS Pose

The fledgling trans style magazine Candy is only four issues old, but publisher Luis Venegas looked to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for inspiration for the Winter 2012 cover.

It features trans model Connie Fleming styled and made up to resemble First Lady Michelle Obama.

The split front cover shows New York based model Fleming, who worked for fashion designer and Ugly Betty stylist Patrica Field, being sworn into office and waving an American flag accompanied by the headline 'The Candydate'.

Venegas explained the rationale behind this Candy cover in a Dazed Digital magazine interview..

“I remember back in early 2007 when the Democratic Party’s nominees were narrowed down between two ‘controversial’ stereotypes never before seen for presidency: a black man, Barack Obama; and a woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton. At that time, I thought, ‘when will the time come when these archaic walls break down and the White House will be occupied by, for example, a black, transsexual woman?’”

The cover has definitely been generating some buzz and conversation on the Net and has its fans and its detractors.  I fall somewhere in the middle on this. 

I'm just happy they didn't decide to do some full of fail 'edgy' cover and put a white transwoman in blackface on it.

Nizah Morris Case-Ten Years Later

One of the cases I've been tracking ever since I started the blog is the Nizah Morris case. 

In the pre-dawn hours of December 22, 2002 she was at the downtown Key West bar at 13th and Walnut streets attending a party being held there.  She was allegedly severely inebriated and collapsed in front of the bar around 2:00 AM.  Someone called the paramedics to take her to the hospital   While waiting at least 20 minutes for the paramedics to arrive a Philadelphia police officer arrived at the scene. 

The 47 year old Morris declined the police officer's offer of a courtesy ride to take her to the hospital but instead asked to be taken home.  She was helped by bar patrons into the back of the police cruiser and unfortunately never made it there.

Instead she was found lying on her back at 16th and Walnut by a passing motorist unconscious with a fractured skull and bleeding from the right side of her head.  She had a life threatening subdural hematoma that required immediate medical attention and Morris was taken to Philadelphia's Jefferson University Hospital in critical condition.   She was on life support for several days until she was taken off of it and died at 8:30 PM EST on Christmas Eve.

The next day Morris' death was declared by the medical examiner as a homicide.   And you knew there had to be a little transphobia lurking in this story as well.   On December 26 Nizah's mother Roslyn Wilkins was notified of her daughter's death by a police detective who said to her, "He's dead"   

After Wilkins complained about the misgendering way he broke the news of her child's death to her, that detective was removed from the case.   The family was even more disturbed after looking at photos taken at the medical examiner's office that showed Morris with what appeared to be defensive wounds on her hands.
  
And yes, what would a story about a murdered African-American trans woman be without a heaping helping of media disrespect and misgendering?   When the Philadelphia Inquirer published their initial account of the morris story on December 31 they referred to Nizah as a 'prostitute' and stuck the misgendering 'male prostitute' in the body of the story. 

On January 1 after a memorial service attended by over 300 people Nizah Morris' body was cremated.      

That was ten years ago, and to this day the Morris family nor the Philadelphia trans community has gotten a consistent story from the PPD about what exactly happened to Nizah Morris on that fateful night.   It also hasn't helped that information, tapes and evidence pertaining to the case has mysteriously disappeared

The Morris family and others in the Philadelphia rainbow community suspect that excessive force was used on Morris, the PPD knows more about what happened on that fateful December 22 night than they are acknowledging and are covering up what really happened.

The three officers involved in the Morris incident, Thomas Berry, Elizabeth DiDonato and Kenneth Novak remain on the Philadelphia police force and were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in December 2003.

In the latest intrigue surrounding this case it seems the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office refuses to confirm or deny whether it has a police log pertaining to the Nizah Morris case, even though such logs are considered public records under Pennsylvania state law.

The case has been investigated by the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission for several years and neither the family or the Philadelphia LGBT community has gotten a satisfactory explanation of what happened.

The question i continue to ask in this case is the same as always.  What does the Philadelphia District Attorney's office and the Philadelphia PD know about what happened to Nizah Morris, when did they know it, and if the po-po's are involved, who did it? 

“Bring in the feds,” Wilkins said.  

I agree with the family in the call for federal authorities to get involved in this ongoing investigation.  It's sadly ten years later and we are still no closer to answering the simple question of what did happen to Nizah Morris in those predawn December 22 hours.

4.5 Million Hits!

Another day, another TransGriot milestone.   

It was only back in July that I had the 4 millionth person surf by to visit my cyberhome.  As of 5:48 PM CST today person number 4.5 million has done so.

Thanks TransGriot readers for your huge part in making this milestone happen.   You spend your valuable time reading my over 6100 posts including this one, recommending them to your friends and even dropping tips in the electronic tip jar.    I can't thank you enough for that.

My soon to be seven year old blog (midnight January 1 is my blogiversary) wouldn't be where it is without your support.

Now on to 2013 and my next milestone of 5 million hits!.

Archbishop Tutu Reminds Ugandan MP's God Does Not Discriminate

TransGriot Note: Nobel laureate and Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu wrote this op-ed that was originally published at the Ugandan-based  Daily Monitor    Hope they heed his words and ponder them while they are on holiday break

Uganda’s Parliament is – unbelievably – on the verge of considering a new piece of legislation that would have the effect of legalising persecution, discrimination, hatred and prejudice in that country.
Should the Anti-Homosexuality Bill be voted into law, it will criminalise acts of love between certain categories of people, just as the apartheid government made intimate relations between black and white South Africans a punishable offence.

Members of the apartheid police force charged with the upkeep of “morality” would rush into the bedrooms of suspected offenders to gather evidence, such as warm bed sheets. Those found guilty were arrested, put on trial and punished. What awaits the people of Uganda?

One thing that Ugandan legislators should know is that God does not discriminate among members of our family. God does not say black is better than white, or tall is better than short, or football players are better than basketball players, or Christians are better than Muslims … or gay is better than straight. No. God says love one another; love your neighbour. God is for freedom, equality and love.

People have over many centuries devised all kinds of terrible instruments to oppress other people. Usually, they have rationalised their awful actions on the basis of their belief in their own superiority, in their culture, in their spiritual beliefs, in their skin colour. Thus, they argue, they are justified to hate and bomb and maim the “other”.

The anti-homosexuality legislation now under consideration in Uganda is just such an instrument. Nelson Mandela said: “No one is born hating another person.” If people are taught and can learn to hate, they can learn to love.

Many times in my life, I have been blessed to witness the innate capacity of our human family to reconcile differences. The common denominator in all these transactions is recognition that the notion of equal rights in any family, in any society, is non-negotiable. No sane person or group of people can sustainably argue that their rights should be more equal than others.

If what I am told is true, that the anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda has widespread popular support, it should surely be the moral duty of the custodians of that country to educate its citizens about discrimination and equal rights. Surely, it should be their duty to clarify the fundamental misunderstandings in communities about what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI).

The depiction of members of the LGBTI community as crazed and depraved monsters threatening the welfare of children and families is simply untrue, and is reminiscent of what we experienced under apartheid and what the Jews experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

To those who claim that homosexuality is not part of our African culture, you are conveniently ignoring the fact that LGBTI Africans have lived peacefully and productively beside us throughout history.
I am proud that in South Africa, when we succeeded in overthrowing apartheid, we put in place a Constitution that prohibited all forms of discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

We did this because we understood that the freedom of one depends upon the freedom of all. We call it the spirit of ubuntu: the idea that I cannot be free if you are not also free.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, and does not feel threatened by others’ differences, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

The ideology of racial superiority that was once used to justify the colonisation of our lands is part of our recent history. Today, we face a new challenge. We must overcome the notion that sexual orientation defines one’s identity or determines one’s station in life – or unjustly elevates one class of people over another.
It is with supreme sorrow that I witness, to this day, the subjugation and repression of African brothers and sisters whose only crime is the practice of love. Hate, in any form or shape, has no place in the house of God.

I urge the people of Uganda to reject hatred and prejudice.

Love comes more naturally to the human heart than hate.

Christine Jorgensen-Sixty Years Later

While Christine Jorgensen was quietly convalescing in a Danish hospital after the second of her genital surgeries on November 20, the news about her being the first post World War II transwoman was about to explode literally into New York's and eventually the world's consciousness.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin institute had already done the first trans surgeries with Lili Elbe and 'Dorchen' back in 1930-31.  Christine was the first post World War II to do so after undergoing hormone replacement therapy under Dr. Christian Hamburger and his team.. 

On December 1, 1952 the headline for the New York Daily News blared 'EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY', thus triggering the ongoing fascination of America and the world with us transpeople.

That December 1952 headline knocked a nuclear test at Eniwetok Atoll off the front pages and also created a news feeding frenzy that only became more pronounced when then 27 year old Christine  returned home to New York on February 13, 1953.

It is a sixty year period that has seen surgery for transwomen evolve through the efforts of people such as Georges Bourou, Roberto Granato, Stanley Biber, Yvon Menard, Sanguan Kunaporn, and a girl like us in Marci Bowers.

It is also a period that has seen the knowledge of the medical and social side of transsexualty grow through the efforts of Harry Benjamin, organizations such as WPATH and in many cases, transpeople themselves.


Christine Jorgensen as our pioneering American transwoman would be followed by legions of other transwomen and transmen not only here, but around the world such as Great Britain's April Ashley and France's Coccinelle.   There were countless others who eventually had surgery and under the protocols of the time faded into society never to reveal their status as transwomen while other picked up the advocacy torch to fight for the human rights of people like themselves. 

Christine was the first to deal with trans celebrity status.  She navigated the media onslaught that greeted her upon her return to the States.  She wrote her life story in an autobiography that sits on my bookshelf now and became a movie.  She had a career in entertainment and Hollywood. She did the education at university campuses as a lecturer in the 1970's and 1980's.   She did the television interviews on the shows of the day such as Donahue and Dick Cavett .  She worked with the medical professionals of her time such as Dr. Harry Benjamin while living her life to best of her ability until she passed away in May 1989 of lung and bladder cancer the day before my 27th birthday. 

Christine also dealt with the societal frustrations that many transpeople still deal with today.   She was denied the opportunity to get married in 1959 because her birth certificte still had 'male' on it.  She was loved by some and vilified by others.  But she was happy and never regretted what she'd gone through to become a pioneering #girllikeus.

She also gave a name and a face to what people were suffering with and was the trans icon of many of my trans elders who were kids during that time period.  When Jorgensen passed away on May 3, 1989 in San Clemente, CA I was well into gathering information and making the moves to get hormones to facilitate my own transition that would happen for me in 1994.

Some people consider Christine Jorgensen's arrival in New York and her stylishly stepping off that SAS airplane from Copenhagen at what is now JFK airport the opening moments of the sexual revolution in the United States and there's a plausible argument that could be made for that.   

As she said in the film that was made several years before her death in which she returned to Denmark to reunite with the medical team that made her transition possible, "We didn't start the sexual revolution but I think we gave it a good kick in the pants!"

But Christine Jorgensen is also the starting point for our public fascination with and at times sixty year contentious discussion of transsexality on many levels   It's also the beginnings of a worldwide journey of discovery and evolution for those of us who are gender variant.   It also jump started the still evolving medical and societal thinking concerning gender identity and the causes and treatment of transsexuality.

And we transpeople owe a lot to her sixty years later for being courageous enough to start that journey.

East Aurora, IL School Board Caves To The Bigots Again

What started out as a wonderful happening for the kids in the East Aurora, IL district when their school board passed a trans inclusive policy only to cave on it days later after opposition from the SPLC certified hate group the Illinois Family Association is getting more exasperation inducing as it goes along. 

After the IFA browbeat the school board into rescinding the policy, the East Aurora board announced the formation of an ad hoc committee to formulate a new policy to protect their trans and gender variant students.

But as I feared when the board caved initially to the IFA in October and emboldened the transphobes, they simply doubled down on the bullying tactics in an attempt to kill any trans inclusive policy from being crafted and adopted.   At a November 30 meeting of the ad hoc committee they filled the room with 120 opponents of the trans inclusive policy and disrupted it to the point the committee couldn't conduct business.   

Anita Lewis, the school board member chairing the ad hoc committee declined to schedule another meeting, and now the East Aurora IL school board has caved once again to the transphobic bigots. 

The board dissolved the ad hoc committe that was formed to craft a trans policy that would be in their words when they formed it 'a model to the nation'.

Yeah East Aurora, IL school board.   You're a model to the nation all right.   You caved in the face of intolerant bigots, reversed a policy that would have protected your trans and gender variant students and now left them vulnerable to the very bigots you sought to protect them from.

You also sent a message to those trans and gender variant students in this district that you as a school board would (and have) throw them under the bus and not stand and deliver for them when they needed you to. 

I hope your profiles in cowardice are rewarded with all of your being voted out of office by progressive minded parents and residents and you are replaced by civic minded people who will do what's right for all the kids of the East Aurora district.  

They need school board members who will stand by their principled decisions,  not retreat from them in the face of loud and wrong opposition.  

Trans Pioneer April Ashley Receives Her MBE

I wrote about this when it happened back in June, and in a morning investiture ceremony held at Buckingham Palace last Thursday, trans pioneer April Ashley was awarded the Member of the British Empire (MBE) as part of the annual Queen Birthday Honors list.

The now 77 year old Ashley  was one of the first persons from Great Britain who underwent SRS back in 1960, became a successful actress and model, appeared in the Road To Hong Kong movie with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and became a trans human rights advocate..

She was also one of the parties in the horrible 1970 Corbet v Corbett divorce case that set a grossly negative marriage precedent for transpeople in Great Britain by not allowing them to get married until it was reversed in 2004 by the British Gender Recognition Act.

Ashley received the Member of the British Empire in the investiture ceremony from Prince Charles for her long time work as a British trans human rights advocate, and congratulations to her for a well deserved honor.

Ashley said that for over half a century she had "been writing to people and helping people and I've written thousands and thousands of letters".

"Strangely enough although it was transgender, it was also gay and lesbian [people writing to me] and women desperate for divorces," she said.

About her gender reassignment surgery in 1960 and being awarded the MBE Ashley said, "To me it was just a normal thing to do - I never thought I was doing anything special quite frankly, so to be suddenly awarded this is astonishing."

Bella Jay, who organizes the annual Sparkle event in Manchester, UK said the former model had "faced many struggles in life, which perhaps people don't really understand in the more tolerant and open society in which we live today".

"Achieving real transgender equality is a big issue for many people in modern Britain, but all too often it either fails to gain any real publicity or is misunderstood," said Jay in a BBC interview.

"I congratulate April on the award which recognizes her achievements and again helps bring the issues facing the trans-community into the public eye.

Ashley's trans cousins across the Pond and around the world that she was an inspiration and beacon of hope to in the 60's and beyond also join our British cousins in recognizing April Ashley, MBE as well.

Break Out The Oreos, We Have A Cookie-Chomping US Senator

To no ones surprise, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) chose Rep Tim Scott (R-SC) yesterday to fill resigning Senator Jim DeMint's remaining term in the US Senate.  

The 47 year old Scott is a Tea Klux Klan favorite who was elected to the House in 2010 from a district that includes north Charleston and Myrtle Beach, SC.  He beat the son of notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond in the GOP primary that year on his way to election..

Scott will be the first Black* senator from South Carolina, the seventh in US history and the first from the  South since Hiram Revels (1870) and Blanche K Bruce (1875-1881) represented Mississippi during Reconstruction. 

In addition to Revels and Bruce, the other Republican senator was Edward Brooke from Massachusetts.

He was the first African-American elected to the US senate by popular vote and represented the state from (1967-1979)  Brooke was a moderate Republican who championed mass transit, low-income housing and a higher minimum wage.  

The Democratic African-American senators all come from Illinois and includes the only Black female US senator in Carol Moseley Braun. She served from 1993-1999, was a prosecutor before winning political office and called for more restrictive gun laws during her tenure. Unfortunately she was defeated in her first re-election bid and was later appointed as the US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

We know about the second US senator from Illinois because he now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  But before he became the 44th president of the United States in 2008,  in November 2004 Barack Obama was elected to the Senate in a landslide over his GOP opponent Alan Keyes.

When President Obama left the Senate, Roland W. Burris was appointed to Obama's seat on December. 31, 2008.  He served two years and was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for being misleading about his controversial appointment to the seat by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Now that I've discussed the history of African-Americans in the US Senate,  back to the conservanegro about to replace Jim DeMint.   Scott achieved a 92 percent score on the Club for Growth’s legislative scorecard, which meant that he was more conservative than all but 30 members of the House.  

He will have to run for the seat in 2014, so South Carolina Democrats, you have time to get a candidate to take him on.

So yeah, the Republicans can point to Scott's nomination to the US Senate and claim until they're red in the face it's an example of how diverse their party is. 

Knee-grow sycophants mouthing the same failed conservative policies as their white brethern not only will not get our votes, but it's an insult to our intelligence if you think the only reason we vote for candidates is based on the color of their skin. 

But then again, that's a play you vanillacentric privileged conservafools have perfected. 

It's even more of an insult when you nominate a guy who earned an F on the NAACP Congressional Report card and supports policies hostile to African-Americans.

Let me count the ways. Scott called for the impeachment of President Obama if he raised the debt ceiling, is virulently anti-gay, opposes a woman's right to choose, the labor movement, opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." 

And oh yeah, he's the first one along with Angela McGlowan and CL Bryant the Tea Klux Klan trot out when they need a knee-grow human shield to deflect attention from their racism. 

The conservafools are hailing Scott's Senate appointment, but many African-Americans aren't.   He's just another cookie-chomping knee-grow sellout to us. 

Break out the Oreos.

POTUS Sandy Hook Vigil Speech

The POTUS speaking at Sunday night's vigil for the victims of the Newtown CT mass shooting.

The 2012 Presidential Electors Meeting Today

Yes, we American voters handled our electoral business back on November 6.  President Obama won with 51.7% of the vote and got 65,600,358 people to do so compared to Mitt Romney's 47.3% (snicker, snicker) and 60,861,543 votes.

On that date we were not only voting for either the Democratic or Republican party presidential tickets, but also casting votes for the electors who will take part in representing our various states in the Electoral College.

Those electors are meeting in the 50 state capitols and the District of Columbia (AKA Washington DC) today to carry out that part of the presidential election process.  DC gets three electoral votes and is treated like a state per the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.

The electors barring any defections will ratify the 332-206 blowout win for President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney,  but the results of the 2012 election don't become official until the President of the Senate counts the electoral votes out loud at a special joint session of Congress that will be held on January 6, 2013.

POC's Calling Out Problematic Instances Of Racist Behavior Doesn't Make The POC 'Racist'

And y'all need to chill with that crap, especially in liberal-progressive circles.

In fact, I and other POC social justice bloggers are tired of having to point out the obvious or make this ad nauseum point about race and countless others.  Far too often because of whiteness, white supremacy and vanillacentric privilege,  bigoted and racist crap happens that a person of color for their own sanity is going to have to call out    

Sometimes we're going to have to call you out when you do problematic things in the name of 'colorblindness' that cluelessly reinforces the dominance of whiteness.  

When we POC's do that, that is not 'racism'.   FOX noise got y'all twisted on that.   It is not what a pissed off white individual or a conservafool commentator hurls back at a POC who had the courage to speak up and point out a problematic situation so it doesn't happen the next time.

Racism=prejudice plus systemic power.   In fact, let Moni school you on this one more time.:

Racism is the systematic discrimination, denial of rights and benefits by whites against non-whites in all areas of human activity.  (economics, education, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war).

And naw, that's the Sociology 101 definition of racism.  Don't even try to pull out a definition of racism from Webster's (or any) dictionary and try to argue with me or any other person of color that everybody can be racist.  No, everybody cannot be racist and you are making the mistake that just about every white person does of conflating bigotry and prejudice with racism..      

Exhibit A of what I'm talking about is the voter ID voter suppression laws.   They were proposed by ALEC, written and sponsored by conservative white politicians, passed by conservative white politicians in white dominated state legislatures and vigorously defended by white conservatives.

They had the racist intent of suppressing the turnout of non-white voters and their ability to vote in elections for the candidates of their choice.

So in this example you had whites who attempted to deny the voting rights of non-whites in elections, an area of human activity that determines the outcome of the laws that govern society and how it's organized solely to keep political power and because they fear what will happen when white people become a minority population in 2040.  

Hint to the wise.  Better keep those affirmative action laws on the legal books.. Your kids, grandkids and great grandkids may need them someday.   

Everyone be bigoted and prejudiced.  Everybody can NOT be racist, because persons of color individually or in their respective ethnic groups alone do not have the systemic societal power to deny whites rights and societal benefits in any area of human activity.   

The Trans Conclusion Jump Strikes Again

One of the things that annoys me about the transgender community is the conclusion jump.

It's a tendency to take a snippet of information and come up with a pessimistic scenario severely out of whack with the available evidence or presume that the jumped conclusion is true even though the weight of evidence doesn't support it.      TransGriot July 5, 2007

The London Olympic Games unfortunately closed without an open trans athlete participating in that fortnight of competition.  But I can guarantee if the conclusion jump were an Olympic event some peeps in my community would take the gold medal for it. 

I wrote about this tendency of elements of our community to engage in this behavior during a situation in 2007 in which liberal-progressive talk show host Randi Rhodes called Ann Coulter a transwoman and transpeople justifiably called her on it.  

But a few conclusion jumped to the point where one person jawdroppingly equated her to transphobic right wing talker Michael Savage and another called her a transphobe when Rhodes clearly was neither.

We had another example of the trans conclusion jump at work last week when a transwoman had a not so pleasant flying experience in a Texas airport.    The incident as it turned out as more information became available got blown up way out of proportion to the facts of the case.

One thing you must do as a blogger (or on social media) is verify before posting. Your credibility as a blogger is important, especially when you represent a marginalized community and people are relying on you to help give them the facts they need to form their opinions on issues.  

You have to think like a reporter. Facts and accurate information should be first and foremost in a post. You can do point of view opinion style commentary in a later post if necessary.

Trusting your instincts is also paramount. I had questions about that incident, which is why you didn't see it posted on TransGriot when it first started appearing on the Net. 

Because I'm one of the biggest award winning bloggers of color, I have an international readership, I'm an award-winning activist, I talk about the African-American trans community in my writing, and what I write is highly valued,  I have to get it right.  It's more important in my mind to be accurate than to be the first to post it.
TransGriot will be seven years old on January 1.  I've put a lot of work into building its reputation as a go-to source for information on the African-American trans community and fearlessly and accurately discussing issues of importance to me and the trans community in general.  I take that responsibility seriously. 

The trans community and its hundreds of bloggers must consider the blogosphere as one of the vitally important tools in our civil rights toolkit.   It  has been one of the reasons that our trans human rights movement has made the remarkable progress it has over the last decade. 

Our trans bloggers from our A-list award winners to the folks just starting and building their blogging reps have raised our community's visibility along with bringing the trans community's issue concerns to the attention of the general public, politicians and civil rights organizations.  They have played a major role in pointing out transpeople are part of the diverse mosaic of human life.So chill with the conclusion jumping, okay?   It takes years to build up a solid reputation in the blogosphere for accuracy and being a go-to blog for commentary for our community, and one horribly incorrect post to screw it up.

TransGriot Note: Second picture is of Louisville television personality and Voice-Tribune editor Angie Fenton.  

2012 Texans Watch-Back To Back AFC South Champs!

My fave NFL ballers put on their deep steel blue uniforms, shook off the beatdown they received at the hands of the New England Patriots last Monday and welcomed Andrew Luck back home by pinning him and his Indianapolis Colts with a loss at Reliant.


The 29-17 win clinched the AFC South title for the second straight year for the Texans.  They rolled up 417 yards of offense in this game, with Arian Foster leading the way with 165 yards rushing on 27 carries and Andre Johnson catching 11 passes for 151 yards and a touchdown. 

The Bulls on Parade also showed signs of getting back to normal with JJ Watt getting closer to Houstonian Michael Strahan's single season NFL sack record of 22.5.   JJ is having an NFL defensive MVP type season and is at 19.5 sacks after taking Luck to the Reliant Stadium turf three times. 

The Texans also received an early Christmas present a few hours later when the San Francisco 49ers beat the Patriots 41-34 in Foxborough.


All the 12-2 Texans have to do is win one of their two remaining regular season games against either the Minnesota Vikings or the regular season finale versus the Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium and they will clinch the number one seed and home field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs.

Congrats on winning the AFC South title for the second season in a row.  But the eyes of every Texans player and fan are turned east toward New Orleans.   They took a major step toward making that happen today.

Call Me A Flip-Flopper, But I Have Reconsidered And Altered My Position On Guns

TransGriot Note: A must read post from Deep Thought's Eli Blake  

I've been remarkably consistent in my views on guns over the past few decades. Essentially, it has boiled down to the following statement, which I had posted in more places than I can count:

I support your right to own a gun. Any gun.

The Constitutional fact that Americans have the right to be armed aside, I fundamentally believe (as a liberal) that you have the right to read, download, drink, smoke, have sexual activity or whatever as you please as long as you are not harming someone else by it, and therefore also to buy what you please (and if it is a gun, then buy it.) In fact, until recently the debate on guns has been moving further and further to the right, where without changing a single position, I had gone from guns being one issue where I generally agreed with the right (when the debate was about registration and limitations on ownership) to where I was more likely to agree with the left (when the debate had moved past that to trying to force guns into more and more places like public buildings and private businesses over the objections of the business owners.) I summarized this several months ago in this post: The Debate on Guns has been Changing.

Recently though, in light of a spate of deranged gunmen killing large numbers of people, the debate has been moving back the other way. And in theory that would move me back to where I had been focused, against any new restrictions. To restrict individual rights, I believe in a high bar.

That bar has been reached. The slaughter of first grade children at an elementary school yesterday has been the point at which I have to reluctantly agree that the harm to society caused by allowing the ownership of a particular category of weapons-- assault weapons with clips capable of firing large numbers of rounds before reloading, and in rapid succession-- outweighs any good reason one could have for owning one.

And the fact is, this weekend was only a third as bloody as it could have been. In the past 48 hours you didn't read about another school shooting in Bartlesville, Oklahoma because of a brave student informant and an alert school administration, nor about a massacre in a hospital in Alabama this morning because of two alert hospital staff and two police officers, three of whom were wounded but who stopped the gunman before he could shoot anyone else.

You can read the rest of it at his blog

Black Female Intellectuals Chat About A New Black Feminist Reader

I'm not a feminist and identify as a womanist, but I was intrigued to see the note on Dr Kaila Story's (AKA Niece) Facebook page in which she talked about a chat she'd had with Dr. Yaba Blay and Dr. Brittney Cooper

When they aren't teaching their lucky students at their various colleges, Niece is the co-host of the WFPL-FM radio show 'Strange Fruit', Dr. Blay was featured on the recent episode of the CNN series Black In America, and  Dr. Cooper is one of the co-founders of the Crunk Feminist Collective. 

They discussed the persistence of terrible images of Black women in Hip-Hop music and during the course of that discussion, Professors.Story, Blay and Cooper began a dialogue about the need for an updated anthology of Black Feminist Thought.

That what happens when you get three brilliant and accomplished African-descended women chatting about issues in our community.

I hope if that anthology comes to pass and becomes available, Black feminists will take the opportunity to make it explicitly clear where their movement differs from white-dominated feminism.  I hope they call out the maddening tendency of white feminists to engage in cricket chirping silence when prominent Black women such as First Lady Michelle Obama get misogynistic attacks aimed at them, but are in full throated protest if someone even says a bad word or looks crosseyed at a white female no matter what side of the political spectrum she's on.

I commented in the thread I hoped they would condemn the trans exclusionary radical feminists to that discussion.  It is a Black feminist issue since predominately white TERF's have been pushing virulent anti-trans rhetoric for 40 years that I and other trans people believe fuels anti-trans discrimination, negativity toward our community and the anti-trans hate that leads to our murders.   The people who have taken the brunt of those anti-trans murders have been Black and Latina trans women.

If it does happen, it was suggested by Dr. Story that I write that portion of it   And if they do (or someone else) starts working on that updated anthology, should I get the invitation to write that essay, I most certainly will.

Jazz Talks To Barbara Walters On Dating

Y'all know how much I love our little transteen Jazz, a girl like us who was introduced via the first Barbara Walters ABC 20/20 show report on transgender kids.    Jazz is now approaching age 13 and one of the questions Barbara asked in the follow up show that was supposed to air on Friday pertained to dating.

The wise beyond her years trans youngling had some interesting things to say about it, including something that we her trans elders should file away

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Miss International Queen 2012 Is....

After Nigeria's Sahhara got screwed for the 2011 title and it exposed a problematic pattern of dark skinned women and African descended ones not being chosen as the winners for the pageant along with transpinays, in protest yours truly was going to eschew writing a post about the 2012 Miss International Queen contest as had been my blog's tradition.

The controversy over the questionable win of Thailand's Sirapassorn 'Sammy' Atthayakorn over 1st runner up Sahhara and 2nd runner up Margaret (another transpinay representing Lebanon) sparked so much online drama that the Amazing Philippine Beauties pageant organizers considered starting a rival international trans pageant in Manila in the wake of the kerfluffle and transpinays were prepping a boycott of Miss International Queen event..

But when 20 year old Kevin Balot of the Philippines became the first transpinay to win the Miss International Queen title in the nearly decade long history of the event on November 2, had to write something about the groundbreaking win that my transpinay sisters had been anxiously waiting for.  Jessika Simoes of Brazil was 1st runner up fo this year's edition of the Pattaya based event while Thailand's Panvilas Mongkol was 2nd runner up.

What's going to be interesting to observe is whether the Miss International Queen pageant continues to draw contestants in light of the fact the Miss Universe pageant system is opening its doors to transwomen in 2013 and other nations such as Brazil are starting their own national trans pageant events like the one that have existed in the States, Thailand and the Philippines. .

Congratulations Kevin for winning Miss International Queen 2012!