Trans News Worldwide

[smalltownguy]

August 5, 2019

Victoria's Secret just cast its first transgender model & she's a total babe

Valentina Sampaio confirms her Victoria's Secret casting, making her the first openly transgender model hired by the brand

The news comes less than year after Victoria Secret's chief marketing officer, Ed Razek made controversial comments about transgender models

Sampaio confirmed the news on Instagram, with the 23-year-old sharing behind-the-scenes pictures from her new VS Pink shoot

Less than a week after rumours started circulating that the 2019 Victoria's Secret show might be cancelled, the brand appears to have hired its first transgender model, Valentina Sampaio.

23-year-old Sampaio announced the news on Instagram by sharing a behind-the-scene picture of her shooting for VS Pink.

Less than a year ago, Victoria's Secret's chief marketing officer Ed Razek faced backlash for his comments about transgender models, specifying why they wouldn't be included in the show:

"Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy," he said.

Razek subsequently apologised for his remarks but, for many, the damage was already done.

"My remark regarding the inclusion of transgender models in the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show came across as insensitive. I apologize," said Razek. "To be clear, we absolutely would cast a transgender model for the show. We've had transgender models come to castings... And like many others, they didn't make it... But it was never about gender. I admire and respect their journey to embrace who they really are."

The new recruit comes a week after VS model Shanina Shaik claimed the 2019 show is cancelled.

"Unfortunately the Victoria's Secret show won't be happening this year," Shanina told The Daily Telegraph. "It's something I'm not used to because every year around this time I'm training like an angel."

"But I'm sure in the future something will happen, which I'm pretty sure about," she continued. "I'm sure they're trying to work on branding and new ways to do the show because it's the best show in the world."

To be honest, we're not 100% sure what's going on with this year's show, but let's not allow all that noise get in the way of congratulating Valentina on her kickass gig - we're definitely looking forward to seeing more from this bombshell!

[smalltownguy]

Aug 05, 2019

Lok Sabha passes Transgender persons protection of rights bill

TAGS # India

The bill was introduced on July 19

The Lok Sabha on August 5 passed a bill which provides a mechanism for social, economic and educational empowerment of transgenders.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2019 was passed by a voice vote amid noisy protests by some opposition parties over Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury not being allowed to speak on his adjournment notice.

The bill was introduced on July 19.

Replying on the bill, Minister of State for Social Justice Rattan Lal Kataria said it makes provision for establishing a national authority for safeguarding rights of transgenders.

The minister said according to the 2011 census there are more than 4.80 lakh transgenders in the country.

He said in the bill there are provisions for penalty and punishment in cases of offences and sexual harassment against transgender persons.

A contentious provision that criminalised begging by transgender people has been removed from the bill. The provision was part of the bill when it was introduced by the previous government. The bill had lapsed.

According to the bill, a transgender is a person whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth and includes trans-man or trans-woman (whether or not such person has undergone sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapy or laser therapy or such other therapy), person with inter-sex variations, gender-queer and person having such socio-cultural identities as 'kinner', 'hijra', 'aravani' and 'jogta'.

Going by the bill, a person would have the right to choose to be identified as a man, woman or transgender, irrespective of sex reassignment surgery and hormonal therapy.

It also requires transgender persons to go through a district magistrate and district screening committee to get certified as a trans person.
Earlier participating in the debate on the bill, BJP MP Manoj Tiwari said transgenders are symbol of happiness. They visit homes of people during the time of celebrations and happiness and it is also important to save their culture and heritage.

[smalltownguy]

Aug 08, 2019

Cricket Australia introduces new, inclusive rules for trans, gender-diverse players

SYDNEY: Cricket Australia unveiled new guidelines Thursday to ensure transgender players can take part in the game at the highest levels.

The policy sets out a testosterone limit for transgender and gender-diverse players who want to play for state and national women's teams.

"It doesn't make any sense that today, people are discriminated against, harassed or excluded, because of who they are," Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts said in a statement.

To be eligible for elite women's teams, the players must show a testosterone concentration of less than 10 nanomoles per litre over at least 12 months.

They must also be able to demonstrate their elected gender is consistent with how they are living their lives on a daily basis.

The move more closely aligns Australia to the International Cricket Council's (ICC) gender diversity guidelines.

Cricket Australia's policy also provides guidance to community clubs, supporting grassroots cricketers to compete as the gender with which they identify.

The guidelines cover everything from victimisation to privacy and providing suitable facilities, as well as the collection of personal information.

Transgender participation in sport has proved a thorny issue with some prominent stars, including tennis great Martina Navratilova, voicing disquiet.

[smalltownguy]

Aug 8, 2019

Second transgender woman of color shot to death in SC in 15 days

After two black transgender women were killed in South Carolina in just over two weeks, Charleston and national LGBTQ groups say the situation is “an absolute state of emergency.”

The latest victim was identified as 24-year-old Dime Doe by family and the Alliance for Full Acceptance, a Charleston-based LGBTQ advocacy organization.

Doe was found Sunday by a passerby, slumped over the steering wheel of her car in the area of Concord Church and Barnwell roads in Allendale County, according to the State Law Enforcement Division. She had been shot.

“This disturbing rash of violence underscores how dangerous it is to simply exist as a transgender person in America, particularly for transgender women of color,” said Sarah McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights organization.

Little information on the circumstances surrounding Doe’s death was available as of Thursday, and Allendale County law enforcement agencies declined to release basic information about the case.

Repeated requests to the Allendale County Coroner’s Office for the victim’s name, age and cause and manner of death were denied.

When asked to explain why the information was being withheld, a Coroner’s Office representative said, “All I can say is I’m not releasing anything.”

The Allendale County Sheriff’s Office declined to release an incident report on Wednesday despite SLED clearing the report for release. A sheriff’s representative could not be reached Thursday.

Doe’s death comes about two weeks after Denali Stuckey, a 29-year-old transgender woman of color, was fatally shot July 20 in North Charleston.

Chase Glenn, AFFA’s executive director, said Doe’s death should be a wake-up call to the broader community.

“We are sounding the alarm,” Glenn said. “We are in an absolute state of emergency for black transgender women.”

The motives behind the homicide aren’t known but these kinds of crimes are often fueled by prejudice, racism and misogyny, he said.

“Black trans women live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, are too often treated as disposable and are experiencing epidemic levels of violence,” Glenn said.

Doe is the fourth transgender woman of color killed in South Carolina since 2018.

In 2018, at least 26 transgender people were killed in incidents of violence nationwide, according to the Human Rights Campaign. So far in 2019, 15 trans people have been killed.

[smalltownguy]

August 07, 2019

Teen arrested in fatal shooting of transgender woman

William Watson faces charges of second-degree murder, attempted murder

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. - A teenager was arrested Monday in connection with the fatal shooting of a transgender woman in Miami-Dade County's Goulds neighborhood.

According to Miami-Dade police detectives, a witness identified William Watson as Marquis "Kiki" Fantroy's killer in a photo lineup. Records show Watson is in foster care.

The 21-year-old transgender woman died July 31 after an early morning shooting near her home.

According to the arrest report, Watson got upset during a conversation, shot at a person officers identified as "Victim Bell" and then started chasing and shooting at Fantroy.

Detectives said Watson ran after her and shot at her several times.

Fantroy was near a corner where Southwest 115th Court and Southwest 116th Avenue meet, north of Southwest 224th Street, when she collapsed, police said.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue personnel took her to Jackson South Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

Fantroy was the 13th transgender woman killed this year in the U.S. and all of them have been African-American, TransGriot reported. Advocates reported 26 transgender women were killed in the U.S. in 2018 and 29 were killed in 2017.

Watson faces a charge of second-degree murder and an attempted murder charge.

[smalltownguy]

August 09, 2019

Judge: School District Violated Trans Student Gavin Grimm's Rights

The Gloucester County, Va., School Board violated transgender student Gavin Grimm’s constitutional rights by denying him use of the boys’ restroom while in high school, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The board violated Grimm’s equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as his right to be free of sex discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law, Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled. She also ordered the school district to update the high school transcripts for Grimm, who graduated in 2017, to reflect his male gender and provide copies to him within 10 days.

The ruling is the latest chapter in a long legal saga that at one point appeared ready to go to the Supreme Court and perhaps still could. In 2014, at the beginning of his sophomore year, Grimm and his mother informed school administrators that the student, who was assigned female at birth, would express his male gender identity in all aspects of his life. Administrators agreed he could use the boys’ restroom at Gloucester High School, and he did so for two months without incident.

But in December of that year, the board adopted a policy forcing him to use a single-stall restroom, something he found stigmatizing and inconvenient to the point that he avoided consuming liquids during the school day. He filed suit in 2015 with representation by the American Civil Liberties Union and its Virginia affiliate.

Another judge in the Eastern District sided with the school board in a 2015 ruling, but the following year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned that decision, ruling that under Title IX and the Obama administration’s guidance on its application, Grimm had suffered unlawful discrimination. The Obama administration had held that discrimination based on gender identity was a form of sex discrimination, and it issued guidelines saying schools should allow transgender students access to restrooms and changing rooms consistent with their gender identity.

The Supreme Court was set to hear the school board’s appeal in 2017 but decided not to after the Trump administration revoked the Obama-era guidelines and adopted a more narrow interpretation of Title IX. It vacated the appeals court ruling and sent the case back to the district court for consideration in the absence of the guidance, meaning it had to be decided based only on the constitutional issues and Title IX, which courts are still free to interpret as they see fit.

Wright Allen last year denied the school district’s motion to dismiss the case, and Friday she granted Grimm’s motion for summary judgment, the legal term for a ruling that comes without a full trial but with consideration of the facts of the case. “This is a ruling that doesn’t just take our word for it,” ACLU attorney Joshua Block told The Advocate.

It’s unknown so far if the school district will appeal the ruling. The Advocate has requested comment but has not yet received a response. Virginia media outlets said the district is expected to appeal.

Grimm and his attorneys welcomed the ruling, which holds that the school district violated Grimm’s rights from the time it adopted the restrictive policy until his graduation.

“It is such a relief to achieve this closure and vindication from the court after four years of fighting not just for myself, but for trans youth across America,” Grimm said in an ACLU press release. “I promise to continue to advocate for as long as it takes for everyone to be able to live their authentic lives freely, in public, and without harassment and discrimination.”

The Human Rights Campaign also praised the ruling. “Every student should feel safe at school, regardless of gender identity. Transgender students are covered by Title IX and the United States Constitution and are entitled to the same rights and protections as every other student,” said Cathryn Oakley, HRC state legislative director and senior counsel, in a press release. “With the Trump-Pence administration’s barrage of attacks on LGBTQ people in this country, including against students, we are pleased that yet another federal court decision has reaffirmed legal rights and dignity of transgender people. Congratulations to Gavin Grimm and the American Civil Liberties Union on this milestone victory.”

[smalltownguy]

August 14, 2019

Pennsylvania to become latest state offering gender-neutral IDs

Pennsylvania moves to offer a gender-neutral option on state IDs

Pennsylvania is among a handful of states driving the charge towards gender-inclusive licenses

PHILADELPHIA – Last spring, Dexter Rose walked into a Philadelphia Driver and Photo License Center with a “Request for Gender Change” form. Handwritten on the form was a box with the single letter “X” scribbled in under gender.

Rose, a social worker, identifies as a trans-non-binary individual and prefers gender-neutral pronouns like “they/them/their” — for years she felt uncomfortable choosing between the male and female option on the state ID form.

Dexter Rose, is a Gender Affirming Services Specialist with the Mazzoni Center.

“It didn’t feel very affirming to have to draw in the box, and then not know if PennDOT [Pennsylvania Department of Transportation] would honor the form,” said Rose. “The whole process was scary.”

Nearly one year later, the agency is expected to change its policy and drivers in the state will have three options when it comes to identifying themselves on their driver’s licenses and state IDs: male, female, and X.

Rose said the change is a big step forward and a victory for members of the LGBTQ community.

"This change will give people access, and that's important," said Rose.

According to Alexis Campbell, a spokesperson for PennDOT, the change comes in response to a growing number of residents asking for gender-neutral ID options and “national trends.”

"PennDOT is glad to offer a license that is inclusive of everybody and can accurately reflect who they are," said Campbell.

Pennsylvania is part of a growing number of states that are allowing ID holders to choose their gender, or no gender, no matter what their birth certificate says.

Three years ago, no one in the U.S. was legally recognized as neither male or female. Today, seven states and Washington D.C. allow people to change their gender without a doctor's signature, and 13 states have a policy in place allowing drivers to obtain a gender-neutral marker on their driver's licenses and identification cards.

Most recently, New Hampshire passed a law creating a gender-neutral option for driver’s licenses, which will take effect in January. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu allowed the bill to become law without his signature on July 10.

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Transportation believes it can make the change without action by the General Assembly, said Campbell.

But there has been pushback by some conservative groups that say the change is impractical and ripe for abuse.

In Pennsylvania, the socially conservative Pennsylvania Family Institute said identification documents are legal documents, which should reflect objective facts, like biological sex. The group also objected to the fact that no documentation would be needed to prove gender identity.

“Proponents of the legislation provide no answers to the many practical questions it raises,” said Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, in a statement. “If our state starts discarding biological sex from our identity documents, it will impact law enforcement, insurances, and medical care.”

Republican lawmakers echoed those concerns.

“It’s an unnecessary change,” said state Rep. Tedd Nesbit. He said removing a gender marker on IDs could make it more difficult for police to relay identifying information.

State Rep. Lynda Schlegel-Culver, also a Republican, said an immediate concern would be whether the change would create problems in complying with the federal REAL ID requirements.

But PennDOT officials insist this is a change that is long overdue.

A National Center for Transgender Equality survey released in 2016, which included 28,000 transgender respondents, found 69 percent of Pennsylvanians said their IDs listed a gender that did not reflect their gender identity.

Of the Pennsylvanians who participated in the survey, 30 percent said they’d been verbally harassed, denied service or assaulted after they provided an ID that did not reflect the gender with which they identified.

"Everyone deserves to have something in their pocket that accurately shows who they are," said Campbell.

Rose agreed.

"It feels good to have identification the reflects who really am," Rose said.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said that by spring 2020, motorists in the state who don’t want to disclose their gender will be able to place an “X” on their driver’s licenses instead of identifying themselves as male or female.

[smalltownguy]

August 20, 2019

Trans Teens, Trailed by Homelessness

In California and other states, transgender and non-binary people are more likely to be unsheltered than any other unhoused population.

The decision to leave home wasn’t easy for Greyson. After his mother was deported to Mexico, he’d been almost single-handedly taking care of his two younger sisters and his father, who was addicted to drugs. When he was 15, the family made plans to move from California’s East Bay down to Mexico, too. As a trans person, Greyson was scared. He had heard horror stories of beatings and assaults of LGBTQ people.

“It’s dangerous existing [there],” said Greyson, who didn’t share his last name. “It was either get murdered, kill myself, or run away.” He chose the third option.

That landed him in a homeless shelter in West Oakland for the next four days. There, Greyson found something he’s never known: peers who welcomed him. “It was my first real taste of having queer family,” he said. “It was wild how many there were.”

From the shelter, Greyson went to two mental hospitals, and then a series of foster care group homes in the Bay Area. When he spoke to CityLab last month in Berkeley, he said he was about to be kicked out of the latest housing program in Walnut Creek. He hoped to find an apartment with his girlfriend. “I might actually end up homeless for a bit, which is going to suck,” he said. “It’s better than my family.”

Greyson’s story is just one in a chorus of many from trans and non-binary people who are unhoused, unsheltered, or unsure where they’ll find a place to sleep next. Though trans people only make up a fraction of a percentage of the entire population of people living in homelessness, a significant proportion of transgender Americans—about a third, according to a 2015 survey—become homeless at some point in their lives. National figures from the 2018 point-in-time (PIT) count reveal that they’re more likely to be unsheltered than other populations. And of all the trans and non-binary homeless people counted nationally, a 2018 National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) analysis found that California was home to half of them.

Nationally, an estimated 40 percent of unhoused youth in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ. In some California cities, that proportion is higher: According to San Francisco’s 2019 PIT count, 46 percent of all unhoused youth are LGBTQ, nearly a quarter of whom identify as transgender and non-binary. In Alameda County, where the latest available demographic data comes from 2017’s PIT count and where they do not specify how many youth respondents were also LGBTQ, about 0.7 percent of the total number of unhoused youth identified as transgender. Preliminary data from Alameda County’s 2019 PIT count reveals that homelessness has leaped 43 percent overall since then.

Greyson says that many queer youth, particularly those who have transitioned or plan to, become homeless the way he did—they’re either kicked out of their house, or they flee because they don’t feel safe there. “For younger people, there’s a lot of family rejection that leads to them being homeless,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of NAEH.

But once trans and non-binary people become homeless, they’re also more likely to avoid the shelter system than cisgender peers: 48 percent of cisgender unhoused adults were counted as unsheltered in 2018, according to NAEH, compared to 56 percent of transgender unhoused adults, and more than 80 percent of non-binary unhoused adults.

“For some people, being homeless is the worst thing in the whole free world, so they think, ‘Why wouldn’t you stay in a shelter?’ But that’s a very privileged perspective,” said Christopher Rodriguez, the program manager at Castro Youth Housing Initiative with Larkin Street Youth Services, San Francisco’s organization for homeless youth. “You could be raped in a shelter.”

The connection between homelessness and sexual violence isn’t just a problem for LGBTQ people, nor is it a problem that’s less prevalent on the street: The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that within 48 hours of leaving home, a third of teens will be recruited into sex work. Rodriguez says that often, it takes just 72 hours for youth to be propositioned for sex. Many young people find life on the streets safer than shelters, and trans and non-binary people may avoid them because they’re often misgendered or forced to go to the shelter that matches their birth certificate. That can cause psychologically damaging feelings of gender dysphoria, and can compound the violence and threats from other shelter residents.

“They don’t feel like it’s clear what kind of facilities they should use, and they don’t think that the regular assessments that get used for everybody necessarily address what their problems are,” said Roman.

In 2012, the Department of Housing and Urban Development established the Equal Access rule, which was meant to stop shelters and support centers from discriminating based on sexual orientation or gender identity. But in May, HUD published a proposed change to the rule, which would allow shelter providers to use an unhoused person’s sex to determine where to—or whether to—house them in certain sex-separated facilities, depending on each providers’ “privacy, safety, practical concerns, religious beliefs.” HUD insists that the rule would still bar discrimination based on sex or gender identity, but this could make shelter conditions a lot worse, said Roman, and push more trans and non-binary people onto the streets.

For trans people just as much as anyone else, Greyson says the core problem is intergenerational poverty and lack of affordable housing. Trans and non-binary people are particularly economically vulnerable: They’re three times more likely to make less than $10,000 per year, according to True Colors United, a national advocacy organization for LGBTQ unhoused youth; trans people of color are four times more likely to be unemployed. “Without [housing], you can’t get a job, you can’t get mail. You’re basically stuck if you’re homeless, and it’s that way on purpose,” he said. “The government and society doesn’t want people at the bottom to rise any more than they’re allowed to. I think a lot needs to change.”

How to make a safer shelter...

Bobbi, who is 23 and declined to share her last name, went up to San Francisco from San Jose last year, arriving with a few friends to visit the S.F. Art Institute. She fell in love with the city immediately—the energy, the hills, the beaches, the people, the neighborhood bars in the historic Castro neighborhood, which has long been a haven for the LGBTQ community. But outside one of those bars one night out, she and her friends were “confronted by this older white guy,” she said. There was an altercation; Bobbi defended herself, she says, and landed in jail for three months.

After her release, she turned to Larkin Street Youth Services, a San Francisco-based organization that runs housing programs and shelters for unhoused people ages 18 to 24.

For Bobbi, the shelter environment at Larkin Street’s 40-person “Lark-Inn” was just too hectic. She returned to San Jose for a time, couch-surfing and crashing where she could, as she had since she was 15. “Everything was just kind of bland there for me,” she said. “I kept thinking where was the last place where I was genuinely happy, and I kept thinking: San Francisco.” So she returned, and was re-admitted to the shelter.

For most of her life, she had identified as trans, though she kept that information mostly to herself. But when she confided in one of the shelter leaders, he told her about a new program Larkin Street was developing—a transitional house built specifically for trans homeless youth.

The Larkin Street house, a light-filled Victorian home in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, opened in March. Run by Larkin’s Castro Youth Housing Initiative, it’s the only program like it in the country, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Six trans youth ages 18 to 24 can live there at once, and can stay for up to two years, during which time they’re paired with case managers and connected with social services, job training, and education. They’re also given HIV prevention tools, supported if they choose to medically transition, and equipped with savings accounts managed by Larkin Street.

“It’s a client-led path, so the clients will tell us what they want, and we’ll help them work on it,” said Larkin Street’s Rodriguez, who is also the director of the house. “The ideal would be they go to a two-year college, work in a coffee shop in the weekends, save up some money, and at the end of two years, they’ll get their [associate] degree, we’ll give them back their savings account, they’ll move into a roommate situation with a friend that they met in our program … and just move on. And have only one experience of homelessness.”

By focusing on comprehensive support in this critical time in a young person’s life, Rodriguez says Larkin wants to reduce long-term homelessness. “Half of the chronically homeless adults were homeless when they were in the transitional age youth bracket,” he said.

Bobbi was wary of moving into such a brand-new program after the chaos of the shelter system—“I’m a bit of a control freak,” she says—but she says she feels safe there. A garden, tended to by local volunteers, blooms outside. There’s a large TV in the dining room, where Bobbi says she and her roommates gather to watch Netflix.

For those who can access it, the program could be transformative, but it has only six beds. (When CityLab visited in August, only four were taken.) In the East Bay, where Greyson lives, there are no shelters specially carved out for trans unhoused people. But even traditional shelters can retool their programming to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people, says Roman. Along with the Equal Access Rule, HUD published guidance for shelter managers on how to use inclusive language, create appropriate facilities, and maintain confidentiality around what medication people are taking and what sex they were assigned at birth. Under the Trump administration, this guidance has been removed from HUD’s website, but it’s still up on the NAEH’s site.

More data on the magnitude of the problem is needed, Roman says, in order for there to be more resources dedicated. Point-in-time counts are infamous for undercounting all homeless populations, especially unhoused youth, who may be staying with a friend on the night the count is conducted but are still technically homeless. And trans and non-binary people are likely to be particularly wary of sharing personal information about themselves with people conducting the counts.

Roman says she was surprised that, based on NAEH’s analysis of the 2018 PIT count, transgender people were not technically disproportionately homeless: They make up 0.6 percent of the entire U.S. population, and 0.5 percent of the unhoused population. But Greyson and other trans homeless youth said that this reflects the flaws of reporting rather than the reality of the situation. “It’s wild recognizing how many people in my [trans] community are homeless, and also of color,” he said.

Transgender and non-binary people “were found in almost every state and two-thirds of the Continua of Care in the U.S,” NAEH’s analysis of 2018 PIT count data found. L.A. had the highest number of transgender people experiencing homelessness.

The concentration of unhoused LGBTQ people in California cities like L.A. and San Francisco can be explained in part by the historically welcoming nature of those places, says Rodriguez. “Everyone’s like, ‘I’m seeking safety and I came to San Francisco’ because that’s what we’re known for,” he said. “They’re often surprised that we’re in a housing crisis.”

The road to “normal”
Greyson spends a few afternoons a month at Youth Spirit Artworks, a Berkeley-based nonprofit jobs training program for homeless and low-income youth that uses art for skill-building. Warm and soft-spoken, he’s beloved there. A peer lit up when they saw him sitting at the table outside. “I love you, Greyson,” they said.

The community Greyson has found there, like the one he found in those first days at the West Oakland shelter, is another valuable source of support. It’s those kinds of connections that places like the Larkin Street transitional house want to foster, too.

“What we do here is provide mutual support from peers,” Rodriguez said. “Chosen families are very important … finding a group of friends that have something deeply in common that will come help you in the middle of the night.”

That chosen family—along with therapy—can help youth address the severe mental health issues that afflict the trans community: A 2018 American Academy of Pediatrics study found that 50 percent of adolescents (ages 11 to 19 years old) who had transitioned from male to female had attempted suicide. “Literally every trans and queer person I know has mental illness; most of it is PTSD,” said Greyson, who adds that more trans-centered housing options would help a lot. “If you’re trans you’re already turned away enough. You might as well be with people who understand the struggle you’re going through.”

After a few months in the house, Bobbi feels she’s on the right path to start a new life. “For the longest time, it was like, about surviving,” she said. “Just wondering where I was going to stay at night. This has been kind of the first time I’ve been super-stable and I feel like that’s something that’s given me the freedom to explore what I want.”

Growing up, Bobbi says, her parents were homeless; her aspirations always revolved around making a lot of money and having somewhere to stay. Now that she’s been saving up and has a roof over her head, she’s realized that “I could do so much more than that.” She’s getting her GED, and will use it to apply for a scholarship to the Arts Institute. There, Bobbi wants to study culinary arts, but she’s also exploring hair and makeup—she’s been practicing on her roommates.

“’Normal’ has such a negative connotation to it, but that’s my goal,” said Bobbi. “I want to come home after a 9-to-5 and just think about work. I want to have these things, and finally feel normal and complete.”

[smalltownguy]

AUGUST 24, 2019

Transgender women, gay men aggressively removed from bar

LOS ANGELES -- A video posted online and viewed more than 36,000 times shows security guards forcibly removing a group of transgender women and gay men from a bar in downtown Los Angeles Friday, KTLA reported.

The guards at Las Perlas on 107 E. 6th St. are seen grabbing at the patrons and dragging them out of the door. At one point, a woman could be heard yelling, "don't touch me like that," as she struggled with the bouncer who was grabbing at her arms.

Another visibly distressed woman looks on at the camera as a man wraps his arm around her neck and drags her out, video shows.

The group was made up of staff and volunteers from Bienestar Human Services, a non-profit social services organization for Latino and LGBTQ groups. According to KTLA, they say they were unfairly treated because of their identity.

They were at the bar celebrating the first day of a local LGBTQ festival when they were approached by a man and a woman who "who began to aggressively misgender them, call them 'men' and shout transphobic slurs," Bienestar said in a news release.

"The group of trans women tried to de-escalate the situation, then the couple shouted and threatened the group by saying, 'We will come back and kill you,'" the non-profit said.

Police could be seen responding to the scene in another video.

The Los Angeles Police Department told KTLA that officers responded to a report of a hate crime at about 10 p.m. and took a statement from a person removed from the bar.

Las Perlas issued a statement after videos of the incident were shared online. The bar's spokesperson said that an escalated verbal altercation broke out among two groups of guests at Las Perlas.

"Our manager on duty asked both groups to leave as the safety and security of our patrons and employees is our top priority and we have zero tolerance for this type of behavior in our establishments," the statement read. "The guards removed the guests that were not compliant with the manager's request to leave and did so in accordance with company policy."

The spokesperson called the incident "rare" and "unfortunate" and said the bar has provided "an inclusive and welcoming environment."

The business said they will be donating all profits made during the LGBTQ festival to Bienestar Human Services.

The non-profit said that its members and volunteers were treated with much more aggression than the man and woman who they say started the altercation.

"While the heterosexual couple was asked to leave the establishment, the group of trans women were approached by bar security staff and eventually physically and aggressively removed from the bar," Bienestar said.

The videos shared online drew outrage from community members, some of whom said they plan to boycott Las Perlas .

“Our trans community does not feel safe, especially after our lives being threatened," said Bienestar Human Services program manager, Khloe Perez-Rios, who recorded the video of the incident. "Las Perlas must answer for how this situation was handled – and being next door to Redline, an LGBTQ-focused bar, this is unacceptable. Our community demands answers and action.”

Los Angeles saw an increase in hate crime reports last year, with members of the LGBTQ community being among the most frequently targeted groups, according to an Aug. 2018 report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

The LAPD reported an almost 40% increase in hate incidents related to victims' sexual orientation between 2017 and 2018, according to the report.

[collinswriters]

For most of the shootings/news you guys post here, are you sure they happened because of their gender/sexual identity? A lot of people are shot and killed every day for so many reasons. I don't get it.