Trans News Worldwide

[smalltownguy]

26 APR 2018

Why Hull's transgender lottery winner Melissa Ede plans to become a celebrity hypnotist
She hopes to be known as 'Mesmerising Melissa' on stage

Transgender lottery millionaire Melissa Ede wants to be a Derren Brown-style celebrity hypnotist.

The 57-year-old, who scooped £4m on a National Lottery scratchcard, hopes to be known as “Mesmerising Melissa” on stage.


The former taxi driver has passed an online Hypnosis for Beginners course with a 100 per cent score.

Melissa Ede

She signed up for it after seeing Derren Brown live in Hull days earlier with her partner, Rachel Nason.

Melissa posted a photo of her certificate on Facebook, with the caption: “The first stage of becoming mesmerising Melissa.”

When asked by a fan if she plans to do live shows, she replied: “Yeah.”

The course, run by hypnotherapy trainer Dan Jones, claims it teaches “the process of doing hypnotic inductions and how to hypnotise anyone without the need for hypnosis scripts”.

Melissa, who has four children, had gender reassignment surgery in 2011 and has become a well-known local figure in Hull.

Melissa Ede won £4 million on a scratch card

She also posts bizarre videos online with items such as a bottle of mayonnaise hanging from her chest.

In her latest video Melissa, formerly known as Les, has also filmed herself dancing around with lollipops and margarita pizzas stuck to her breasts.

Melissa Ede admits she splashes her £4m Lottery win on charity shop bargains

In February it was revealed she had spent over £3,000 on a new look including cheek fillers, Botox, lip fillers, a brow lift and “under-eye plumping”.

[smalltownguy]

Apr 26, 2018

Police: Transgender woman likely knew her attacker

BRIDGEPORT -
Police are investigating what led up to the shooting of a well-known transgender woman.

It happened in an apartment near Park and Stillman streets at around 2 p.m. Wednesday.

Police believe the 49-year-old victim was shot on the first floor of the apartment building.

They say the victim likely knew the suspect, though it's unclear if the suspect was already in the apartment or came to shoot her.

Police say the victim was shot at least once in the face and several times in the arms.

She's unable to speak right now.

News 12 spoke with one of her friends who says she can't believe this happened.

"A lot of people know her here in Bridgeport, she has been living in Bridgeport for a long time, I don't see where she has a problem with anyone," says Alexandra Molina.

Police can only communicate with the victim by notepad right now.

They're hoping once she's able to speak again, they'll be able to determine a motive for the shooting.

connecticut.news12.com

[smalltownguy]

APR 27, 2018

As countries tighten transgender protections, will Switzerland follow?


A proposed Swiss amendment to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity raises many questions about legal recognition and language – for example, on civil documents like passports.

As many countries introduce more legal protections for transgender people, Swiss politicians are examining introducing similar measures. If approved, it will be a victory for transgender rights groups, but implementation may not be easy.

The latest Trans Rights Europe Index 2017 shows much of Western Europe has strengthened transgender rights in some way in the last five years in line with recommendations from the Council of Europe and international human rights standards.

In mid-April, the parliament in Portugal approved a law that made the country only the sixth in Europe to allow a change of gender without medical or state intervention. A month earlier, the Austrian Constitutional Court opened proceedings to repeal state registration of sex and Sweden became the first country in the world to offer compensation to transgender people who were forced to undergo sterilisation to be allowed to change their legal gender. Malta has been at the forefront of transgender rights, recently introducing policies on inclusion in education, healthcare, and prison facilities.

Next year, the Swiss parliament will decide on an amendment (in German) to the Criminal Code that would make hate speech and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity illegal. This would be in addition to race, ethnicity, and religion, which are protected at present. If passed, it would be a victory for the LGBTIQ community in Switzerland, but there is already heated debate on how such a law would be interpreted in practice and where to draw the line between hate speech and free speech.

The passage in Canada last year of Bill C-16, which bans discrimination and hate speech on the basis of gender identity and expression, also unleashed a fiery debate about how to implement such protections when fixed binary gender identities (man and woman or male and female) are so engrained in everything from pronouns to birth certificates.

An important signal
The Swiss parliamentary initiative (in German) to amend Article 261 has been in the pipeline since 2013, when it was presented by Mathias Reynard of the Social Democratic party. The original text only referred to sexual orientation, but gender identity was later added. (See draft language, in German, here.) Following consultations in 2017, the deadline for a vote in parliament was extended until spring 2019.

While transgender people are afforded some protections under current laws, Alecs Recher, head of legal services at the Transgender Network Switzerland (TGNS) (site in German, French and Italian) says passing Art. 261b would “be an important signal that Switzerland does not tolerate hate speech and discrimination against LGBT. It is also a form of prevention, discouraging people from committing such acts.”

There are also real implications for the health and safety of transgender people, says Recher. “The law would make it possible to bring a criminal case against a person who targets transgender people generally with hate speech. Current laws only protect individuals from attacks on someone’s personality or honour” under different articles of the Swiss Criminal Code and Civil Code.

The initiative also adds sexual orientation and gender identity to the prohibited grounds for discrimination in the case that a person refuses to provide someone with a service intended for the general public. Although Article 8 of the Constitution prohibits discrimination in general terms on various grounds including gender and way of life, the new initiative, if passed, would make such acts a criminal offence with a sentence of up to three years or a fine.

There are already some protections from discrimination at work under the Federal Act on Gender Equality. However, high unemployment rates for transgender people, estimated to be around 20% — five to six times higher than average in Switzerland — indicate that challenges remain. A study co-financed by the Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality (EBG), found that around 25% of participants lost their jobs after coming out, or experienced a deterioration of their professional situation.

Recher explains that what really worries him is how transgender people are starting to view discrimination as normal. “When providing legal counselling, I find that people face mobbing, bullying, and discrimination so often that they have come to acknowledge it as a part of life. They don’t even see the use in pursuing legal action or telling someone about the indecent behaviour. Creating more legal protections would send the message that this isn’t tolerated and hopefully give people the confidence to speak up.”

Implementation debate
One of the key points of debate of the C-16 law in Canada is whether the law infringes upon freedom of speech. This was triggered in part by criticism from a University of Toronto professor who refused to use a preferred pronoun for his students, saying it violated his right to free speech.

Consultations (in French and German) in 2017 on the Swiss initiative in the House of Representatives revealed similar tensions and sharp divisions. The majority opinion argued that since transgender people are at above-average risk of suicide due to hate crimes, they warrant special protection. It also refuted arguments by the minority opinion that there are problems with interpreting concepts like gender identity. Representing the minority opinion, Yves Nidegger of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP/UDC), in an article published in French-language newspaper Le Temps, argued that the initiative “would penalize the very groups it claims to protect. No more fitness or women-only hotels since refusing men entry is like denying someone a service because of their sex”. There were also questions about the implications for freedom of expression enshrined in Article 16 of the Constitution.

Recher does not believe that refusing to use a preferred pronoun would qualify as hate speech in Switzerland. “But, it would nevertheless be disrespectful,” he says. This aside, there are still important considerations for putting such a law into practice. This includes questions about legal gender recognition and language. While Swiss law permits a change of legal gender, there is currently no legal gender recognised beside male and female. A few courts in Switzerland still require medical procedures to legally change genders despite the European Court of Human Rights finding that this violates human rights.

Complicating things in Switzerland is the multiple languages in the country. Some transgender people argue that the gender neutral “they” for the singular in the third person makes it easier for the English language to adapt, in contrast to Switzerland’s official languages, German, French, and Italian.

Male, Female or X

A number of countries have recently taken steps to introduce alternatives to binary gender selections. In 2017, the highest court in Germany ruled in favour of the introduction of a third gender in civil documents, making it the first in Europe to do so. The Court said that the Constitution protected the personality rights of individuals who do not define themselves as male or female, adding that the current law on civil status interfered with that right.

Malta, Denmark, Australia, and several other countries allow “X” as an option in passports and other government documents. The Australian passport office states: “We can issue a passport to sex and gender diverse applicants, identifying them as M (male), F (female) or X (indeterminate/intersex/unspecified).” It also includes instructions for people who are transitioning to another sex.

In June 2017, Oregon became the first US state and the District of Columbia became the first city to allow residents to identify as other than male or female on state driver’s licenses.

Companies are also adapting. In 2014, Facebook introduced 56 gender identities to choose from including androgynous, bi-gender, intersex, gender fluid or transsexual. Other sites like Flickr allow users to put “other” while some social media sites have removed gender selection fields altogether.

swissinfo.ch

[smalltownguy]

APRIL 28 2018

Joy Reid Uses Her Show to Apologize

But the MSNBC anchor stuck to her belief that homophobic posts on her blog are from hacking.

BY LUCAS GRINDLEY
APRIL 28 2018 1:57 PM EDT

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid still doesn’t believe she wrote the latest homophobic posts to surface from her old blog, but she apologized today for much of what she does remember saying.

“I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then,” said Reid during her show, AM Joy, on Saturday morning.

A number of homophobic and transphobic writings first surfaced last year from Reid’s time as a commentator in Florida. Some she takes responsibility for, while others that became public this month she claims are the result of someone hacking her blog.

“Many of you have seen these blog posts circulating online and in social media,” she told viewers. “Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory, and outright weird and hateful.” Reid says a friend first discovered them in December and forwarded links. “I was stunned,” she said. “Frankly, I couldn’t imagine where they could have come from or whose voice that was.”

Reid said she hired cyber security experts to track down evidence her blog must’ve been hacked.

“And the reality is they have not been able to prove it,” she conceded on Saturday. The Daily Beast—which also suspended Reid’s column on the site—reported earlier this week that Reid’s claim to be hacked couldn’t be proven. “But here is what I know. I genuinely don’t believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me. But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me.”

Reid then spent much of her time explaining her upbringing and acknowledging her past homophobia.

“I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people want to advocate for,” she said. “I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.” She apologized specifically to the transgender people for once having made transphobic cracks about Ann Coulter, who she also apologized to.

Reid recounted the story of one gay friend who she had failed in particular.

“I can remember a friend of mine, my freshman year in college, telling me he was gay, and my knee-jerk reaction being that it was so disappointing to the women he could have married,” recalled Reid. “He was so hurt, he didn’t speak to me for months. I am heartbroken that I didn’t do better back then.”

Time will tell whether the apology is enough to repair the damage to Reid, with PFLAG rescinding an award for allyship that it had planned to give. After the apology aired, Reid is already receiving support online from colleagues.

[smalltownguy]

By TOI | Saturday | 28th April, 2018

Raipur walks for equality, hosts first transgender fashion show.

Attachment 1071904

The main focus of this show was on the transgender models a nd their fight towards equality. We, as a country have shunned the transgender community for the longest time even if they have been putting up a decent fight. In an attempt at accepting them into society, we have come up with various ways to help them ease into the society. A lot of people had come to the show to show their support for the models and community as well. The walk was one to remember and has created its own unique history in the hearts and minds of the people who attended it.

We, as a country have shunned the transgender community for the longest time even if they have been putting up a decent fight.

In an attempt at accepting them into society, we have come up with various ways to help them ease into the society.

One such attempt was made by the people of Raipur by hosting the first fashion show for them.This show was held at Muktakari Manch at Ghasidas Grahlay, and was an immediate hit.

A lot of people had come to the show to show their support for the models and community as well.

[tao1kiku]

Keep it up. All this is greatly appreciated

[smalltownguy]

April 29, 2018

Health care new front for rollback of transgender rights under Trump

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, lawyer for the LGBT civil rights group Lambda Legal, poses outside his Manhattan office, Friday in New York. Military service, bathroom use, job bias and now health care. The Trump administration is under fire for rewriting a rule barring discrimination in health care due to “gender identity.” Groups representing transgender people expect the Obama protections to be gutted and are preparing to take the administration to court. “The proposed rollback does fit into a pattern of transphobia and anti-LGBT sentiment in this administration,” said Gonzalez-Pagan. Bebeto Matthews — The Associated Press

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, The Associated Press
POSTED: 04/29/18, 9:37 AM EDT

WASHINGTON >> Military service. Bathroom use. Job bias. And now, health care.

The Trump administration is coming under fire for rewriting a federal rule that bars discrimination in health care due to “gender identity.” Critics say it’s another attempt to undercut acceptance for transgender people.

The Health and Human Services Department rule dates to the Obama administration, a time when LGBT people gained political and social recognition. But a federal judge in Texas said the rule went too far by concluding that discrimination on the basis of gender identity is a form of sex discrimination, which is forbidden by civil rights laws.

Instead of appealing the judge’s injunction, the Trump administration has opted to rewrite the rule, which applies to health care providers and insurers receiving federal funds.

Roger Severino, head of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, said the rewrite will address the “reasonableness, necessity and efficacy” of the Obama-era requirement. He refused to discuss specifics, as the revision is under White House review before its official release.

Groups representing transgender people expect the Obama protections to be gutted and are preparing to take the administration to court.

“The proposed rollback does fit into a pattern of transphobia and anti-LGBT sentiment in this administration,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization.

He ran through a checklist: President Donald Trump’s call to bar military service by transgender people; Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ memo concluding that civil rights laws don’t protect transgender people from discrimination on the job; the override of Obama-era guidance that allowed transgender students to use school bathrooms that matched their gender identities.

Social and religious conservatives are one of the administration’s most steadfast constituencies, and the White House has been out front championing their causes, including restrictions on abortion and legal protections for health care providers with moral and religious qualms about particular procedures.

Behind the latest health care dispute is a medically-recognized condition called “gender dysphoria” — discomfort or distress caused by a discrepancy between the gender that a person identifies as and their gender at birth. Consequences can include severe depression. Treatment can range from sex-reassignment surgery and hormones to people changing their outward appearance by adopting a different hairstyle or clothing.

Under the Obama-era rule, a hospital could be required to perform gender-transition procedures such as hysterectomies if the facility provided that kind of treatment for other medical conditions. The rule was meant to carry out the anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act, which bars sex discrimination in health care but does not use the term “gender identity.”

In the Texas case, a Catholic hospital system, several states, and a Christian medical association argued that the rule went beyond the law as written and would coerce providers to act against their medical judgment and religious beliefs.

That rule “would have forced doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children, even if that would be against their best medical judgment and they believed it would be harmful to the child,” said Luke Goodrich, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is involved in the case.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that for children who have yet to reach puberty, gender transition does not involve any medical interventions, but instead focuses on social changes such as clothing and calling the child by another name.

The Becket Fund responded that the Obama administration did not limit the application of its nondiscrimination rule to adults.

UCLA legal scholar Jocelyn Samuels oversaw drafting of the anti-discrimination rule while in the Obama administration, and says it reflected established legal precedent that transgender people are protected under federal sex discrimination laws. “The case law on whether sex discrimination includes gender identity has been pretty clear for quite a while,” said Samuels.

The original rule did not override either the medical judgment or religious beliefs of providers, said Samuels, arguing those are protected by other laws.

The timetable for the Trump administration’s proposed changes is uncertain, but the rewrite isn’t likely to settle the debate. The transgender controversy could follow the path of other Trump initiatives to the Supreme Court. ACLU attorney Joshua Block said that five federal appeals courts have ruled that discrimination based on gender identity violates federal laws against sex discrimination.

In Congress, a GOP advocate for transgender rights is urging the administration to re-evaluate. Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., came to the U.S. from Cuba as a child.

“I fled from a communist regime to come to this land of opportunity and freedom, where if you work hard and are a responsible member of society, you have the ability to get ahead,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “That principle should apply to anyone, including transgender Americans. I urge the administration to guide its policies under the premise of freedom, opportunity and equality.”

One of Ros-Lehtinen’s children is a transgender man.

[johncock0]

This administration perhaps someone in particular in the administration is focused on this topic and out to get them, I think. Hateful beings.

[smalltownguy]

1 MAY 2018

Caitlyn Jenner 'to marry transgender student 47 YEARS her junior' as it's revealed she 'hasn't met' Khloe and Kim's babies

The former Olympian and reality star is reportedly planning to tie the knot in an intimate ceremony

Caitlyn Jenner has said time and time again that she's "just friends" with blonde bombshell Sophia Hutchins.

But now, it's being reported that they're getting married!

After their close friendship was described as a "mother and daughter" relationship, it's now said they've been dating in recent weeks.

And things are getting serious very quickly - despite their 47-year age gap.

If Caitlyn, 68, married 21-year-old transgender student Sophia, it would be her fourth marriage.

Before transitioning in 2015, she tied the knot three times as Bruce - to Chrystie Crownover in 1972, Linda Thompson in 1981, and to Kris Jenner in 1991.

Caitlyn Jenner's post-surgery sex life revealed - as sources claim she's dating a model 47 years her junior

Caitlyn is reportedly getting married (Image: ITV Picture Desk)

Caitlyn had denied dating Sophia in the past (Image: Getty Images North America)

Caitlyn has six biological children - two with each wife - and was step-father to Kris' kids, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob Kardashian.

Now, a source close to the star has told Heat magazine: "Cait really sees herself spending the rest of her life with Sophia.

"She lost her support system when she fell out with her family and these days, it feels like Sophia's the only person she can count on."

Earlier this year, it's said that Caitlyn turned to Sophia when her relationship with the Kardashians began to break down.

She was married to Kris Jenner before she transitioned (Image: Instagram)

She's hardly been in touch with the famous family ever since she took a massive swipe at ex Kris in her autobiography, The Secrets Of My Life, released last year.

The source added to the mag: "Cait is a complete outcast at the moment. She has also lost friends in the LGBT community because of her political views [backing Donald Trump].

"She was really hoping to reconnect with the Kardashians, especially with Khloe and Kim having had babies, but sadly she hasn't met them, and she hasn't even got to spend much time with her new granddaughter Stormi [Kylie Jenner's baby]. She just wants some companionship and really felt all alone before she met Sophia."

Caitlyn and Sophia live together and are rarely seen without one another by their sides.

They're reportedly planning an intimate ceremony near Caitlyn's home in Malibu.

However, a source close to Caitlyn told Mirror Online that while they could be dating, marriage isn't on the cards just yet.

Back in January, Caitlyn made a number of revelations during her tell-all interview on Piers Morgan's Life Stories.

And she said at the time she was open to dating men and women.

She said: "It could be either. I don't know. It is kind of fun so see the world from the girl's side. You know."

[smalltownguy]

May 3, 2018

India’s largest transgender festival kicks off

Celebrated every year at the Koothandavar Temple in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Koovagam - the country’s largest transgender festival - kicked off recently.

The festival attracts transvestites from all parts of India to participate in a re-enactment of a tale of Mahabharata.

It commemorates the myth of Hindu Lord Krishna taking female form in order to marry Lord Aravan – a warrior who fought the Mahabharata War against rivals - for which trangenders dress up in a symbolic act to marry Lord Aravan.

The next day they mourn the death of Aravan - who sacrificed his life on the battlefield – by breaking their bangles.



Koovagam lasts for about 18 days and is considered as the biggest jamboree for the gender.

The unique gathering also entails various beauty pageants, seminars (that discuss basic transgender rights), music and dance competitions and events.