Federal Judge: California Must Provide Trans Inmate with Access to Gender-Affirming Surgery
A federal judge has ruled that a transgender inmate in California must be granted access to gender-affirming surgery that her prison doctors have deemed medically necessary.
Mitch Kellaway
My Life Would Not Be Possible Without Feminism
I recently got married. I have two children. I own a house, and I have a full-time job. At first glance, none of these circumstances may strike you as remarkable. In fact, maybe you share in many of them. But if I had been born even 50 years earlier, I wouldn’t have many of the rights that I have now to love who I love, make choices about my body and own property.
I don’t want to bore you with a long history of feminism, first and foremost, because I don’t know the long history of feminism, but I do know this: Without it, my life would not be possible. In the mid-1800s, women in the U.S. earned the right to own property. This might not seem like a big deal, but at the time women were property.
That’s right. The husband owned the wife, the land and the money. If the husband died, sometimes the wife was allowed to own his property, but she wasn’t allowed to do anything with it. It just had her name on it, which was actually his name. The whole point was to keep the property — the woman and the land and the money — in the family or owned by the brothers, the sons and the fathers. This had far-ranging implications.
It still forms the foundation of many of our current arguments about pro-choice and abortions. It still impacts the laws that we have about who can marry and why. It’s the reason that we objectify women’s bodies and try to outlaw yoga pants. But here is how it affects me.
After I graduated from college, an idea that only made sense if I was going to contribute something to society besides children and clean laundry, I got a job. My job paid me money. I used that money to pay my rent and go out to eat a lot. This is the first way that I enjoyed feminism.
While eating more than my fair share of blue cheese and paying my fair share of rent using money from my new job, I met someone and fell in love. This person also happened to be a woman with her own paycheck, her own cheese and a house that she had purchased by qualifying for a loan at a bank.
After a little more than a year of dating, we decided that we wanted to be together forever, but we couldn’t get married because there were no laws indicating that a woman could own another woman. In fact, the idea that two women would want to merge households was a concept that had been overlooked entirely. There was no law for it. And no law against it. Just blank space.
So, we did the next best thing, we bought property together. We also got a joint checking account. And for many people, including our employers but excluding our government, this demonstrated enough commitment to each other that we could get other benefits, like paying for each other’s health insurance and getting a couples discount at the gym.
We still got asked if we wanted separate checks at restaurants and when I bought a car, the dealer suggested that I talk to my husband before I made a final decision, so I went shopping elsewhere. We suffered these indignities with stoicism and sarcasm, and then 10 years and four dogs later, we decided that we wanted to have children.
This, again, is where property, in the form of cold, hard cash, came to bear. I bought blood tests and lab results, medical procedures and tissue donations in the form of human sperm. Most of this was not covered by our medical insurance, in spite of the fact that I had a very generous plan and a supportive employer. After three years of credit card loans and psychological torture, I gave birth to a baby girl. And almost two years after that, I had another one.
In the eyes of the law, I was the parent and my spouse was not, so she adopted our children. What does this mean? It means that we paid someone, social services, to evaluate our house, our relationship and our circumstances to determine if she was worthy to be a parent. It means that I went to court and testified that, yes, in fact, the woman I would marry if the law would allow such a thing, was the other parent to my children and she was not coercing me for the opportunity to live with them, wipe their noses and badger them about picking up the pieces of their Barbie playhouse.
She was, in fact, in love with them. She was there when they were born. She got up in the middle of the night to comfort them when they are sick and defend them with the ferocity of a wild animal when a mean gesture was made in their direction. And then, one day, months after my oldest daughter had started kindergarten, and I was taking the youngest back to daycare after a visit to the dentist, I got a call.
“The Attorney General is issuing marriage licenses,” my spouse said.
“He is? How ironic!” I said. “Do you want to get married again?”
“No, do you?”
“Not really. But if it’s important to you, I will.”
The week before, we had just returned from a trip to Chicago where we had flown together without friends or family and without much warning to tie the knot. We were waiting to see if a “gay marriage” law would pass in Colorado, but it was the end of September and we were running out of time that year. So we bought plane tickets, made a beeline for the marriage license office, enjoyed a day in the city, said “I do” and came home.
It’s been a tremendous amount of work exercising the rights I’ve been granted and being responsible for the property I own. We have bankrolled the entire thing with 78 cents on every dollar that a man would have had for the same job done. We have filled out forms and jumped through hoops to take what might have been granted easily or celebrated more if we were a man and a woman with jobs, a house and children. But I’m still tremendously grateful for what I have. Many people have much, much less.
So when Nicki Minaj, Shailene Woodley and Carrie Underwood are not sure if they are so “extreme” as to be feminists, I would suggest that they have another look at the string of diamonds, the mansion or the record contract that drives their privileged lifestyle and ask themselves if they would like to have all that freedom and independence transferred to their father or their brother, because women shouldn’t own property, they should be property. Your choice. And that alone, having the choice, is feminism.
This post originally appeared on Bluntmom.com.
#MarriageMonday: Celebrating Lennie and Pearl
In 2014, HRC named Lennie Gerber and Pearl Berlin as our favorite couple of the year.
HRC.org
We’re This Close To An Official Lego “Golden Girls”
Why there isn’t already a Lego version of America’s favorite geriatric gal pals is beyond me, but luckily Sam Hatmaker isn’t asleep behind the wheel. The intrepid New Yorker built a scale model of the iconic set from The Golden Girls and has submitted it for official Legos consideration:
It has been meticulously recreated to have opening cupboards and fridge in the kitchen, Wicker Sofa and Chairs, a hallway backdrop, a storage closet in the kitchen, and an outdoor area with potted plants and a hose.
The only thing missing are a pair of Lego culottes for Dorothy and, naturally, the lanai. Where are they going to have their mojitos and play naughty bachelorette games every time one of them gets engaged? — which, as true fans of the show know, is pretty often.
Below, check out some classic GG scenes rendered in Lego by this hero among heroes and vote, dammit. Vote, vote, vote!:
Dorothy grabbing that dough
Rose’s frozen head dream
Rose snatching her teddy bear from Jenny Lewis, the most evil Girl Scout in herstory
That time Rose shot Blanche’s vase and almost poor Lester
And of course, Dorothy and Sophia as Sonny and Cher
Les Fabian Brathwaite, travelin’ down the road and back again.
Les Fabian Brathwaite
David Lynch Bows Out Of 'Twin Peaks' Revival Over Money Dispute With Showtime
David Lynch has decided to pull out from directing Showtime’s upcoming relaunch of his cult classic series Twin Peaks following a dispute with the network over money. Last fall Lynch signed on to helm the series’s return and hinted that the show’s lead Kyle MacLachlan would reprise his role as special agent Dale Cooper. Last month Lynch admitted that while the scripts for all nine episodes of the new series were completed, he had yet to sign a contract officially linking him to the project.
“I haven’t returned yet and we’re still working on the contract,” he explained to an audience at his recently opened exhibition at the Australian Gallery of Modern Art. “But I love the world of Twin Peaks and I love those characters. And I think it will be very special to go back into that world.”
Lynch took to Facebook over the weekend to confirm the rumors that his talks with Showtime had finally fallen apart and he’d decided to walk away from the project
“After 1 year and 4 months of negotiations, I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done,” wrote Lynch, careful to point out that the reboot would likely still happen without him. “This weekend I started to call actors to let them know I would not be directing. Twin Peaks may still be very much alive at Showtime. I love the world of Twin Peaks and wish things could have worked out differently.”
Charles Pulliam-Moore
San Diego County Launches Mental Health First Aid Program
In November 2012, Kurt Cunningham was suffering from depression and anxiety. It was so severe that he didn’t leave his house at times. He spent months trying to figure out how to kill himself.
www.kpbs.org/news/2015/apr/06/first-aid-mental-health-san-diego-county/
From Working With Rihanna To Playing God, Jim Parsons Is Having A Divine Moment
For a few days in May, Jim Parsons will be three distinct things at once: a lovable physics nerd, a lovable alien and a lovable God. The eighth season of “The Big Bang Theory” comes to a close on May 7. Two days before that, Parsons will step onto the Broadway stage to play the Almighty in “An Act of God,” which runs for 13 weeks. If you’re feeling extra ambitious, make that a triple-header with “Home.” Currently in theaters, DreamWorks’ animated movie, in which a teenager (voiced by Rihanna) helps Parsons’ lonely extraterrestrial, named Oh, adjust to life on Earth, debuted at No. 1 after opening on March 27. That doesn’t leave the 42-year-old actor with much blank space on his calendar, but somewhere in there he’ll need to squeeze in an Emmy campaign, in hopes of collecting his fifth statue for portraying Sheldon Cooper. HuffPost Entertainment caught up with Parsons in between the avalanche to ask how he balances it all.
Memorizing all the science jargon Sheldon says on “The Big Bang Theory” can’t be easy, and now you have all this biblical talk to learn, too. Does it become overwhelming?
It’s a funny thing. I have a couple more episodes to shoot and then in the past month two months I’ve been doing all this press for the animated movie “Home.” Every moment I have a chance to drink coffee in the morning or a moment to read, I’m like, “You should probably run some lines. You should run, you know, the ninth commandment or whatever.” So these weird quotes and these weird phrasings just run through my head — “thou art” and “thou shalt” and things like that. It’s a weird place where one might need therapy afterwards. It can be tough to deal with the Sheldon stuff, some more than others. I will say the blessing of the television show is that you only have to know it once and you can take a few takes to do it. The frightening part, and the invigorating part, but frightening-before-you-do-it part, of theater is that it’s one night and one night only as far as that crowd witnessing the story that night. But certainly a television show and doing 24 episodes in nine months, you have five days with each one and you’re just never, ever gong to know it at that level that you can know something you’re doing at the theater.
You can probably get by without fully understanding everything Sheldon is saying, but is reading the Bible part of your God preparations?
Well, with the Sheldon stuff — the science stuff — the strongest part of my research would be just learning to pronounce things, and secondarily I do always make a passing effort at trying to figure out what the hell this might represent. But there are times that it is literally gibberish to me and I just hope I’m putting my inflection in a place that makes it sound sort of like I know what I’m talking about. The God stuff is actually a lot easier to understand. You may not want to always, but it really seems to be easier. Party because I took a lot more God, if you will, than I took science in my lifetime because I was raised going to church every Sunday. So we don’t touch on anything in this play that is unfamiliar to me. In fact, I think it’s been more about touching on things where I go, “My, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.” Old stories from the Bible come up. So in that way, no, the biggest thing I’ve done so far is make sure I have really strict in my head the precise definitions of “omnipotent,” “omniscient” and “omnipresent” because they come up several times and every once in a while, when I’m running through all these lines, I’m like, “Wait wait wait, which one of the O’s is this?” And it helps to remember exactly what each of those is. I mean, I know what they are, but every once in a while you’re like, “Shit, is it ‘omnipresent’ or ‘omniscient’ right now? Hmm.” Context is everything.
On top of that, there are a couple of minor characters, but this is pretty much a one-man show.
Yeah, these angels, frankly, should be talking a lot more than they are. So there.
Do you have a favorite fictional God?
The heavyweight God for me is Morgan Freeman, having a lot to do with that voice. That being said, emotionally the first one I always think of is George Burns. Those movies were playing on TV and on HBO when I was young, so he was really my first God to encounter from Hollywood. And he was such a dear old man, or at least I felt that way when I was watching as a child. I thought, “Thank you, what a lovely God.”
Had you and Rihanna met before working on “Home”?
God, no. We never would have had that chance. I guess I could have gone to a concert, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I even could have worked my way backstage, but no. That didn’t happen, so we didn’t meet until we did the movie.
Jennifer Lopez has a role in “Home,” too, so you were essentially living in pop-star land. Were all three of you in the studio at the same time?
No, it would have exploded. We really weren’t though. Most of the time we had to record alone. I think it’s a lot easier for them to get our recordings alone. I also think, scheduling-wise, they do it that way. But no, we never worked together.
Being your first animated movie, did you find yourself still concocting mannerisms and facial expressions for the character? And do they factor into the actual movie?
They do factor in, but they really were concocted accidentally. It was a very interesting experience to be robbed of certain storytelling abilities like your body and your face. There was a certain point where the animation got more and more precise and particular, and at that point sometimes the character would make eye movements or even when his mouth would open sometimes, I’ve seen myself enough on camera to know, “That’s really, completely me,” and it would be. And I have to tell you, too, that part didn’t freak me out. In fact, I found it very joyful because the hard part was when I was watching preliminary sketches and drawings with my voice. Even actors who hear themselves a lot of the time, I think even for us there’s still the little seed of that first time you hear yourself on the tape recorder and go, “No, that’s not how I sound,” because your voice just doesn’t sound the same. So there was this double whammy of this disembodied voice but embodied through this alien that I really wasn’t comfortable with at first. They would even take lines that I remember recording and not being thrilled with, and they’d say, “Sure, it’s fine.” Animators are the best excuse-makers in the world. They take all the rough edges off of everything that I’ve done. It was really delightful. I would jump to do another animated movie. They take a long time and you feel like you’re never going to see the full fruits of the labor, and that is a test of patience, but the process is joyful and the result of kind of heavenly.
There’s a cute scene where your character, Oh, starts involuntarily dancing and can’t stop. What’s a song that you just have to dance to if it comes on?
I don’t really have one because I have enough self-control about these issues. I keep thinking that I should dance more often. Because of the movie, it keeps coming up, but I guess I just don’t dance enough.
What about karaoke?
I’d rather be shot in the heart. My God, it’s one of my least favorite activities on earth. I’d run away.
What’s the last Rihanna song you had stuck in your head?
“Please Don’t Stop the Music.” It’s such a good song.
What’s the last J. Lo song you had stuck in your head?
The one from the movie because I keep hearing it, “Feel the Light.” It’s the song that kind of travels through the whole movie.
I want to ask about the Emmys’ category adjustments, which will change some of what “The Big Bang Theory” competes with this year. Have you kept up with that?
I heard about it happening. I will say that I think the attempt to — I don’t even know what you call it — the attempt to shuffle things around and try to think about what is the best place for certain work to be showcased is a good and necessary thing to put energy into. And I really do speak in that part from personal experience, both in the acting category and in the show category. I felt it very vividly last year when, and it’s been a while now, but in the actor category was me and then William H. Macy from “Shameless” and then Don Cheadle and Louis C.K. If you watch an episode of each of those shows right in a row, you really are going, “Are you kidding me? We’re asking people to compare and contrast these? What?” There will always be a bit of that, though, even in its most infantile stages, back when there were only three channels or whatever. When you’re comparing entertainment things like that, it’s always apples and oranges and carrots and celery. There are so many opportunities for writers and actors on TV right now that it is a cornucopia. It’s like being in a Thanksgiving feast as far as opportunities and choices on television, and that is 100 percent good. But when you’re talking about how to divide up an award show, it is 100 percent tricky. It’s only gotten trickier. So I guess we’ll see with the decisions they’ve already made. I don’t think you know till you do it. It is, though, a very, very good quote-unquote problem to be having.
Right, I think we’re on our way to figuring out how to modernize the Emmys, but I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense just to split shows by half-hour and hourlong programs?
Oh, that’s interesting. Absolutely. Well, and then do they decide further between cable and network? I don’t know. I hesitate to call it Pandora’s box because it’s an award show — it’s not war. But it is the messier part of it. Again, it’s a good thing to be in. It’s just not a clean breakdown of what’s going on on the small screen anymore. So I guess if you’re going to continue to have categories, you have to figure out some sort of regulations or dividing lines.
Exclusive: Adidas America Takes Stand Against Discrimination; Speaks Up for Inclusive Workplace
Today, adidas America joined an ever-increasing wave of corporate support for LGBT equality.
HRC.org
Restore Pizza’s Good Name And Help Homeless LGBT Youth With #Pizza4Equality
In light of recent discriminatory dinner (or hungover breakfast) donations, the gold standard of bachelor delivery has had its gooey name sullied. But one group is trying to change all that.
Religious freedom Inequality lovers Crystal and Kevin O’Connor of Indiana’s Memories Pizza have raised $842,592 after they said they’d turn away business based on their feelings about LGBT people. A campaign called #Pizza4Equality is now underway to restore pizza’s good name while raising cash for Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Fund benefitting homeless LGBT youth.
Supporters are asked to donate the cost of one pizza in their area (though larger donations are welcomed) in an effort to match the unsettling $842,592 raised by Memories. As of this post, a respectable $47,097 has been reached.
The campaign’s creator, Scott Wooledge, writes:
Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Fund has set April 29 as the first national #40toNoneDay to end #LGBT youth homelessness! And I thought, would it not be totally awesome if we equality supporters (and pizza lovers) could match that #MemoriesPizza “charity” by April 29? Can we match their amount and help homeless youth get off the street, learn life skills and get an education and jobs? I’m an dreamer, but I say yes, we can!
Dan Tracer
ABC News to Air 'Far-Ranging and Exclusive' Interview Between Diane Sawyer and Bruce Jenner April 24
Bruce Jenner will sit down for a two-hour interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer airing April 24, Variety reports:
ABC News declined to offer much detail on the content of the talks, but said in a statement that the interview was “far-ranging and exclusive” and would appear as a special two-hour edition of “20/20″ starting at 9 p.m. Eastern on Friday, April 24.
Back in February, Jenner was involved in a fatal car accident on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
Previously, “Jamie Foxx Mocks Bruce Jenner’s Reported Transition at ‘iHeartRadio” Music Awards” [tlrd]
Kyler Geoffroy
