Open Question: If god died for our sins, why does he banish lgbt people and they aren't aloud to go to heaven. im bi and I can't go because of it. help me!?
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Transgender Leaders Advocate for Equal Rights Ordinance in Houston
Transgender Leaders Advocate for Equal Rights Ordinance in Houston
Over the past several weeks, transgender leaders in Houston have worked hard ahead of the vote on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) on November 3. It’s a personal fight for many.
HRC.org
Ted Cruz Welcomes Backing of Anti-LGBT Bigot Who Believes Gay Marriage Will Lead To Worldwide Disaster
Ted Cruz Welcomes Backing of Anti-LGBT Bigot Who Believes Gay Marriage Will Lead To Worldwide Disaster
Sandy Rios has said President Barack Obama’s decision to light up the White House in rainbow colors following the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling increased the terror threat against America. Rios has also said the high court’s decision will result in a major worldwide disaster, and that gay men are child molesters by nature and should therefore be barred from the Boy Scouts.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Rios (right), who serves as a radio host and director of governmental affairs for the American Family Association, an anti-LGBT hate group, has endorsed Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for president. And perhaps it’s not surprising that Cruz has wholeheartedly welcomed Rios’ endorsement, which he announced Friday along with the backing of two other conservative activists.
“I am thrilled to have the support of three of the conservative movement’s strongest voices for families, religious liberty and the unborn,” Cruz said in a statement, via Right Wing Watch. “We are running an aggressive grassroots campaign and their help engaging and motivating conservative voters gives our effort a great advantage.”
Two days later, Cruz appeared at a Texas Southern Baptist megachurch alongside five other GOP presidential candidates to talk about so-called threats to religious liberty. From The Texas Tribune:
Among the hottest topics at the North Texas Presidential Forum was religious liberty, especially in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was the most vocal, recalling at length a rally he held earlier this year in Iowa spotlighting people who believe they were discriminated against for religious reasons.
“As these threats grow darker and darker and darker, they are waking people up here in Texas and across this country,” said Cruz, who received a rock star reception from the home-state crowd.
On Monday, Cruz’s support doubled in the latest GOP presidential poll, increasing to 9 percent, although he’s still in fourth behind Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio.
For a list of some of Rios’ most ridiculous statements about LGBT people and other topics over the years, check out Towleroad’s Sandy Rios channel.
The post Ted Cruz Welcomes Backing of Anti-LGBT Bigot Who Believes Gay Marriage Will Lead To Worldwide Disaster appeared first on Towleroad.
John Wright
The Remarkable Journey From Identical Twins To Brother And Sister
The Remarkable Journey From Identical Twins To Brother And Sister
When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin baby boys 18 years ago, they had no idea the trajectory their lives would take. Wayne, an Air Force veteran and rugged outdoorsman, was looking forward to fishing, hunting and playing baseball with his boys. Kelly was just excited to have kids of her own after suffering through years of fertility treatments.
As identical twins, Wyatt and Jonas Maines shared matching DNA. But it was soon clear to their parents that they differed in one monumental way: gender. From a very young age, Wyatt identified as female. When he was two years old, he told his dad he hated his penis. He asked his mom when he would get to be a girl. In fifth grade, Wyatt officially took the name Nicole.
In Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, which came out on Tuesday, Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Ellis Nutt follows the Maines as they learn to understand their transgender child — and to support each other during the process. In Ellis’ telling, the family’s greatest teacher is Nicole. She knows who she is; it is up to her family to listen.The narrative, which takes readers from a rural town in Maine all the way to the White House, includes bullying, family strife and a landmark court case on transgender rights.
It’s a culmination of a story that I’ve personally been following since 2010. I first met Nicole when she was 12 years old and a patient at Children’s Hospital Boston, where I worked as a writer at the time. Her doctor was Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who co-founded the first clinic in the U.S. dedicated to treating transgender children. At Children’s Hospital Boston, Nicole was given puberty-suppressing drugs — an innovative treatment for transgender kids that essentially pauses their puberty, stopping their bodies from developing unwanted physical changes.
In Nicole’s case, taking puberty-suppressing medication meant she wouldn’t develop an Adam’s apple, facial hair and other male features that could cause extreme anxiety and make it more difficult to transition when she became older.
I was assigned to write a feature on her and on Spack’s work with transgender kids. When I interviewed Nicole and her family, they were going through a rough time. They had recently moved from Orono, Maine, to Portland, uprooting themselves after Nicole was bullied at school for using the girls’ bathroom.
Nicole had been using the girls’ facilities without incident until a male student began following her into the bathroom and claiming that if Nicole could use it, he could too. In response, the school banned Nicole from using the girls’ bathroom, and instead made her use a staff bathroom, isolated from other students.
The Maines pulled their kids from the school and filed a discrimination lawsuit. In 2014, seven years after the first bathroom incident, the family was finally handed a huge victory: Maine’s Supreme Court ruled that the school violated state anti-discrimination law by not allowing Nicole to use the girls’ bathroom. The decision made history, as it was the first time a state court ruled that transgender students must be allowed access to the bathroom of the gender with which they identify.
Nicole underwent gender confirmation surgery this summer. She and her brother are now attending the University of Maine.
I spoke to Nutt about the process of writing Becoming Nicole. An edited, condensed version of our conversation follows.
Why were you drawn to Nicole Maines’ story?
Meeting the Maines, it’s impossible not to like them. What impressed me is they seemed, on the one hand, like a very ordinary family. And yet their story is quite extraordinary. I think a lot of people can identify with them.
The other part that attracted me is the fact that Jonas and Nicole are identical twins. It presented an opening, as someone who writes about science, to discuss the science of gender.
These are identical twins, they have the exact same DNA, but they are obviously deeply different. What happened to turn some genetic switches on or off in one and not the other one really goes back to what happened in utero.
If we can look at gender identity as something that has to do with the brain, and not with the genitals we were born with, or how we were raised, or how many dolls we were given, I think that is important.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this story?
The most surprising thing, from the science perspective, is that from what we know, gender identity is a completely separate brain process in prenatal development. By six weeks, our genitals and our reproductive organs have been determined as male or female, but not until six months are our brains either masculinized or feminized by hormones. That was really eye-opening.
From the perspective of the family, the degree to which this was who Nicole was from birth was in some ways surprising. I watched hours of videos [of the twins as children]. It’s impossible to watch all these videos, some of which are very ordinary moments, and not be impressed that this was a child who absolutely, 100 percent knew she was a girl.
At age 2, you barely have a vocabulary to communicate, much less tell someone that the body you are in doesn’t agree with your brain. It’s something so integral to who the child is that it’s impossible to think that this is something that could be influenced by the number of dolls they are given or someone dressing them differently.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
I think that just about anyone who reads this book will find something in it that they can relate to. Even though it’s a book about a transgender child, it speaks to families and how we come to understand each other. It’s a story about four lives, not just one. It’s not a biography of a transgender child — it’s a biography of a family.
I hope that people will read it and get to know this family, and by understanding who they are, they will realize that it is not a terrible fate to have a transgender child.
Nicole isn’t any different from any other young women. She just knew who she was. And she knew her body didn’t agree with that, and her family helped her find an answer.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
DVD: “Jurassic World,” “Jess & James,” “Children Of The Night,” & More!
DVD: “Jurassic World,” “Jess & James,” “Children Of The Night,” & More!
Chris Pratt playing master to dinosaurs in Jurassic World is all it should take to lure you into checking out this week’s home entertainment releases, but beyond that we also have Argentinians in bathing suits (Jess & James, above), and child vampires.
Here are the trailers and details!
($49.98 3D Blu-ray, $34.98 Blu-ray, $29.98 DVD; Universal)
After 14 years, the franchise returns with a stellar popcorn funride. This time around, a pair of kids (what else?) are left in the hands of their power executive aunt (Dallas Bryce Howard) in Jurassic World, a theme park with live reconstituted dinosaurs. Of course, the scientists have played with genetics and bred a new dino that’s completely crazy and dangerous and it gets loose, making Chris Pratt, who has mastered a way to command velociraptors, come to the rescue. While the reliance on CGI effects does take away some of the marvel, suspense, and wonder from the earlier films — there’s only one practical dinosaur effect, and you can tell the difference — there is still plenty of spectacle, humor, and chomping action here. Extras include a handful of featurettes, including an “Innovation Center Tour With Chris Pratt” and deleted scenes.
($24.99 DVD; TLA)
A pair of young gay Argentinians, Jess and James, both have their share of baggage and angst. After they hook up for some sex, the latter invites the former to take a road trip together through the country’s rural stretches, and off they go. Adventures follow, and along the way to visit Jess’ estranged sibling, they add a third guy, Tomas, to the mix. Sexy and visually beautiful stuff from writer/director Santiago Giralt, whose previous Argentinian films will hopefully also make the journey to home entertainment release in the USA.
($29.99 Blu-ray, $24.99 DVD; Artsploitation)
About as far from HBO’s True Blood as you can get, openly gay writer/director Ivan Noel’s take on vampires is atmospheric, slow-burning, and darkly humorous – and the bloodsuckers are all kids. The story begins as Alicia, a female journalist, investigates a rural Argentinian orphanage where the children are supposedly afflicted with some kind of disease. Well, we know what that disease is, don’t we, and this pint-sized vamp population includes the grandson of Count Dracula himself. A group of obsessed vampire hunters, meanwhile, is determined to put stakes through the whole lot’s hearts, leading to drama and a whole lot of grue. Some interesting concepts get explored, like the drawbacks of being stuck in pre-puberty for eternity, and there is some bloodletting as one would expect/hope for. Extras include a making of and commentary.
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Lawrence Ferber
Canada Elects New Liberal PM Justin Trudeau, Unseating Conservative Stephen Harper
Canada Elects New Liberal PM Justin Trudeau, Unseating Conservative Stephen Harper
Canada has a new Prime Minister, the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau, who is also the son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Conservative Stephen Harper is now out of office as Liberals also took a number of seats:
Starting with a sweep of the Atlantic provinces, the Liberals capitalized on what many Canadians saw as Mr. Harper’s heavy-handed style, and the party went on to capture 184 of the 338 seats in the next House of Commons…The Conservatives were reduced to 99 seats from 159 in the last Parliament, according to preliminary results. The New Democratic Party, which had held second place and formed the official opposition, held on to only 44 seats after suffering substantial losses in Quebec to the Liberals.”
Trudeau’s victory speech:
The Guardian adds:
After rousing his party from third in the polls to first place on voting day, Trudeau promised “sunny ways” for all Canadians. “This is what positive politics can do. This is what a positive, hopeful vision, and a platform and a team together can make happen,” he said in his victory speech.
Among his first tasks will be to assemble a cabinet, which he promised in campaigning would contain an equal number of men and women. Trudeau is expected to be sworn in before the G20 summit in Turkey, which starts on 15 November.
Trudeau, elected leader of the Liberal Party in 2013, is the nation’s youngest Prime Minister at 44 and the first to follow a parent into office.
Here’s Rachel Maddow reporting the news:
The post Canada Elects New Liberal PM Justin Trudeau, Unseating Conservative Stephen Harper appeared first on Towleroad.
Andy Towle
Canada Elects New Liberal PM Justin Trudeau, Unseating Conservative Stephen Harper
An American Family's Transformation
An American Family's Transformation
You know that old question about who you’d invite to a dinner party if you could pick anybody from any time in history? My answer would likely be to re-create an incredible gathering from the spring of 2014 when three families — none well known to each other, but all tied by a common thread of caring deeply about transgender kids — sat down together for dinner.
There was the Maines family: Kelly and Wayne and their 16-year-old twins, Nicole and Jonas. Also at our dinner table were Kendra, my spouse, and our two daughters, who were 3 and 5, and our neighbors, Anna and her 13-year-old daughter, Aubrey.
I can’t remember what we ate or every detail of the conversation, but I do remember the ease with which we all spoke, the gentle and caring atmosphere that enveloped us.
The Maines family was in Washington, D.C., advocating for transgender students, even as Nicole’s discrimination case against her former school district was being argued by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. At the time, neighbor Aubrey was navigating her own transition in the often difficult milieu of middle school. And Kendra and I had gotten to know both families after being connected by mutual friends. They knew I was transgender and worked at the Human Rights Campaign with programs like Welcoming Schools, which aims to make classrooms more inclusive for kids like Nicole and Aubrey.
Over dinner, both Nicole and Aubrey spoke of being sure of their gender identities early on. By the end of elementary school, Nicole was living openly as a girl. But she met resistance among elementary and middle school administrators and bullying from fellow students. Jonas, who never questioned his sister’s identity, stood up to the bullies. So did her parents. They were forced to move so that Nicole and Jonas could go to school in peace, even though it meant that Wayne had to stay behind for his job, and travel hours each weekend to be with his family. Anna and Aubrey talked about their lives, and particularly their work to ensure Aubrey’s safe transition at school. They too had sought support for Aubrey since she was a young child, but finding it was difficult — even inside the family, where a costly custody battle ensued with Aubrey’s unsupportive father.
Kendra and I shared our own story — falling in love and marrying before my transition, and her unwavering support. I spoke of my own my school battle, before I’d even heard the word transgender, to wear pants during my graduation, even though my public high school had a policy requiring girls to wear dresses.
Of course, as at any good dinner party, the conversation roamed. We also talked about politics and D.C. traffic, bands the teenagers loved and the adults tolerated, and summer vacation plans. Sprinkled in were side conversations, ranging anywhere from favorite TV shows to finding a trans-friendly doctor.
Despite the very real challenges we were discussing, I was struck that our tone wasn’t one of defeat. It was one of gratitude. We all had family who supported us. In a situation similar to Jonas and Nicole’s, I had an identical twin sister who was unyielding in her support of my transition. We all had good friends. We all had places to call home. And we had this new connection with each other.
Since that wonderful dinner, Aubrey and Nicole have remained friends, and Aubrey babysits our kids. Anna and Wayne are part of an incredible network of parents of transgender young people who stay connected and lend support to each other, no matter where they are in their journey of acceptance. And our work to advocate has continued.
Anna and Aubrey speak at events in D.C. about the need for inclusion, almost always using their pseudonyms (which I’ve used here) given concern about the impact visibility may have on Aubrey’s future.
I’ve worked with Aubrey, Wayne, other parents, and leading advocates at HRC and allied organizations to create resources for supporting transgender youth and their families, including a new comprehensive guide to help schools do right by every transitioning student.
And the Maines family’s story is now the subject of a new book, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Amy Ellis Nutt and hitting shelves today.
That evening we all spent together was special, special enough to want to share it with others. And in this small way, I can. Here’s what I suggest to you: pick up the book — and read it over a nice dinner.
JAY BROWN is the director of research and public education at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
Jay Brown
www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/10/20/american-familys-transformation
This Trans Attorney Says Everyone Deserves a Trial — Even Suspected Terrorists
This Trans Attorney Says Everyone Deserves a Trial — Even Suspected Terrorists
Zoe Dolan knows her line of work doesn’t make her popular, and her job requires an expertise in deftly combating arguments with counterarguments. Both on and off the job she faces criticism for defending those who are accused of seeking to harm the U.S.; some even call her a traitor. But Dolan says her work provides an important service: “Our Constitution guarantees the right to legal defense for anyone charged with a crime.”
Dolan, a criminal defense attorney who practices in New York and Los Angeles, has represented clients in some of the biggest cases in the country. In an article about one of these cases, The New York Times noted that she “is proficient in Arabic, has lived in the Middle East and is the only member of the defense team with a government security clearance.”
She also just happens to be transgender.
The Times was reporting on the terrorism trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden and a Kuwaiti-born cleric who sat with Bin Laden in an Afghan cave hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and later became a fiery spokesman for the al Qaeda leader. Dolan was defending Abu Ghaith in the trial, which in March 2014 ended in conviction on three counts: conspiracy to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiring to do so. Abu Ghaith was sentenced to life in prison.
“I see my work as a commitment to defend the Constitution and a court of law,” Dolan tells The Advocate, and she does not think of her gender transition as either a help or a hindrance to her work.
Dolan never disclosed being trans to Abu Ghaith, to any other client, or to a jury.
Sitting across from the attractive, sandy-haired 38-year-old in a booth at a Hollywood café, one might think she wouldn’t have to come out if she chose not to; surfing her Facebook pictures, friends see a woman not afraid to bare her toned bikini body on a beach. She has what some trans men and women aspire to, what transgender businesswoman Angelica Ross calls “passing privilege.”
Whether because of that privilege or not, Dolan has found herself at the heart of two of the biggest terror trials of our time — before Abu Ghaith, there was Kareem Ibrahim.
Ibrahim, now 69, was convicted in 2011 of joining a conspiracy to blow up fuel lines at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. For security reasons, Dolan says she can speak more freely about that trial than her representation of Abu Ghaith. She decided to write about her experiences in court in a new memoir, There Is Room for You: Tales From a Transgender Defender’s Heart.
“What I saw happening in court appalled me,” Dolan says. “At the end of the day, we had a client who wasn’t allowed to tell his full story on the witness stand. And somehow the courts didn’t have a problem with that.”
In her book, Dolan explains in great detail how Ibrahim was recruited by informants in 2007 from his native Trinidad, where he was an imam, a Muslim religious leader. For his role in the aborted bombing, he was sentenced to life in prison in 2012. In 2013 he lost again on appeal. Dolan writes in her book:
“The principle at the heart of it all: imagine a prosecution arising from the work of a confidential informant in which you were stopped from testifying about your own prior statements, even the tidbits that the government cherry-picked to use against you at trial. Do we believe in hearing the whole truth, only when it suits us?
Underneath our defense to the rights for which Americans throughout history have shed blood and died, should we countenance lip service to ideals that paste over reality with words, words, words?”
Asked how that experience changed her, Dolan tells The Advocate, “I hope that one thing people will take away from my book is, ‘Wait a minute. If this is the example we’re setting, in any case, regardless of the charges, how do I feel about that? How would I feel if I were prevented from telling my complete side of the story, and I had given a statement to law enforcement, thinking I was going to help myself?’ And [prosecutors] did what they did in that trial, which is that they take out pieces here and there, and they throw it at you but prevent you from adding back what was excluded from the trial.”
Dolan asks, rhetorically, “Is that the system of criminal justice we want in this country?”
She knows a lot more about the wheels of justice than most defenders of accused terrorists. She has also represented clients in high-profile mob trials as well as low-level offenders, and Dolan was once a crime victim herself.
In January 2005, a man she knew sexually assaulted her in her home. She described the attack in terrifying detail in her memoir: “He held me in a headlock and whispered, ‘You know what I want. Give it to me or I’m going to kill you.’”
She managed to escape his grasp and ran from her apartment, naked, to a neighbor’s, chased by her assailant, wielding a baseball bat.
After much deliberation, Dolan reported him to police, and worked with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to file charges. She was familiar with that office because she had interned there; in fact, she came out to a woman in the D.A.’s office during an interview for that summer internship, before legally changing her name.
There she learned firsthand how rarely justice is served for those who need it most; her attacker successfully pleaded his case down to a misdemeanor. Dolan moved,and never saw or heard from him again, but her experience changed her forever.
“Ever since the assault,” she wrote in her memoir, “I had developed a fear of being alone with a man or being too close to one at all, even in public.”
Yet she moved on, even took in a male roommate, and moved forward with her law career, keeping her gender transition to herself for most of the past decade.
“I was concerned about narrowing my opportunities and not being able to pursue what I wanted to do despite my transgender identity,” Dolan tells The Advocate. “My practice doesn’t have anything to do with me being transgender and never really has.”
But rather than be outed, she worked with a reporter at the Times in 2014 to come out publicly, which it turns out barely registered a blip in the Manhattan federal courthouse where she was working last year.
“One of the prosecutors on that [Abu Ghaith] case, along with some of my adversaries at the time, wrote to me and said very complimentary things,” Dolan says. “One person asked me, ‘Is your phone ringing off the hook with new business?’ It doesn’t really work that way with the media.”
She wrote earlier this year in a Huffington Post essay about the irony involved in keeping her transgender identity secret yet asking clients “to be vulnerable and share their past with me. In order to help them, I ask them to bare their souls. … Sharing my own story leaves me exposed, raw, and vulnerable to one truth above all: I am no lawyer without the clients I represent, and, like them, I am human first.”
“Three months before the whole Time magazine ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ issue featuring Laverne Cox on the cover, I was the beneficiary of my own tipping point,” Dolan says. “I’m really lucky.”
And not for the first time. She tells of a harrowing experience at the turn of the century, when she realized the true value of her American identity on a trip to Egypt.
Dolan was there studying Arabic in May 2001, when security forces raided a floating gay nightclub and she was caught in the sweep. Dozens of men were arrested and imprisoned, and to those forces, she was just another man; this was just prior to her enrolling in law school and beginning her physical transition.
Caught in the grip of the arresting officer, she told him, “I am American.”
“Those three words give meaning to what I do every day,” Dolan told Al Jazeera last year. “I felt powerless, and vulnerable, in ways that I had never imagined possible. My life has been about standing up for what I believe ever since.”
And when she’s not working, Dolan writes and looks for love. “I am single as all hell,” she says, with a gentle laugh. Just as she has bared her body in an Upworthy video to make a statement, she has bared her soul in her memoir, most of all when it comes to being a transgender woman looking to be loved.
Below, an excerpt from There Is Room for You: Tales From a Transgender Defender’s Heart:
Adriano was all over me the moment we stepped in the door. My heart came apart a little as I placed my palms on his chest and drew away.
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Can we just sit down for a minute?”
We sat on the edge of my bed, a miserable excuse of springs and plastic that only a college dorm room can get away with. He took my hands in his and looked at me with such earnestness that I struggled to speak.
“What’s wrong? Are you on your period? It doesn’t bother me, really.”
I laughed.
“Really.”
I lifted my hand to his cheek and smiled.
“No,” I said, “it’s very different from that.”
After I told him, he bolted up and looked down at me in rage.
“You’re a man?” he shouted.
“’No, I’m trying to explain — “
He tightened his fists. I thought he was going to hit me.
But he didn’t. He just turned around and left.
I cried myself to sleep that night. My dreams had come true: I got to be Cinderella for an evening with a dashing young Italian man who was the cutest one in a room of so many others. The experience was beyond anything I had dared to imagine.
But greediness had spelled the end. I had stayed past midnight to dance a little longer with Adriano, which I should never have done. I had lost track of the ground while soaring through the sky. It was glorious, until everything fell apart. My gown had turned to rags, and I was covered in soot.
Dawn Ennis
The Westboro Baptist Church Dropped A Single To Protest Kim Davis, And It’s As Weird As You’d Expect
The Westboro Baptist Church Dropped A Single To Protest Kim Davis, And It’s As Weird As You’d Expect
As part of this morning’s protest taking aim at Kim Davis, members of the Westboro Baptist Church congregated around her Rowan County office, armed with their obligatory signage and zombie-like chants — nothing so out of the ordinary there.
However, they also premiered a brand-new parody ditty, which they like to call “Kentucky Woman: She Caused Fag Marriage.”
They released a press release this morning, although that link seems to be broken.
But for better or worse, you can catch the overall gist of the song below:
#westborobaptist singing “kentucky woman” in regards to #KimDavis pic.twitter.com/4BV2sKBXKr
— Patrick Price (@PatrickPriceTV) October 19, 2015
Dan Tracer
Open Question: Lgbt+ scholorships?
Open Question: Lgbt+ scholorships?
Ok so im bi, im not out to anyone yet, but i want to apply for some lgbt+ scholorships for uni. Can i get scholarships without my parents knowing about them? im just not ready to come out but i really need the money for uni. is there a way to get it without them knowing?
