Supportive Mom Publishes New Birth Announcement for Trans Son

The teen’s 1995 birth announcement was in error, says his mother, adding that loving him is ‘the easiest thing in the world.’

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Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/12/02/supportive-mom-publishes-new-birth-announcement-trans-son

Lady Gaga Reveals She Was Raped At 19
Lady Gaga revealed that she was raped at 19 in a radio interview with “The Howard Stern Show” on Tuesday.

“I went through some horrific things that I’m able to laugh [at] now, because I’ve gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years,” Gaga said in the interview.

“My music’s been wonderful for me. But, you know, I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19,” she added. “I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, ‘Oh, is this just the way adults are?'”

The topic was broached by Stern after Lady Gaga explained that she wrote the song “Swine” about sexual violence. “The song is about rape, the song is about demoralization, the song is about rage and fury and passion — and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release,” she said.

Gaga told Stern that she had not previously addressed the assault because she did not want “to be defined by it.”

“I’ll be damned if somebody’s gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one dickhead [who] did that to me,” she said. “I’m going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful and all the things that I’ve made out of my strife. I did that.”

As Gaga told Stern, she never confronted the man after the incident. “I don’t know how I would react. It would terrify me. It would paralyze me,” she said. “I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralyzed by fear. It wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I went, ‘Wow, that was really messed up.'”

Listen to the full segment from “The Howard Stern Show” below. Head over to Soundcloud for the entire interview with Lady Gaga.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02/lady-gaga-raped_n_6257760.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Major Metropolitan Area Expands Protections for LGBT Community

Today, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to add gender identity and expression to the city’s Human Rights Ordinance.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/major-metropolitan-area-expands-protections-for-lgbt-community?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Man Dies After Being Bound In Saran Wrap During Bondage Session Gone Wrong

35-year-old Richard Bowler (left) and 23-year-old David Connor (right)

“It’s a bit embarrassing,” 35-year-old Richard Bowler told the police operator when he called for help in the early morning hours of August 20, 2013. “It’s my friend. … We had a bit of a kinky sex game and he’s stopped breathing.”

“He’s on my bed,” Bowler continued, his voice growing more and more frantic. “He’s wrapped up in a PVC sheet with tape and that. He’s got clingfilm wrapped around his body and I have got a text message on my phone stating that’s what he likes.”

When paramedics arrived on the scene, they found Bowler struggling to perform CPR on Williams in bed.

“I thought he was just sleeping,” Bowler reportedly told them. “I am sorry. I should have called before. He takes ketamine and that mongs him out.”

The mattress was covered in black plastic sheeting. Williams was tightly bound with saran wrap.

“The clingfilm extended from his ankles to his shoulders and it was obvious he had been dead for some time,” prosecutors told the court this week.

Bowler suffers from cerebral palsy. He and his live-in caretaker, 23-year-old David Connor, are now facing manslaughter charges after accidentally killing 47-year-old Alun Williams during a bondage sex session gone wrong last summer.

Williams lived with his girlfriend in Shepherdswell, Kent, England, but would occasionally engage in bondage and “mummification” with men he met online. On August 19, he went over to Bowler and Connor’s flat to have a threesome.

Upon his arrival, Bowler and Connor wrapped Williams in saran wrap then laid him down on the bed. Then Connor proceeded to spank him while Bowler penetrated him with a strap-on. At around 1 a.m., the two men left for a while. When they returned, Williams was died.

Police found drugs including poppers, ketamine, cocaine, and methamphetamine at the scene of the crime. They also found gas masks, hand ties, masking tape, duct tape, and other sex toys.

A post-mortem examination on Williams’ body confirmed that he had suffered from dehydration which eventually led to a heart attack. At the time of his death, he was under the influence of ketamine and methamphetamine.

Both Bowler and Connor are now facing charges of manslaughter. The charge specifies that wrapping Williams in saran wrap and plastic “subjected him to bodily harm in the form of dehydration, overheating and stress to his cardiovascular system” and was the “substantial cause of his death.” The men also face an alternative charge of manslaughter by gross negligence.

Bowler told police that he and Williams had met on a gay website five years ago and would often get together for bondage sex sessions.

Text messages between he and Williams sent between June and August of last year confirmed his statement. On the afternoon of August 19, Williams texted Bowler about meeting later that night, in which “wrapping” was mentioned. His final message to Bowler was sent at 11:23 p.m. telling him that he was outside of his flat.

Both Bowler and Connor deny the charges against them.

The trial continues.

Related stories:

U.K. Man Pleads Not Guilty To Extreme Meth-Fueled S&M Gay Sex Session Gone Wrong

A Closeted Actor Keeps His Boyfriend Prisoner, A Bisexual Soap Star Accused Of Rape, And More

British Actress “Devastated” After Discovering Boyfriend’s Not-So-Secret Gay S&M Past

Graham Gremore is a columnist and contributor for Queerty and Life of the Law. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Graham Gremore

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/aSeTb1jkWUw/man-dies-after-being-bound-in-saran-wrap-during-bondage-session-gone-wrong-20141202

European Union Rules Asylum Seeker Tests For Homosexuality Unlawful

Jim Redmond

www.towleroad.com/2014/12/european-union-rules-asylum-seeker-tests-for-homosexuality-unlawful.html

Sex-Segregation in Schools Is Bad Policy
The New York Times reports that the practice of separating public school students into classrooms based on traditional definitions of sex has increased in recent years. The article leads with describing decorations in two classrooms — pink and cheetah print for the girls’ classroom, racecars and footballs for the boys’. In case anybody was fooled that sex-segregation would give male and female students the same opportunities, the decorations in themselves show a clear reinforcement of gender stereotypes that plague the American workforce and create sex-based inequality. Sex-segregation in public schools is not only an archaic policy, it also threatens the safety of trans students and institutionalizes patriarchal definitions of gender that harm our entire society.

Though policies allowing sex-segregated classrooms claim participation must be voluntary — the pressure trans children feel to assimilate and conform to external expectations about male or female behavior is incredibly strong. The policy is such that if a student was able to identify themselves as trans and and have the courage to articulate their identity to school officials, they would hypothetically be placed in a classroom that reflects their identity. There are blatant problems with these assumptions.

Trans students already feel isolated by a social structure crafted around genital-based segregation. Bathrooms, even for small children, are segregated by sex and clothing, starting in infancy, is separated based on perceived sexual identity. Though the Department of Education confirms that schools must respect students’ gender identities in single-sex classrooms, the reality is that young children do not often know they are trans and should not be put in a situation where they have to decide their sexual identity and articulate why they may not feel comfortable in their bodies or traditional sex-based roles to authority figures. Policies that separate children based on their genitalia isolate trans children and create an environment where children who already feel discomfort with their sexual or gender identity are asked to forfeit their opportunity to learn and develop next to peers of varying sexual identities.

As an elementary school student, I did not have the emotional capacity or language to identify my discomfort with my body as a part of being trans and would never have been able to articulate this to school officials. If presented with sex-segregated classrooms, I likely would have gone along with it, burying my discomfort with existing feelings of disassociation with my peers. I can only imagine how limited my experience would have been in a female-only classroom and the increased pressure I would have felt to conform to female expectations.

Trans students, however, are certainly not the only population disadvantaged by sex-segregated classrooms. Sex-segregation in itself is a product of an oppressive sexual binary that limits sexual identity to “male” and “female” silos. Male individuals — rather those people our culture defines as “male” — have historically dominated society physically and hierarchically. One response to male domination is to separate female-identified individuals and create female-exclusive spaces, like female-only classrooms. Some might mistake this as a brand of feminism. But feminism without intersectionality isn’t feminism, and separating children with vaginas from children with penises (and completely ignoring intersex children) isn’t empowering.

Rather than separating students and teaching children to relate to peers based on similarities or differences in their sex, we should confront rampant inequality, misogyny and sex-based oppression across American society and beyond head on. Laws that regulate what people can do with their reproductive organs, legislation that denies health care for trans bodies and general acceptance of widespread sex-based violence are the forces in our society that create the inequality and misogyny that trickles into our school systems. If we want our female children to have the same opportunity as male children, separation and isolation are not the answer. Honest discussion about what sexual identity is, how it defines our cultural norms and how traditional sex and gender roles limit our collective development will offer real opportunities for creating safe and non-discriminatory public schools.

www.huffingtonpost.com/lucas-waldron/sexsegregation-in-schools_b_6256708.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Australian Mom Uses Classified Ad to Show Support for Transgender Son

A mother in Queensland, Australia used a birth announcement to show her support for her 19-year-old transgender son.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/australian-mom-uses-classified-ad-to-show-support-for-transgender-son?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed