«The winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All-Stars Season 6 was revealed when the season’s final episode aired on September 2. Kylie Sonique Love, a former competitor from the second season of the original RuPaul’s Drag Race series, was crowned the winner, making her the first out transgender competitor to win any edition of the legendary drag competition franchise.»
As always: Some drag artists identify as their target gender and use drag to explore a transgender identity. Others do not. That’s OK.
«In a recent interview with the AARP, the BAFTA-winning screen legend revealed that she will be officiating the wedding of her youngest daughter Ruby, who (with her permission) she also revealed is an out and proud transgender woman.»
In an interview with Today Wade spoke about the gift and eye-opening experience of raising his transgender daughter Zaya, who recently celebrated her 14th birthday.
“It’s made me grow,” he said. “I didn’t know anything really, wasn’t knowledgeable about the LGBTQ+ community. What it has done is open my eyes and open my ears to something greater and bigger than I.”
In conversation with the NBC morning show, Wade added that Zaya “has allowed us gracefully to be her support system.” “She’s the strong one in this family, she’s the hero,” he said.
“It’s our family’s job to make sure that we listen to her, we listen to the doctors, we ask questions. We formulate our own ideas of how Zaya should be, we don’t allow others to do that for us.”
Top photo from Them/Getty/Paula Lobo. Photo #2 from Instagram.
See also NBC: “Dwyane Wade says daughter Zaya helped him become a better parent: ‘It opened my eyes'”
The transgender Delaware state senator Sarah McBride talks to Lisa Peterson over at Popsugar and Yahoo! Life. Read the whole interview!
On home sickness
One of the challenges cis folks have when talking about gender identity is it’s hard to understand what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth, or to be trans and in the closet. From as early an age as I can remember, I remember feeling this unshakeable homesickness.
On transitioning later in life
I think many trans adults who don’t transition until later, they’ll always wonder, What if? And I do wonder how different my journey could have been had those first experiences finding out about people like me had been affirming and celebratory and nuanced and compassionate. Would I then have had the ability and the courage to just share myself at an earlier age?
What to tell your younger self
First and foremost, I wish I could tell my younger self that it’s going to be OK. That you can come out and your family will still love you, your friends will still be your friends, you can live your truth and dream big dreams all at the same time. Whether those dreams are finding love and being loved, living in communities you love and doing work that you love, that’s possible. Truly, the only things that are impossible are the things that we don’t try.
On conquering your fear
Everyone deals with something society has told them they should be ashamed of, whether it’s your sexual orientation or your gender identity or any other almost infinite number of things about a person that society can say ‘You should hide that,’ or 'That’s worthy of being mocked.’ And the thing about out-LGBTQ people is that we have taken that fact, we have taken that insecurity and that fear, and we’ve conquered it.
I wanna tell a story.
So, rewind a little more than a year. I’d just started my new job, which is unimportant to the story apart from the basic nature: I get on the phone with people to help them open financial accounts, and I spend maybe 15-30 minutes helping them do so. It’s complex, the computer systems I have to use are finicky, and it’s laden down with a lot of bureaucratic red tape.
My very first day live on the job, I was a nervous wreck. There were so many things I needed to keep track of, and I was having to talk to people over the phone for the first time in years, which meant my voice dysphoria was at an all-time high.
Then I got this client. I don’t actually recall his name and I couldn’t tell it to you even if I did, so let’s call him Bob.
Bob was elderly and had lived a hard life. He was transferring the contents of his pitifully small 401k from Walmart into a more accessible account, and I was helping him set that up. He came on the line cranky and more than a little paranoid. He asked me repeatedly if we were going to tell the government about his money, grumbled at me about the information I had to collect to get the account opened, made a few political statements with which I heartily disagreed. It was not a bad call, but I was definitely on edge.
Then it came time to set up a beneficiary on his account – someone who would inherit the account if he passed away.
And he paused, and then he said, “My daughter.”
I asked for her name and date of birth for the listing, and Bob told me. But then he went on.
“I want to tell you about her,” he said. “She’s very special to me.
"You see, I didn’t always have her. Years ago I had a son. And my wife and I, we loved our son so much. He was our perfect boy. We watched him grow up, he made it into college, he got a job. I never went to college, you know? But he did. I was so proud of that.
"Then, one day, he disappeared. Stopped calling, stopped visiting, stopped everything. Six years, we didn’t know what had happened to him, if he was alive, if he was dead, nothing. It was…”
He paused there, his voice creaking like it was about to break. I could see where this was going, and I was rapt.
“Then we got a letter,” he went on. “From her. She told us everything, explained it all. That she was–” He paused, then said “transgender” as if it were a foreign word that he wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce. “That he’d – she’d – disappeared like that because she was afraid of what we’d say. What I’d say. Maybe what I’d do. But she missed us and she wanted us to get to know her as she really is.”
He paused there, pretty clearly waiting for my reaction. I said something – I barely remember what – about how scary it must have been for her, and how hard for Bob and his wife not to hear from their child for so long.
“It was,” he agreed. “But you gotta know this. I love my daughter.” He said it with his whole being, with every bit of power and meaning that his thin, aged voice could hold. “I love my daughter, and I’m so proud of her. She’s getting married next month, and I thank God for letting me live long enough to walk her down the aisle, just like every girl deserves. She is the light of my life.”
At the end of a long, intimidating, tiring day, his fierce love for his trans daughter took my breath away. I’m always going to remember Bob – remember how he wasn’t perfect, wasn’t progressive, didn’t really know the etiquette or the language, but how deep and intense his love for his daughter was. How he told this to me, a stranger, as though daring me to say even the slightest rude word about her.
There is love in this world. Sometimes, it comes from the people you would least expect. It might not look quite like you think it will. But it is out there.
“I love my daughter,” Bob said, intense and emphatic, and I will never forget the sound of his voice.
For trans people who have not come out yet, not to themselves and not to others, their real gender identity will often lurk under the surface, in the subconscious.
It was like that for me too, for a long while. But that “other” side of me would not be silenced, and for good reason.
This strip is by Greg Dean of RealLifeComics. The whole story is available over at Facebook.
Thanks to Lost for pointing me in the direction of this comic.
See also: “The Transgender Jung”
«The Rev. Megan Rohrer was elected bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Sierra Pacific synod on Saturday (May 8), becoming the first transgender person to serve as bishop in the denomination or in any of the U.S.’s major Christian faiths.»
Michel Martin has made an interview with Dr. Eric Vilain about transgender athletes in sport over at Boise State Public Radio. The short version: It is complicated, but in general trans people do not have any real advantage over cis people in sports.
Anti-trans activists are trying to ban trans kids and adults from public sports. They say that their laws and regulations are put in place to eliminate any competitive advantage that transgender athletes may have.
But do they have any advantage?
Eric Villain holds an MD and a PhD. He is a pediatrician and geneticist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and an expert on intersex conditions. He’s been an adviser both to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the International Olympic Committee.
I will present a few quotes from the interview here to give you an insight into the most important points made by Dr. Villain.
Villain points out that men have on average an advantage in performance in athletics of about 10 to 12% over women. The fact is, however, that trans athletes, on average, are not winning any more than their cis counterparts. So how can that be?
Villain explains:
“…higher levels of the male hormone testosterone are associated with better performance only in a very small number of athletic disciplines - 400 meters, 800 meters, hammer throw, pole vault. And it certainly does not explain the whole 10% difference…
“…I would say that every sport requires different talents and anatomies for success. So I think we should focus on celebrating this diversity rather than focusing on relative notions of fairness. For example, the body of a marathon runner is extremely different than the body of a shotput champion. And a trans woman athlete may have some advantage on the basketball field because of her height but would be at a disadvantage in gymnastics.
“So it’s complicated. And more and more, many trans women athletes, for example, will take gender-affirming hormones, which will reduce their muscle mass and red blood cells, which carry the oxygen necessary for better performance. And that will also reduce the speed, the strength and the endurance.
“…at a high school level, many trans youth do delay their puberty, which means that even if they are not taking these gender-affirming hormones, their natural puberty in their biological sex is not happening, therefore resulting in a delay and an absence of an effect on muscle mass, at least for the male-to-female situation. So the supposed advantage of muscle mass and red blood cells because of testosterone becomes moot in middle and often high school competitions when there have been puberty blockers involved.
Read (or listen to) the whole interview here!
Illustration: sv_sunny
Photo of Villain from Wikipedia.
Oliver Laughland has spoken with Andrea Jenkins, Minneapolis city councillor about coming out as trans, the prejudices she has had to overcome – and how policing must change.
Laughland writes:
Jenkins, the first Black, openly transgender woman elected to public office in the US, became one of the most forceful voices to emanate from Minneapolis. She is not only a politician but also a poet, oral historian and an activist. She sang gospel in front of the nation’s media at a press conference in the days after Floyd’s death and played a central role in re-examining how the city’s long-criticised police force was funded. She insisted that racism be treated as a national public health emergency. And this month, with the murder trial of former officer Derek Chauvin, she is trying to prepare the city for the potential fallout.
It was only after she divorced at the age of 30 that she came out as a trans woman:
“I just really realised that I can’t go on any more, hiding the truth from myself. Hiding the truth from those who I love. If I am going to thrive in life, I have to come to grips with who I am, and I have to accept it.”…
“This thing that we call gender, it’s going to be so different 25 years from now. The reality that there are more than two binary gender identities will be, I believe, widely accepted and widely realised by people in the world. It’s only a matter of time. This whole conservative movement … is a last gasp to hold on to power and authority.”
Photo: Andrea Ellen Reed
The American Psychological Association has published a Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts where they ask for a ban of so-called “conversion therapy” for transgender people.
They start out with pointing out that “psychologists understand that gender is a nonbinary construct that allows for a range of gender identities and that a person’s gender identity may not align with sex assigned at birth.”
They point out that they use the broad umbrella definition of transgender (”the full range of people whose gender identity and/or gender role do not conform to what is typically associated with their sex assigned at birth”).
APA opposes the idea that incongruence between sex and gender is a mental disorder.
They refer to a wide variety of studies that documents that conversion therapy is based on homophobia and transphobia, that it is harmful for those who are exposed to such treatment and that it does not work.
“There is a growing body of research that shows that transgender or nonbinary gender identities are normal variations in human expression of gender,” says APA President Jennifer F. Kelly, PhD.
“Attempts to force people to conform with rigid gender identities can be harmful to their mental health and well-being.”
Trans people who who have experienced gender affirming psychological and medical practices, on the other hand, “report improved psychological functioning, quality of life, treatment retention and engagement, and reductions in psychological distress, gender dysphoria, and maladaptive coping mechanisms,” the resolution says.
APA also stress that “because of evidence of harm and lack of evidence of efficacy, supports public policies and legislation that prohibit, or aim to reduce GICE [Gender Identity Change Efforts], cissexism, and anti-transgender and anti-gender nonbinary bias and that increase support for gender diversity.”
You can read the whole resolution here.
By the way, the APA council has also adopted an updated Resolution on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, which reiterates APA’s opposition to using nonscientific explanations to frame same-gender and multiple-gender orientations as unhealthy.
Photo of trans person with transgender flag: Vladimir Vladimirov
