Lady Gaga took time out of her Vancouver show this week to read a letter given to her by a lesbian fan.
The fan, who was in the audience, wrote: “You truly helped me become a better person and you made coming out so much easier. I never would’ve done it if it wasn’t for you.
“I also wanted to thank you for always teaching me to be myself. I now know who the fuck I am and feel like I can do anything.”
Lady Gaga then invited the fan to meet her after the show.
A man is suing a doctor, after he was diagnosed with the “chronic condition” of homosexuality in a routine physical.
Los Angeles-based Michael Moore, 46, said he discovered the note on his medical records after he underwent a physical with Dr Elaine Jones of Torrance Health Association in April last year.
When he noticed the note, he confronted Dr Jones and asked her to remove it, but she defended her diagnosis, claiming the medical community goes “back and forth” on whether homosexuality is considered an illness.
Homosexuality was removed from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1973.
Mr Moore claims he was at one point assured that the record had been deleted, to find out later that it was still present.
He said: “It was infuriating. It was painful.
“I gave them chance after chance and this time I’m not going to be silent. My silence would condone this activity.”
“I don’t want any gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual ever to hear from a doctor that their normal and healthy sexuality is anything other than that.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! I danced with a gay! Marge, Lisa, promise me you won’t tell anyone. Promise me!”
―Homer Simpson, after discovering John‘s sexual orientation
“Homer’s Phobia” is the fifteenth episode of Season 8 which aired on February 16, 1997. The episode was written by Ron Hauge and directed by Mike B. Anderson. John Waters guest stars as John.
Hi everybody!
My name is Aidan Kircheim and besides the current president of PFLAG Long Island, I am also a transgender man.
I like comic books, video games, Dungeons and Dragons, and cute stuffed toys. If there’s a need to talk to someone about the recent Marvel Secret Wars event or the latest Virtual Reality technology, I can be that guy.
However, this ongoing segment is going to be about my realization and growth from a young woman into an adult man (and not at all about comic books… sadly).
Some topics I’d like to discuss as these segments continue are: my family and their reactions, things that I look back on during my time as a female that make complete sense now, my transition not only from female to male in general but also from my initial struggle with identifying as a lesbian – to embracing the man I truly always was as well as travels and experiences, my sexuality, and anything else that comes up along the way!
I will also make myself available to have open communication with anyone who desires it, including issues or questions to address in my future contributions to TEB (Transgender Ear Bender) – feel free to email through the PFLAG Long island email address ([email protected]) and I’ll be happy to chat, listen, and anything in-between!
I suppose I should start at the beginning. I was born on a Friday evening at 5:25pm, at South Nassau Hospital in Oceanside, NY. My two brothers Matthew and Michael (who were ten and eight years old, respectively, at the time) were eagerly awaiting my arrival, as were my parents, but it was my grandmother who was the most excited about her next grandchild. The story goes – when she found out it was a girl, she disappeared on a shopping spree for two days and came back with toys and blankets and clothes and a crib. She was excited to finally have a baby girl in the family; they all were.
I learned from a very young age (as most children do) what a girl was supposed to be, and I was determined to fit the mold to make my parents happy. Much of my early life was lived for my parents, and trying to make up for how troublesome my brother Michael was. I wanted to make life easier for them and just be a good kid, even if it meant that I wasn’t emotionally stable all of the time. I learned that girls are supposed to like certain things, wear certain clothes, grow their hair long, and act a certain way. So I did what I felt like I had to, and became a fantastic actress.
I secretly wanted to act just like my brothers, and get away with things they got away with, instead of constantly being told to be more “ladylike”. I was a “tomboy”, and always had more friends who were boys. I got along better with boys, and I was happier with boys. Regardless, I played the part of a girl as best as I could, and apparently it was good enough that when I came out as transgender at the age of 22, no one had seen it coming!
I’m going to start the next segment elaborating on what it was like to be a child in my family, living in a small town on Long Island. Hope you join us for the next one, and feel free to let me know of anything specific you’d like me to cover – or just that you’d like to hear about.
Thanks and see you next time!
Indiana has appealed the ruling in Henderson v. Adams, 17-1141, which allowed married non-birth mothers to be listed as a parent on the child’s birth certificate. The Pence administration refused to recognize these women as parents and twice tried to convince the district court to limit the scope of the state’s parenthood statutes.
Although a new governor has been installed, the state is turning to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals but has not yet submitted a brief stating what issue it wants the appellate panel to address. Neither Gov. Eric Holcomb nor Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill responded to phone and email messages seeking comment.
“I had been hopeful that with a new attorney general and a new governor we would see a change in the state’s handling of this matter,” said Karen Celestino-Horseman, one of attorneys representing the couples in Henderson.
The plaintiffs in Henderson, a group of married lesbian couples, challenged Indiana’s stance that non-birth mothers are not parents because they are not biologically related to the children. Their primary argument was that they were being treated differently from similarly situated heterosexual couples who had undergone artificial insemination. The men in those marriages were still listed as the father on the birth certificate even though they didn’t share a biological connection with the offspring.
Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana overturned the state’s parenthood statutes, finding they violate the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment.
The state subsequently filed a motion asking the court to modify and clarify the ruling. Walton Pratt denied the motion to amend the judgment but granted the state’s request to clarify how the judgment should be applied, pointing out “the Order means what it says and says what it means.”
The IndianaLawyer.com, by Marilyn Odendahl, February 8, 2017
Click here to read the entire article.
The post Indiana Birth certificate battle moves to 7th Circuit appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
“For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools, youth sports and other youth organizations, have ultimately deferred to the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs,” the group said in a statement on its website. “However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state.”
The announcement, reported on Monday night by The Associated Press, reverses a policy that drew controversy late last year when a transgender boy in New Jersey was kicked out of the organization about a month after joining.
“After weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization, we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point is no longer sufficient,” Michael Surbaugh, the Scouts’ chief executive, said in a recorded statement on Monday.
The announcement came amid a national debate over transgender rights, with cities and states across the nation struggling with whether and how to regulate gender identity in the workplace, in restrooms and at schools.
In recent years, the Boy Scouts of America has expanded rights for gay people. In 2013, the group ended its ban on openly gay youths participating in its activities. Two years later, the organization ended its ban on openly gay adult leaders.
Advocates for gay and transgender people who had pushed for changes in Boy Scouts’ policy praised Monday’s announcement.
“From our perspective, they clearly did the right thing,” said Zach Wahls, who co-founded Scouts for Equality, a nonprofit group that advocates for stronger protections in the organization for gays and transgender people. “My team and I knew that they were considering a policy change, but we are both heartened and surprised by how quickly they moved to change the situation.”
New York Times,
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Source: Time for Families
The easy answer, and likely the one that animated my daughters’ purchase, is that I’m “Daddy” and David is “Papa.” (How we arrived at who’d have which title is a matter for another column.) But there’s a more complex one, too, which I’m guessing was in the back of their minds: I’m the dad, and David is the mom.
I don’t even have to imagine this as their thinking, really, because one of the kids said as much out loud a few weeks ago. David had just given her medication to help her deal with a cold, and, quite abruptly, she announced that he was “more like the mom” and I was “the dad.” Wait, what? How can our kids (of all people!) be hypnotized by the rigid gender dichotomy that our family undermines by our very existence?
It’s not even as though we follow roles that break down in quite the way of “traditional” mom/dad couples. My job’s hours are pretty flexible, so I have lots of time to spend with the family. I do my share of the laundry and generally clean up after dinner. David does the cooking. And when it comes to caring for them when they’re sick—which, after all, triggered the mom/dad comment—it’s a pretty even deal. In fact, I had to interrupt writing this column to mop up some vomit.
I admit the home workload isn’t strictly a 50/50 proposition. David’s design business is part-time at this point, and he does more around the house than I do. But our roles are flexible and nongendered enough that calling us Mom and Dad is just weird.
It’s also true that our neighborhood is very gender-progressive. Our next door neighbors both work full-time, but the dad’s home a lot more, does more than half the cooking, and is forever busy around the house. On the next block is a dad who mainly works from home while mom goes off to her full-time engineering job. Another mom is a high-level nurse practitioner whose husband is an ice sculptor. And so on. In sum, there is no shortage of gender-role busting all around us. Why isn’t all that enough to steer our kids away from such reductive ways of thinking?
Because even those important, living examples of role flexibility are still overwhelmed by the morass of gender traditionalism swirling around them.
Let’s go back to 2007, when the kids were just 2 years old. We’d just completed the adoption process and wanted to have their Social Security cards re-issued with their new last names and with David and me listed as their legal parents. What ensued, though, was homophobic hilarity of both the internal and external types. The Social Security forms had spaces for two parents: “mother” and “father.” The nice-enough guy who processed the form advised that there had been a few other same-sex couples in this situation, and the solution was simply to choose one parent to do an on-the-spot, limited-time gender change. In other words, he was asking me to lie to the government by designating one of us as “mother” although the application itself was the bigger liar. Then he said: “And since you’re the one standing here, you get to be the father.” I muttered something now lost to the ages and did as he’d suggested.
Not 30 seconds later, of course, I had second thoughts: Why was he making anysuggestion besides “fill in whichever blank you wanted.” And why did I accede to this absurdity rather than doing the only respectable queer thing—signing myself in as “mother,” and then turning on my heel and striding imperiously away, perhaps while quoting Mommie Dearest?
I understand that the forms have been changed since 2007, but the essentializing assumptions that underlay them are much tougher to drive out of our collective mental beehive. Just this past weekend, I heard a trailer for some NPR show featuring a lesbian comedian who declared, to forced laughter, that having two sons was the ultimate joke on her and her wife. I’m sure that if I’d searched out the actual show from which this inanity was plucked, I’d have heard the requisite disclaimers (“Oh, our children are our lives … ”), but I’d already had enough. I thought we LGBTQ parents were supposed to be knocking down these pegs rather than mining them for cheap laughs. Yeah, there’s this “lesbians hate men” trope, but really? And the “joke” feeds into intractable stereotypes about how boys need dads, and girls need moms—even though the comedian was probably trying to make a different point.
Before I work myself into hysterics, though, it’s worth acknowledging the more benign take on all this. Maybe my daughter was just expressing, in the terms available to her, that David’s more likely to express his feminine side, or is more comfortable doing so. But I have trouble with that explanation when gender division is made normative from birth. Retail establishments still divide clothing and toys by gender, and the advertising that parades in front of kids’ eyes almost invariably features moms doing mom things, and dads doing dad things. That I don’t even have to tell you what they’re doing makes the point well enough. Our daughters have managed to develop their own gender styles despite all this hounding, but as they reach adolescence, that’s only going to get harder to maintain. The “Papa is the mom” comment could be an early sign of what’s to come despite our tiresome reminders otherwise.
By John Culhane – slate.com, January 24, 2017
Click here to read the entire article.
The post No One Is Safe From the Gender Binary—Even Gay Families appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
First, I must say that there is an LGBT Trump disconnect. Since I wrote my first piece about LGBT family rights in the Trump presidency, a lot has changed. I have heard from many people, and I myself wanted to believe, that Trump wouldn’t touch the LGBT gains that we have made during the Obama years. But his actions have proven different. His appointments, activity in state courts and the often unintelligible rhetoric we have become accustomed, all suggest that we may not be as safe as some thought we were.
The Appointment Problem – My greatest fears about Trump’s appointments center around the Department of Justice (DOJ), and more specifically, around the civil rights division of the that agency. First, the long and telling history of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Republican Senator from Alabama who President Trump has tapped to lead the DOJ, is troubling for many more that just LGBT Americans. According to The Washington Post, Jeff Sessions has claimed to be a civil rights champion, yet he has overstated his experience and, in some cases, lied altogether about his involvement. Sessions has spent the majority of his career attempting to undermine LGBT equality, the details of which are numerous and troubling.
But the worst of this story is that President Trump has chosen John M. Gore to head the DOJ’s Civil Right s division. Mr. Gore, prior to this nomination, was in the process of defending North Carolina’s odious trans-bathroom bill. Prior to that, he defended Republican efforts to gerrymander congressional districts in violation of the civil rights of minority Americans. This is not only putting the fox in charge of the hen house, but the hens in this analogy are real people who have had their civil rights violated in what should be the most fundamental right this country possesses – the right to vote. How can they now trust that their best interests will be defended by an agency whose sole purpose is supposed to be that defense.
The Visibility Problem – One of the first signs that there might be a distance between Trump’s “accepting” rhetoric toward the LGBT community during the campaign and what he plans to do as president appeared, or rather disappeared, within the first hour after he was sworn in. The official White House website, www.whitehouse.gov, removed the LGBT rights page which had been there throughout Obama’s last term, and before. No explanation was given, however, the pro-Trump Twittersphere rejoiced.
In an equally expedient manner, all data regarding climate change was removed as well from the whitehouse.gov site. As most LGBT Americans are not one issue voters, this deletion concerned me as much as the LGBT page being removed. “Out of sight, out of mind,” seems to be the rule of law now.
The Marriage Issue – I referred earlier to things having changed since I wrote LGBT Family Rights in a Trump Presidency. At that time, the Supreme Court of Texas had declined to re-hear a case which would abolish benefits that the City of Houston provides to same-sex married couples. On the inauguration day, the Supreme Court of Texas changed its mind, under GOP pressure. The Republican Governor of Texas himself wrote a brief to the court asking them to reconsider essentially arguing that the Obergefell Supreme Court marriage decision does not apply to Texas. In that brief, the Governor wrote of the “Federal Tyranny” of the courts and that Obergefell does not require that same-sex married couples and different-sex married couples deserve equal treatment under the law.
In my previous article, I was originally at a loss for identifying a case with a fact pattern that would make it to the Supreme Court which would have the effect of etching away at the Obergefell marriage decision. This Texas case may be just that. While it would undoubtedly take time to make it to the Supreme Court, who knows what its makeup will be then. The anti-marriage movement’s argument is in development as well and may take the same amount of time to get its legs. The Arkansas Supreme Court issued a decision based on this logic denying same-sex couples that right to be listed on their children’s birth certificates. The issue is now before us and we cannot afford to stop paying attention.
After attending the Women’s March in Washington this last weekend, I left with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Hundreds of thousands of people made the impossible seem possible. The greatest lesson that I took form my experience there was that no matter how generous I may have felt before in giving President Trump a chance to govern, I cannot forget, nor should any of us, that he won the election by dividing the country and making it clear that some people were simply not welcome. This is the LGBT Trump disconnect. I fear now that my beloved LGBT community has taken its place among the female, black, brown, Muslim and immigrant communities that were so vilified during the election and may have no voice in the Trump administration. I hope that the LGBT Trump disconnect is a myth, but if past is prologue, we have no option other than to pay attention, remain engaged and share our feelings with everyone we can.
For more information, visit www.timeforfamilies.com, or email me at [email protected].
The post The LGBT Trump Disconnect appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
The state’s highest civil court had rejected the case 8-1 in September, prompting a concerted effort to revive a lawsuit that sought to abolish benefits the city of Houston provides to married same-sex couples. Opponents believe the Houston case provides an opportunity for a ruling that limits the impact of the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.
Gay marriage opponents asked the court to reconsider by filing a rarely granted motion to rehear the case that the court accepted, without comment, on Friday.
Oral arguments will be heard March 1.
The motion to rehear urged the court to reject the “ideology of the sexual revolution” embraced by federal judges who found a constitutional right to gay marriage, overturned Texas abortion regulations and struck down a Mississippi law that would have allowed individuals and businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples based on religious objections to gay marriage.
A separate friend-of-the-court brief, signed by 70 Republican politicians, conservative leaders and Christian pastors, urged the court to stand up to “federal tyranny” and warned that failure to accept the appeal would deny voters “an opportunity to hear what their duly elected high court justices have to say on such an important issue.”
Ratcheting up the pressure, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, all Republicans, filed a brief telling the court that the Houston lawsuit provides an opportunity to limit the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage.
Opponents of same-sex marriage, spurred by religious and social conservative leaders, also barraged the court with emails asking justices to strike down the Houston benefits or face a voter backlash in future Republican primaries.
by Chuck Lindell, statesman.com – January 20, 2017
Click here to read the entire article.
The post After GOP pressure, Texas Supreme Court takes gay marriage case appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
Gabriel and Dylan’s Story – via LoveComesFirst.com
Gabriel and Dylan – Love Comes First: Creating LGBT Families is an ongoing transmedia project designed to inspire, inform and document a community on the brink of tremendous societal and cultural change. As legal bans to marriage and adoption are lifted and reproductive technology advances, new possibilities for building families have arisen. At the same time, LGBT characters and stories have become more prevalent in entertainment and the media—bringing awareness and creative influence to the world at large. Enjoy!
The post Gabriel and Dylan’s Story – Our Families Matter appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
