gaywrites:

The Target Corporation has just launched a line of rainbow-studded t-shirts supporting gay pride season, aiming to donate up to $120,000 of the proceeds to the pro-gay Family Equality Council. 

This may come as a shock to many gay rights activists, who remember Target sadly for its past contributions to MN Forward, a group that supported anti-gay political candidate Tom Emmer. However, Target also gets consistently high rankings on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, and it’s a sponsor of Minneapolis-area Pride events. 

“Target is not anti-gay,” Michael Francis, Target’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s important to set the record straight and provide some context.”

The shirts are apparently only available online and through the month of June. Get yours here. And in the meantime, what do you think about this? Is it a change of heart, or has Target always been allied?

yay target!

gaywrites:

These are not good times for anyone affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage, and not surprisingly, that includes Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Documents circulated by the Human Rights Campaign show that Romney donated $10,000 to NOM a few years ago, a contribution that may well have made a huge impact when NOM was fighting for Prop 8. A while back Romney also signed a pledge from NOM promising to fight marriage equality in this country.

More info on the current NOM controversy:

As a donor and presumably a member of NOM, since a portion of all donations automatically goes toward membership dues, it’s possible that the Romney campaign saw the “confidential” memo in which NOM outlines its strategy to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies.”

HRC and others are calling on Romney to denounce NOM. But as a 2012 candidate he’s signed a pledge from the group that commits him to its ideals, including a ban on marriage equality via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an effort to repeal marriage equality in Washington, D.C., and the formation of a presidential commission to investigate NOM’s opponents.

Crazy stuff. I will never stop saying it: do your research before going to vote in November.

gaywrites:

TW: The article linked above includes language that isn’t very trans*-friendly, but it’s the primary source for this info.

A finalist in the Miss Universe Canada competition was kicked out of the pageant when it was discovered she is transgender.

The rules set by the Miss Universe franchise say that contestants must be “naturally born female.” Jenna Talackova, a trans* contestant, indicated that this was true in her forms, but the director of the pageant “suspected otherwise.” When he confronted her, she told the truth and was removed from the competition.

Talackova could not be reached for comment Friday night. In a YouTube interview posted in 2010, she says she knew she was a female at the age of 4 and began hormone therapy at 14. She surgically changed her gender a few years ago when she was 19.

“I regard myself as a woman with a history,” Talackova says in the video, winking.

This is really unfortunate. I thought we were past this by now.

gaywrites:

Evie had no idea the boy she cared for in his childhood in Indonesia had become the president of the United States. But when she saw “Barry” on TV and in the paper after the election, she knew it had to be him.

“Now when people call me scum,” she says, “I can just say: ‘But I was the nanny for the President of the United States!’”

Evie has recently made headlines for a lot of things: firstly, because she was Barack Obama’s nanny way back when he was a kid, and secondly, because she’s a transgender woman living a life that’s not quite hers. Evie was born biologically male, and though she identifies as a woman, she’s forced to hide herself because of the harsh persecution of trans* people in Indonesia. 

Transgender people constitute a decent part of Indonesia’s population - 7 million of its 240 million people, activists guess - but that doesn’t mean they are respected. Indonesia still has harsh social stigmas against the trans* community that go as far as physical violence and abuse. The Newsday article linked above covers the topic fairly well, but with a couple of flaws in sensitivity, so read at your own risk. 

Evie’s story provides a telling account of trans* life in Indonesia, and it also serves as a model to show just how connected we all are. There’s no real way to know if President Obama considers her when making decisions relating to the LGBT (particularly the T) community, but I commend American media for taking note of Evie’s story. 

gaywrites:

A new LiveScience story examines the high rate of mental health problems in transgender kids and adolescents. 

Based partially on a 2010 study that found 41 percent of trans* people in the U.S. have attempted suicide, the article examines how having a gender identity that doesn’t match one’s body can cause serious psychiatric complications. 

Researchers attributed those rates to discrimination and stigma, as well as a lack of laws protecting transgender people from employment discrimination. Poor insurance coverage of hormones and other treatments to help a transgender person transition to their desired gender also account for the rates, the researchers found. 

But the mismatch between mind and body alone can be a major source of psychological pain, Leibowitz said. Of 97 patients who came to the Endocrine Division for hormones and other treatments related to gender identity disorder between January 1998 and February 2010, 44.3 percent had significant mental health histories. Twenty percent had self-mutilated, and 9.3 percent had attempted suicide at least once. About 37 percent were taking psychiatric medication.

These are some pretty serious numbers, but it’s something we need to know if we’re going to address it properly. So - how do we address it properly?

How to address it properly?

Stop all of the offensive and terrible transphobic jokes that media is saturated with.

When all you ever hear is that you are fake, that nobody will ever see you as a real person, and that your very nature is a source of disgust and/or amusement, it’s pretty fucking hard to feel like there’s a reason to keep on living.

(is it bad that when I read the title, the first thing I thought was “HAHAHAHA this is news?”)

musermatt:

Guise watch the video. I’m a celebrity

oh my gawd I know a famous person!

gaywrites:

When Amy Koch, recently resigned Senate Majority Leader from Minnesota, engaged in an extramarital affair with a Senate staffer and publicly apologized for it, the LGBT community of Minnesota saw a chance to make a point and poke a little fun. 

On behalf of Minnesota’s LGBT people, John Medeiros issued a letter to Koch sarcastically apologizing for ruining her “traditional marriage” by seeking equal rights. The full letter is at the link above. An excerpt:

“On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.”

Thoughts? Intelligent political tactic or immature cheap shot?

reallyfoxnews:

An astoundingly ironic article from Fox News’ resident psychiatrist bigoted homophobe and non-white heterosexual bedroom-policer, Dr. Keith Ablow. From the article,

“The sexual histories of political candidates and elected officials have no place in politics because they can distract us from supporting those men and women with the skills to reduce the nation’s debt, create jobs and defeat our enemies…. 

I have treated miraculously talented, married surgeons and researchers who save lives every day, then meet up with escorts by night. Personally, I wouldn’t hazard going under the knife with a less talented fellow who is a paragon of virtue, sexually.”

Dr. Ablow would, however, stop your children from watching Chaz Bono on television because they might get the idea that being transgender is acceptable, or warn you against shopping at J. Crew, lest your son learn to paint his toenails. But don’t worry, he has no problem praising heterosexual infidelity and serial adulterers. Let’s face it, he just wants you to focus on the fact that they are Republican, male and heterosexual people too.

gaywrites:

A woman from Tennessee was denied the right to visit her partner in a local hospital because the two are not legally family or spouses, Out and About reports. 

Val Burke tried several times to visit her partner in Rolling Hills Hospital’s residential facility and was denied every time. She had been previously allowed in the room only if her partner’s mother was present. 

Recent federal laws allow patients at most hospitals - that is, those participating in Medicare and Medicaid - to determine their own visitation standards. This hospital does qualify under that policy, but Burke was denied visitation anyway. The hospital administration has not commented on why this happened. 

“I went to visit her at the appropriate visiting time and was turned away,” she says. “We have been living together for three years now, but that didn’t matter to them either. The rest of her family is out of town, so she didn’t have any one visit her.”

This. Is. Not. Acceptable.