Category: current events

Living Through the Coronavirus

On May 10, 2020

A lot of shit has been happening since the last time I posted on here. First off, happy Mothers’ Day to all the mothers out there. I sent my mother a gift card to Amazon. It was done digitally, but she hasn’t picked it up yet. They have limited access to the internet. She’ll get it sooner or later.

March 17th marked my fiftieth birthday. This milestone still blows my mind. Frankly, I never expected to live this long. Yet, now that I’m at that age, it doesn’t seem like I’m as old as I thought I was going to be.

February marked the sixth year that I went on HRT. I still have no regrets about it. If I had to say one thing about it, I wish I started sooner in my life. Yet, I know that if I came out when I was fifteen that my parents’ wouldn’t understand or support me. At least, that is what I thought at that point in my life. Then when I was out on my own, I didn’t want to do it because I thought that I would never be able to find a job. Actually, that still haunts me since I lost my job with the Federal Government.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. The elephant in the room is the coronavirus going around. I think it is crazy. I never thought that I’d live to see a pandemic such as this one. I’ve been in quarantine for about a week after my birthday. I have been out to get my car fixed, but for the most part I haven’t been out at all. Thanks to my agoraphobia it hasn’t been affecting my mental health at all. Of course, it isn’t helping matters either. I’ve been seeing my therapist virtually. It is cam-to-cam so we can see each other.

The Trump administration isn’t helping us out either. He said some pretty dumb stuff early on and currently. First he thought it was a hoax made up by the Democratic Party. Then he said we are nearly zero. Then it was a good job if it just killed off two hundred thousand people. Not too long ago he thought it made no sense to test for the virus since one day you can have it and then the next day you do have it. Don’t even get me started on him saying that injecting or digesting disinfectants can cure you of the virus. I wish he would just step down and let the scientists take over.

Joe Biden wasn’t my first pick for the front runner for the Democratic Party’s bid for the Presidency. I was behind Kamala Harris before she dropped out. She’s done a lot for the LGBT community during her time as Attorney General of California. Sure there was that one time she ruled in favor of transgender women inmates being in men’s facilities, but I think she answered the question well when she was at the HRC debates. I do think she wasn’t the most liberal candidate on the ticket. I think she just sways with the times. Many politicians included Obama were more centralist in their viewpoints. Yet, I am backing Joe Biden for 2020.

Harassment of Transgender Women by the Kansas City Police Ignored by the HRC

By Katherine Walter

On December 24, 2014

In current events

A few days ago the New York Daily News had an article about the Kansas City police department posting an anti-transgender on Twitter. The KC police have a tweet-along where they would tweet their daily activities. This isn’t uncommon and many police departments have drive-alongs or virtual tweet-alongs like the KC police department. There was a series of tweets where police officers tweeted that they stopped to talk to a “possible prostitute”. Again, nothing unusual, many police departments like to harass sex workers, or those they expect to be sex workers. I personally don’t think the time and resources should be spent harassing someone who is trying to earn a living. As they were reporting their discussion of the nature of her work and telling her to get a different occupation, they found out she was a transgender woman they then said “she was … a man” and caller her a him/her. It was all very degrading of the police officers to misgender her in such a manner. She is in fact, a woman, not a man. It seemed to me that the Kansas City police department needs some sensitivity training when it comes to dealing with the transgender community.

Yet, what really got to me about the article in the New York Daily News was the very last paragraph. They stated that the Human Rights Campaign called Kansas City, Missouri a “beacon of hope”. The Kansas City Public Media went on to report that the Human Rights Campaign gave the city a perfect score of 100 for two years in a row in their Municipal Equality Index. What a joke. As tweeter Wick Trick tweeted,the Kansas City policy department have harassed transgender women in this manner in the past. I found an article from GLADD from the 2012 Transgender Day of Remembrance that supports this. A transgender woman shared her experience of police harassment in the article.

During September of this year, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin gave the keynote speech at the Southern Comfort Conference where he apologized to the transgender community for their lack of interest in issues that affect transgender men and women. It was a good speech, but I want to hear him put those words into actions. How can the city of Kansas City, Missouri receive a perfect score in the HRC Municipal Equality Index when the city’s police department harass transgender women? Not only that, but getting that mark two years in a row. These indexes that HRC puts out for companies and municipalities are a joke and only useful for gay white men.

You can talk the talk, Mister Griffin, but you are going to have to more importantly walk the walk. It is time for HRC to stop doing what is politically correct and do what is morally and ethically correct. The HRC turned their back on the transgender community when they had to “take the T out of LGBT” for the 2011 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (HR 1397) for political reasons. It is time to put the T back in not just for ENDA but for everything, including the indexes that the HRC publishes every year.