How to Create an In-Case-of-Emergency Everything Document to Keep Your Loved Ones Informed if Worst Comes to Worst [lifehacker.com]

Melanie Pinola — If you were hit by a bus today or were otherwise incapacitated, would your loved ones be able to quickly locate your important information or know how to handle your affairs? Many of us have a great handle on our finances, but our record keeping systems might not be obvious to family members or friends who might need immediate access to them in times of emergency. Here’s a step-by-step guide to organizing your vital information so it can be conveniently and safely accessed when needed.

The Goal: A Master Document or Folder with All Your Important Information 

Full size

Perhaps the easiest method for creating a centralized document or set of files would be creating a Google Spreadsheet that you could share with your family and friends and keep updated regularly. We’ve created a basic Master Information Kit template just for this purpose. The spreadsheet includes prompts for the information below, but you can customize it for your particular needs. To use the template for yourself, in Google Docs go to File > Make a copy… to save it to your Google account (make sure your version of the document’s sharing settings go back to the default “Private”).

Update: Due to high traffic to the template, Google Docs is only showing it in list view, making it impossible to copy. This zipped file has downloadable versions in PDF, XLS, and ODS formats. You can still import these into your Google Docs account.

There are really only a few steps to setting this organizer up: gathering your records, securely sharing them, and keeping them updated. Follow along and you’ll have your kit set up in no time—and a little extra peace of mind.

Click to continue reading this important article: http://lifehacker.com/5817021/in-case-of-emergency-how-to-organize-your-important-records-in-a-master-information-kit

Wrong Reasons: A Warning for Those Considering M2F SRS [lynnconway]

by Lynn Conway

What if you “succeed” in completing a TS transition, but did it for the wrong reasons? Yep, you get the idea! This is one place you do NOT want to go!

In the large majority of cases, transsexual (TS) transitions work out well over the long-term, as we’ve seen in the many stories documented in Lynn’s Transsexual Women’s Successes page.  However, in some cases a complete TS transition may totally fail to meet very unrealistic expectations, and way too late the transitioner may realize that undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS) was a BIG mistake.

In Lynn’s TS Informational pages, we discussed some of the social risks that face TG and TS transitioners.  In the SRS information page, we discussed some of the medical risks of the surgery itself. Here in this page, we focus on the risks involved in undergoing SRS in cases where the overall rationale for transition and/or for undergoing SRS is questionable.

Some examples of “wrong reasons” and wrong situations for undergoing SRS are (i) efforts to become a center of attention and live a “sexy life”, (ii) thinking it will “automatically turn oneself into a woman” in others’ eyes, (iii) deciding to become a woman on a whim (for example, in the midst of a mid-life crisis), (iv) doing it for autosexual “thrills”, (v) doing it while suffering from preexisting serious mental conditions unrelated to GID (depression, bi-polar conditions,…), etc.

Regrets and adjustment difficulties seem to occur especially frequently in the cases of older intense crossdressers and sexual fetishists whose drive to transition is based primarily on male sexual feelings and habits. These individuals will gradually lose their male libidinous responses to their new female body as time passes after the removal of their testicles during SRS.  This loss of libidinous rewards, combined with accumulating practical, social and emotional difficulties in postoperative life, can lead to serious long-term adjustment difficulties for those who’ve “made a mistake”.  (This effect is quite different from the experiencing of a heightened female libido and improvements in lovemaking capability that occur in many other postoperative TS cases). The bottom line here is that EXTREME CAUTION is advised if you are unsure of your motives for SRS.

Examples of cases of “regrets”: Following are stories of people who have experienced regrets and have openly talked about their particular regrets. We can learn a lot from such cases, which help clarify the nature and validity of this serious warning:

Renée Richards

Dani Bunten Berry

Sandra MacDougall

Samantha Kane

Summary

For more please go to: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Warning.html

Renée: Los Angeles Film Festival Review [hollywoodreporter.com]

by Kirk Honeycutt / Hollywood Reporter

Eric Drath’s documentary explores the life of transsexual tennis star Renée Richards before and after her 1975 gender reassignment surgery.

Renée, Eric Drath’s documentary about transsexual tennis star Renée Richards and her battle to play as a woman in the 1977 U.S. Open, is as fascinating as it is frustrating. Made for ESPN Films and shown in the current Los Angeles Film Fest prior to broadcast later this year, the film brings you up-to-date on a personality who once dominated headlines but has now largely faded from public view.

Drath tries to get to the bottom of two people, Richard Raskin, who was born in 1934 into a comfortable upper middle-class existence, and Renée — “French for ‘re-born,’ ” she reminds — following Raskin’s gender reassignment surgery in 1975. It’s fair to say both remain an enigma.

Richards has written two autobiographies and seen two movies made about her life, the TV movie Second Servestarring Vanessa Redgrave and now this one. Yet she remains elusive. This enigmatic quality isn’t just about the schizophrenia of Dick and Renée but about the contractions and self-doubts each possessed.

Drath, who comes from a tennis-loving family, remembers as a boy Dr. Raskin, an eminent eye doctor who treated his sister, yet later appeared in a skirt at the U.S. Open, and wants to find out what happened. Good luck.

Observing Richards in an interview today and then in old footage and old interviews, one clearly observes a war going on within this person, not so much between male and female, as between what one friends calls the “private person,” who is extremely wary of all this attention, and a headstrong and arrogant individual who craves the limelight.

Click to read the rest of the article: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ren-e-los-angeles-film-203165

Just Another Girl (Who Used to Be a Boy) [glamour.com]

from Glamour Magazine May 2010

A striking blue-eyed blond deftly navigates Los Angeles’ Melrose Avenue in her blue convertible Beetle. Her name is Amy Karn, and she could be any 26-year-old girl headed to Friday after-work drinks with the top up, windows down and her hair blowing in the breeze. Perma-glued to her cell, she’s usually talking to Valerie Reynolds, her best friend. This time Valerie’s calling to ask: Did Amy bring the halter bra she needs to borrow? Check. “We share everything,” says Amy. “I don’t know where I’d be without her.” Every woman needs close friends to lean on, but for Amy, this has never been truer. Over the past two-plus years, between settling into her first “grown-up” apartment, getting her career off the ground and trying to find love, Amy has made one mind-blowing transition her friends have not: She’s changed from a man into a woman.

Read More http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2010/04/just-another-girl-who-used-to-be-a-boy#ixzz1QihYJrHD

Quote of the Day: Doubts vs. the Good We Win

Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.

- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Diagnosing Differences: A Film that Should Be Required Viewing for Health Providers Working with Transgender Populations

“Diagnosing Difference should be mandatory viewing for all medical and mental health providers, including those currently in training and those who have practiced for many years … This film provides not only a real portrayal of the diversity of gender identities within transgender communities, it also takes the medical and mental health professions head on with compelling historical facts, contemporary debates and personal narratives.  This film is a call to all mental health providers to not only educate themselves but to become activists for transgender patient rights within their professional communities.”
– Dr. Sara Kimmel, Staff Psychologist, Harvard University Mental Health Services

Diagnosing Difference is a feature-length length (64 mins) documentary featuring interviews with 13 diverse scholars, activists, and artists who identify on the trans spectrum (transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and gender variant) about the impact and implications of the Gender Identity Disorder (GID) on their lives and communities.

Historically, non-trans medical and mental health care professionals have positioned themselves as the “experts” on transgender experience, creating standards, guidelines, and diagnoses that inform legal policies and mediate every aspect of life. Diagnosing Difference shifts the focus to explore the many complexities of the diagnosis from the perspectives of those it affects most directly and personally, including access to medical care, legal ramifications, social stigma, implications for psychotherapeutic care, treatment trauma, and differences in experience based on factors like race, class, gender orientation, and generation.

Diagnosing Difference humanizes the debate around the GID diagnosis by valuing personal experience as a vital (and often ignored) form of expertise. Rather than trying to create an exhaustive examination of the diagnosis or offer claims of universal representation, Diagnosing Difference is purposefully personal, seeking to expand the experience of the audience, provoke thought, and create as many questions as it answers.

Using the diagnosis as a departure point, the participants debunk myths and misconceptions about transgender identities, challenge stereotypical gender expectations, and offer educative insight into the terms and language used to describe transgender lives. This groundbreaking film is the first to explore the impact of the GID diagnosis on people who identify on the trans spectrum in their own words and images.

Diagnosing Difference is accessible to a broad audience, including graduate training programs in psychology and medicine, and represents a significant contribution to the emerging field of trans-affirmative health care.

Filmmaker Annalise Ophelian is a queer San Francisco-based human sexuality educator and trans ally. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology.

For more information, please go to the film’s website: http://www.diagnosingdifference.com/

 

US Affordable Care Act to Collect Health Data/Disparities on LGBT Populations

From the US Department of Health and Human Services:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 29, 2011

Contact: HHS Press Office (202) 690-6343

Affordable Care Act to improve data collection, reduce health disparities

HHS announces new draft standards to improve the monitoring of health data by race, ethnicity, sex, primary language, and disability status, and begins planning for the collection of LGBT health data 

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced new draft standards for collecting and reporting data on race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status, and announced the administration’s plans to begin collecting health data on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) populations. Both efforts aim to help researchers, policy makers, health providers and advocates to identify and address health disparities afflicting these communities.

“Health disparities have persistent and costly affects for minority communities, and the whole country,” Secretary Sebelius said.  “Today we are taking critical steps toward ensuring the collection of useful national data on minority groups, including for the first time, LGBT populations.  The data we will eventually collect in these efforts will serve as powerful tools and help us in our fight to end health disparities.”

Under the plan announced today, HHS will integrate questions on sexual orientation into national data collection efforts by 2013 and begin a process to collect information on gender identity.  This plan includes the testing of questions on sexual orientation to potentially be incorporated into the National Health Interview Survey.  The department also intends to convene a series of research roundtables with national experts to determine the best way to help the department collect data specific to gender identity.

“The first step is to make sure we are asking the right questions,” Secretary Sebelius said.  “Sound data collection takes careful planning to ensure that accurate and actionable data is being recorded.”

The proposed standards for collection and reporting of data on race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status in population health surveys are intended to help federal agencies refine their population health surveys in ways that will help researchers better understand health disparities and zero in on effective strategies for eliminating them.

The race and ethnicity standards, for example, will provide additional categories from which racial and ethnic differences in health care and outcomes can be examined in more detail, particularly among Asian, Hispanic/Latino and Pacific Islander populations.  The disability standards would consist of six items that are already being used successfully in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.  It is intended to improve researchers’ ability to monitor health disparities.

“These new data standards, once finalized, will help us target our research and tailor stronger solutions for underserved and minority communities,” added HHS Director of the Office of Minority Health, Dr. Garth Graham.  “To fully understand and meet the needs of our communities, we must first thoroughly understand who we are serving.”

In anticipation of these efforts, HHS, over the past year, has consulted with federal agencies, requested recommendations from the HHS Data Council, and held listening sessions with relevant community stakeholders.  The public may submit comments for the draft minority data collection standards at www.regulations.gov under docket number HHS-OMH-2011-0013.  Public comments will be accepted until August 1.  Information is also available atwww.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/section4302.

Under Section 4302 of the Affordable Care Act, the Secretary is required to ensure that any federally conducted or supported health care or public health program, activity or survey collects and reports data, to the extent practicable, on race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status, as well as other demographic data on health disparities as deemed appropriate by the Secretary.

For more information on improving data collection to reduce health disparities please visithttp://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/disparities06292011a.html

For more information on improving data collection within the LGBT community visithttp://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/lgbt06292011a.html

Ed Sullivan once scared the hell out of kids with a cartoon depicting the nuclear apocalypse [io9.com]

This appeared on the the website IO9 and is reposted in its entirety.  I think it is too important a message, even today, to ignore about the frailty of life and how we often stand at the edge of our own salvation or our own destruction. – hh

Cyriaque Lamar — On May 27, 1956, The Ed Sullivan Show aired Peter and Joan Foldes’ apocalyptic animation A Short Vision, thereby scarring wee viewers who had no clue they had front-row seats to doomsday.

The blog CONELRAD Adjacent has assembled a detailed history of the broadcast. What’s hilarious about Ed’s decision to screen the film was the fact that he sprung A Short Vision(above) upon his audience with barely a warning. Indeed, that evening’s line-up instead promised acts like the ventriloquist Senor Wences, the “winners of the Harvest Moon dance contest and the Hasleves, acrobats.” Here’s how Ed introduced Armageddon:

[The] host was less than adamant in his parental caution on the initial broadcast. Here, verbatim, are his introductory remarks before showing what was about to become a very controversial film. Sullivan opens his comments with a timely reference to the first hydrogen bomb to be dropped from an American airplane – a feat that was trumpeted from the front pages of newspapers across the country earlier in the month of May 1956.

“Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers – I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated – but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner.”

After the film concludes, Sullivan is standing on the stage looking knowingly at his deadly silent audience. There is then some nervous laughter as he smiles and says “See” while nodding his head (as if to say, “I told you so”) [...] The day after A SHORT VISION was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show to what was reported as a 37.2 in the ratings, the New York World-Telegram and Sun ran on its second page the blaring headline “Shock Wave From A-Bomb Film Rocks Nation’s TV Audience.” And if the headline wasn’t enough, just below it was a gruesome three-panel graphic from the face melting sequence.

You can read more about Ed’s end-time antics over at CONELRAD Adjacent. Also check outthe testimonials of people who were wigged out by A Short Vision

http://io9.com/5815788/ed-sullivan-once-scared-the-hell-out-of-kids-with-a-face+melting-cartoon-depicting-the-nuclear-apocalypse

Quote of the Day: Feelings Vs. Actions

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
- Pearl Buck

Study: Big City Life Will Make You Mean!!!

In a new study just released it appears that living in a Big City has the effect of making people be less tolerant of others.  In other words, people get on each other’s nerves faster!!!!

In the AP article, “Big City Got You Down? Stress Study May Show Why?” by Malcolm Ritter, he reports that

Imaging scans show that in city dwellers or people who grew up in urban areas, certain areas of the brain react more vigorously to stress. That may help explain how city life can boost the risks of schizophrenia and other mental disorders, researchers said.

The study, sponsored by the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, looked at people from urban settings and was published in the latest issue of “Nature.”

For more on the study:

AP: Big city got you down? Stress study may show why

Nature: City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans