April 29, 2012
How Gender Identity May Determine the Right to Vote in 2012 [thenation.com]
by Brentin Mock / thenation.com
American companies are born as private commercial entities, but thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, suddenly they can transition to human status for the purpose of influencing an election with millions of dollars. Meanwhile, thousands of actual human citizens, who’ve only transitioned gender identity, may have less influence over elections—or no influence at all—because they’ll now face heavy burdens under strict photo voter ID laws. It’s an obscene paradox.
Over 25,000 transgender American citizens may face stiff barriers to voting in the November 2012 election, according to the report “The Potential Impact of Voter Identification Laws on Transgender Voters,” released last week by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s law school. This is, by any measure, the portion of the electorate that is among the most marginalized and stigmatized, and hence probably most in need of the right to have a say in who governs their lives. But discussions on both sides of voter ID laws tend to leave out transgender citizens in discussions about who would be most adversely impacted.
I’m including myself in that critique. I briefly mentioned that transgender citizens would be impacted in myfirst Voting Rights Watch blog, but have failed to consistently talk about their burdens in subsequent blogs. We often talk about black and Latino voters, elderly and student voters, women and those with low incomes as having trouble satisfying new photo voter ID mandates, but many transgender voters will have an incredibly tough set of challenges before them if they are to have their vote counted in November. The cost of getting the appropriate ID to vote in some jurisdictions will be as high as getting surgery.
The photo voter ID laws are already unnecessary intrusions into the lives of many people of color. Those intrusions become an epic accumulation of burdens, though, for transgender people of color. According to the report, two particular races—American Indian/Alaskan Native and African-Americans—are most likely to lack identification documents (46 percent and 37 percent, respectively) that reflect their accurate gender identity.
Jody L. Herman, author of the report, used data from the Brennan Center for Justice report on voter ID laws and the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (she also co-authored) to paint a picture of what voting access will look like for transgender citizens in the nine states with strict voting laws. She found that about 88,000 transgender Americans are eligible to vote in those states in November, but roughly a third of those face possibly getting ostracized due to lacking proper ID and the crazy complicated process of obtaining ID if the government questions your gender status.
This goes beyond just trying to get ID for voting purposes. Transgender citizens have problems obtaining and updating their identification cards for any reason, especially when dealing with the government. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey—the largest survey on transgender issues in the nation—shows that 22 percent of respondents said they had been denied equal treatment by a government agency or official, with another 22 percent saying they had been harassed or disrespected in the same setting. Respondents without ID reflecting their correct gender: 41 percent. That’s also about the same percentage who said that when they presented their non-gender-matching ID when asked to show it (at a bar, airport, etc.) were harassed afterward—3 percent said they were attacked or assaulted.
When government agencies that are supposed to serve the public aren’t safe spaces for transgender people, then routine citizen activities—like getting a license—become an albatross rather than an accomplishment. Registering to drive and vote are supposed to be proud moments, but for too many transgender people, it’s something to suffer through. And then consider that some government agencies require “proof” that you actually are the gender that you say you are—in some places that means getting gender reassignment surgery, whether it’s desired or not.
“There are a myriad of state and federal laws that govern whether or how transgender citizens can update their IDs, and some of these requirements are very difficult to meet and incredibly costly,” Herman told me in a phone interview. “Not only is there the emotional and psychological aspects, but also onerous requirements, such as the requirement to have had a certain kind of surgery, and some transgender citizens can’t afford it because it’s not covered by health insurance, while some simply don’t want it.”
But if they want to vote in certain places, they may have to do it. Such surgery typically costs between$40,000 and $50,000—that’s probably the largest poll tax ever. And when the percentage of transgender citizens most likely to lack proper identity documents are those who make below $10,000 a year, for many it’s plain impossible.
These are, no doubt, discussions that went missing among policymakers as they dreamed up and passed these laws. It probably never occurred to the almost-all-white-male voter ID chorus (plus black former Alabama Representative Artur Davis) that people who lack their race, gender and sexual privilege might have troubles with these rule changes. Or maybe it did occur to them, since there is a belief among conservatives that those who aren’t heterosexual aren’t citizens worthy of basic institutions like marriage and voting. Transgender people are the “irresponsible,” who won’t get in line and fly straight, and hence don’t deserve the franchise. I mean, such people might vote for a president that bans LGBTQ housing discrimination or something.
One of the first persons I thought of when I read this report was Janet Mock. We’re not aware of any relation despite sharing last names, but I hope we are related. She’s been great at spreading awareness as a transgender advocate and writer, and I was curious of her thoughts on the report both as a transgender advocate and an African-American. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she tells me she had no problems in terms of changing her gender marker on ID documents and birth certificates (ironically, our nation’s first black president also grew up in Hawaii and is constantly challenged on his birth certificate). However, she says she’s had plenty of other friends in other states who’ve had problems having their gender changed on ID documents.
Says Mock:
It’s this patchwork of state laws concerning documentation that hurts trans people everywhere and limits our opportunities to not only vote but to avoid discrimination when looking for a home or a job. What I find interesting about this type of voter suppression is that it’s obviously against everything we stand for as Americans and a society because it oppresses groups of marginalized Americans, telling us through these added barriers to vote, that our voices do not matter and that we do not have a say. It’s sad that the fundamental democratic right to vote and be heard is something trans people have to add to our laundry list of civic duties taken away from us simply because we choose to live our lives most authentically.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/167402/how-gender-identity-may-determine-right-vote-2012
March 25, 2012
A Transgender Candidate Is Hoping to Make History [nytimes.com]
by Kate Taylor / nytimes.com
Zoning. School overcrowding. The design of New York’s transportation system.
These are just a few of the subjects that Mel Wymore, a candidate for City Council on the Upper West Side, brought up in an interview before addressing the elephant in the room: that, if elected, he would be the first transgender member of the Council.
“I’m not running because I’m transgender,” said Mr. Wymore, 50, who was born female but now, after testosterone therapy and top surgery, identifies as transgender. But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that being transgender doesn’t bring a certain perspective.”
Although gay men and lesbians have broken many electoral barriers — serving as mayors, state legislators and members of Congress — the same is not true of the transgender community. Only a few, including a Democratic district leader in Westchester County and a former member of the Hawaii Board of Education, have been elected to office around the country.
“I think there is a feeling that there is too much difference there,” Mr. Wymore said. But he said he believed: “This is the seat. This is the community that’s ready to go forward.”
The race, for the Sixth District seat occupied by Gale A. Brewer, who is term-limited, is competitive and has drawn a number of candidates, including Marc Landis, a district leader; Helen Rosenthal, a former chairwoman of Community Board 7; and Ken Biberaj, a vice president of the Russian Tea Room.
Melissa Sklarz, a transgender woman, said that the race was full of worthy candidates, and that as president of the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City, she could not make an endorsement. But she described Mr. Wymore’s candidacy as “an opportunity for transgender people everywhere.”
“He’s a great representative,” Ms. Sklarz said. “Many people only know of transgender, I guess, from watching Chaz Bono on ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ Mel Wymore brings a much different, broader experience.”
March 25, 2012
Where Is The Physician Outrage? [whatever.scalzi.com]
by Anonymous Doctor
Originally published on Whatever (http://whatever.scalzi.com)
Right. Here.
I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.
I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.
I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.
In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.
After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.
Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.
It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.
It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.
Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.
1) Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.
2) Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it’s medically indicated, fine… have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.
Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio… and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.
3) If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.
4) If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart,ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of “poor acoustic window”. If you’re really gutsy, enter a comment of “poor acoustic window…plus, I’m not a rapist.” (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient’s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest…but I don’t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)
5) Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it’s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.
In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.
It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.
Because we are their last line of defense.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/03/20/guest-post-a-doctor-on-transvaginal-ultrasounds/
March 14, 2012
After Limbaugh, Maybe It’s Finally Time To Ignore The ‘Slut’ Slur [time.com]
by Megan Gibson / Time.com
Make no mistake, ladies. Rush Limbaugh wasn’t just calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” on his nationally syndicated radio show, heard by an estimated 15 million people. He was calling all of us sluts.
The furor started last week, when Limbaugh spent three consecutive days describing the testimony to House Democrats given by Sandra Fluke on February 23, 2012. A 30-year-old law student at Georgetown University, Fluke had testified that a close friend had been denied birth control coverage through her insurance provider; she required the pills to treat polycystic ovary syndrome. Though Fluke’s testimony did not delve into her own sex life, Limbaugh characterized her as a “slut” and a “prostitute”, saying she wanted taxpayers to pay for her sexual practices.
Apart from Limbaugh’s wildly inaccurate description of Fluke’s statement – she was speaking in favor of requiring private insurance plans to cover contraception – it was his language that caused a firestorm. There was nothing radical about Fluke’s testimony; in 2012, a woman requiring birth control should be altogether uncontroversial. Birth control is something that the vast majority of American women use, have used, or will use at some point, whether they are Democrats, Republicans, college students, sex workers, mothers or even virgins, since hormonal birth control pills are commonly prescribed to remedy irregular or painful menstrual cycles. If Limbaugh thinks Sandra Fluke is a slut, then he must think a whole lot of other women are, too.
Which is why it has been heartening to see the rush of women and men taking to Twitter, Facebook and online petitions to support Fluke and condemn Limbaugh. Across the Internet, women have begun an ongoing campaign to take Limbaugh down, putting pressure on advertisers to pull funding from his show. Despite Limbaugh issuing a written and on-air apology to Fluke, around three dozen advertisers have already pulled their sponsorship and at least two stations have dropped the show altogether. Will the backlash lead to Limbaugh’s show being canceled altogether? In all likelihood, probably not. Still, the solidarity that Fluke and women across the country have shown has been inspiring.
March 14, 2012
One-Way Wantonness [nytimes.com]
by Frank Bruni / nytimes.com
Hussy. Harlot. Hooker.
Floozy. Strumpet. Slut.
When attacking a woman by questioning her sexual mores, there’s a smorgasbord of slurs, and you can take your rancid pick. Help me out here: where are the comparable nouns for men? What’s a male slut?
A role model, in some cases. In others, a presidential candidate.
“Gigolo” doesn’t have the acid or currency of “whore,” and the man with bedpost notches gets compliments. He’s a Casanova, a conquistador.
The lady is a tramp.
Nearly two weeks since Rush Limbaugh let loose on Sandra Fluke, equating her desire for insurance-covered birth control with a prostitute’s demand for a fee, the wrangling over how awful that really was and whether it will truly haunt him continues.
Advertisers bolted in protest; advertisers come and go all the time. It was the beginning of his end; it was ratings chum. He lost his way; he was Rush in Excelsis.
One especially robust strand of commentary has focused on whether Limbaugh, a god of the far right, was smacked down for the kind of thing that less conservative men routinely get away with.
Click to continue reading the article at the NY Times…
February 16, 2012
Quote of the Day: Adaptable
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin
February 7, 2012
Just How Bad Is Child Abuse in America? Very. [jezebel.com]
by Cassie Murdoch / jezebel.com
Child abuse is a dark and depressing reality in American life, but until now, it’s never been clear just how widespread a problem it was. A new study, led by Dr. John Leventhal of Yale University, offers the first comprehensive estimate of serious injuries caused by child abuse in the U.S., and the results are pretty horrifying.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that nearly 4,600 children in the U.S. were hospitalized for injuries caused by physical abuse in 2006, the most recent year for which data was available. Overall, six out of every 100,000 kids under 18 were hospitalized with injuries that ranged from broken bones and burns to traumatic brain injury. The average hospital stay for these children was one week, and 300 of them ended up dying. That puts the death rate for abuse at 6 percent, which is a far higher death rate than exists for other kinds of injury or medical problem that required hospitalization.
Very young children tended to be the most common victims of abuse. For babies under one, there were 58 cases of hospitalization per 100,000 infants. Sadly, children under one who were covered by Medicaid fared worst of all, with one out of every 753 of those babies ending up in the hospital because of abuse. According to Dr. Leventhal, “Medicaid is just a marker of poverty, and poverty leads to stress.”
Stress appears to be a key factor in abuse. There was another smaller study that showed an obvious increase in abusive brain injuries after the financial crisis in 2007, which researchers attributed to added stress on parents. Leventhal said stress disproportionately affects younger kids because they are by nature, more difficult to care for:
They are challenging for some parents to take care of because they cry, it’s hard to understand what they want and parents can get frustrated, exhausted and angry.
Of course, they also can’t defend themselves or runaway as easily as older children can. A heartbreaking reality, and one Dr. Leventhal thinks we need to address urgently. According to his team, at the rate this study found abuse to be occurring, it’s a bigger threat to babies than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And, of course, this study only deals with kids who are hospitalized. There are many more children who endure abuse but aren’t injured severely enough to require medical attention.
So Dr. Leventhal proposes we act to stop abuse in the same way we’ve worked to stop SIDS: “We need a national campaign related to child abuse where every parent is reminded that kids can get injured.” Another probably even more effective option would be to send public health workers to do home visits with new parents to offer support and advice, a practice that is already common in a lot of European countries.
While that level of intervention sounds costly, the expense to society of caring for the abused is far more substantial. Beyond the obvious personal cost to the children and individual families, the study found that abuse-related hospitalizations ran us about $73.8 million in 2006. And in terms of the overall expense of abuse, the CDC reported that one year’s worth of child maltreatment cases costs $124 billion over a lifetime.
But no matter what the cost is, preventing abuse is worth it. Leventhal says, “This is a serious problem that affects young children. We need to figure out a way to help parents do better.” We spend so much money educating people on everything from cancer prevention to the dangers of cholesterol, but now that we’ve got a more accurate picture of the damage abuse is doing across the entire country, there’s no excuse for not going after the problem immediately on a national level—especially because the children who are falling victim to this abuse can’t advocate for themselves.
Child abuse experts calls for U.S. campaign [Reuters]
Study: Child Abuse Affects More U.S. Kids than SIDS [Time]
http://jezebel.com/5882911/just-how-bad-is-child-abuse-in-america-very
January 30, 2012
Are Your Annoying Friends Making You Physically Ill? [jezebel.com]
by Cassie Murdoch / jezebel.com
We all have those friends who are competitive or are constantly causing drama for one reason or another. It’s tempting to just put up with them, but a new study has found that conflicts with those kinds of people could actually be irritating you physically—as in causing your immune system to fire up. This leads to your body to become inflamed, a state which has been associated with things like cancer and diabetes.
The study investigated whether stress from personal conflicts or sports competitions would cause the body to release cytokines, which are molecules linked to inflammation. The researchers saw cytokine levels rise after negative interactions like arguments, but people’s cytokine levels did not rise when they were playing a competitive sport. Co-author psychology professor Shelley Taylor explains the consequences of her findings, “What this tells me is that people should be investing in socially supportive relationships, and they should not court relationships that lead to a great deal of conflict.”
It’s probably a lot more complicated than that, but let’s just take this for what it’s worth: a good excuse to break up with your obnoxious friends and suspend contact with irritating workmates. No one will be able to argue with your scientific reasoning.
As luck would have it, the New York Times has also just offered up a hideously detailed explanation of how to dump your friends when the need arises. It takes them a remarkable three pages to conclude what we all already know: The easiest way to put a friendship out of its misery is to just let it slowly fade away with a series of declined invitations, severed social network ties, and unreturned texts. But if you really need to do a direct, in-person execution, theTimes points you to the advice of psychologist Erika Holiday, who is totally legit because she’s been on Dr. Phil:
Schedule a time where you can sit down with them. It’s not about putting the other person down, but telling them, “You don’t fit into my life, you’re not on same path as me.”
But the great thing is that now you don’t even need to do the bit about fitting into your life, you can just say, “I’m sorry we can’t hang out anymore, but studies have shown you make me sick.” And with those magic words your toxic friendship will most certainly be dead, and you can live healthily ever after.
Study shows how stress triggers immune system [USA Today]
It’s Not Me, It’s You [New York Times]
http://jezebel.com/5880386/are-your-annoying-friends-making-you-physically-ill
