The hemoncology floor of Seattle Children’s Hospital performs Kelly Clarkson’s song “Stronger”
December 7, 2011
Hillary Clinton Speech “Human Rights Must Include LGBT” [bbc.co.uk]
The full text of the speech is available here at this link: New Civil Rights Movement
The MP3 audio of the speech is available at this link: Hillary Clinton Speech on Human Rights Audio Only
The US has publicly declared it will fight discrimination against gays and lesbians abroad by using foreign aid and diplomacy to encourage reform.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience of diplomats in Geneva that “gay rights are human rights”.
A memo from the Obama administration directs US government agencies to consider gay rights when making aid and asylum decisions.
Similar policies already exist for gender equality and ethnic violence.
“It should never be a crime to be gay” Mrs Clinton said at the United Nations in Geneva, adding that a country’s cultural or religious traditions was no excuse for discrimination.
Her audience included representatives from countries where homosexuality is a criminal offence.
Many ambassadors rushed out of the room as soon as Mrs Clinton finished speaking, the Associated Press news agency reported.
‘Human reality’
The announcement, cited by the White House as the “first US government strategy to combat human rights abuses against gays and lesbians abroad”, is also being seen as part of the Obama administration’s outreach to gays and lesbians ahead of the 2012 election.
The official memorandum does not outline consequences for countries with poor records on gay rights. But it allows US agencies working abroad to consult with international organisations on discrimination.
“Gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world,” Mrs Clinton said in Geneva. “Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality.”
The new policy could pose awkward questions for US officials formulating policy towards some regular allies and regional powers.
In 2011, the state department’s annual human rights report cited ally Saudi Arabia’s abuses against gays. The country bans homosexuality outright.
Afghanistan also prohibits homosexual activity, and the same report found that authorities “sporadically” enforced the prohibition.
In the US, Republican presidential candidates criticised the administration’s decision, with Texas Governor Rick Perry saying in a statement that “promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money”.
Mrs Clinton acknowledged the US had its own mixed record on gay rights. As late as 2003, some states had laws that made gay sex a crime.
Earlier this year President Barack Obama signed into law a bill repealing the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law and allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the US military.
More here at the BBC link:
December 6, 2011
Alone During the Holidays? Make No Major Decisions
by Helen Hill MFT
The holidays can be a very lonely time of year for anyone who, because of their uniqueness, finds himself or herself without family, and sometimes, friends. Sharing the time with others can be a salve for those who are tolerated or accepted. But for those of us who are unique, whether transsexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or suffering from some physical malady, and we find ourselves alone, it can be a challenge to just get through the holidays.
Families are defined by blood. Often, that is a mistake. Sometimes there are those relatives (by blood) whose views and outlooks would be offensive and cruel to any outsider — to any kind and compassionate soul. The challenge is to surround ourselves with a family we choose, who love us and accept us for who we are, rather than for what we are not.
If family during the holidays is defined by accepting only those people like themselves, then we have learned nothing about tolerance, acceptance, and compassion. Let us not make the same mistakes as those poor souls who live in fear of what they do not understand, and the resulting cruelty that manifests itself in the name of “family.”
What I would emphasize to all gender-variant individuals is that the holidays are NO TIME to be making major decisions about one’s life, one’s circumstances, one’s issues, or one’s family. Suicide is never good any time. But the holidays have a way of making us, what I like to call, “temporarily isolated” or “temporarily inconsolable.” The emphasis, though, should be on the word TEMPORARY.
During this tough economic time, many are suffering. And even in good economic times, during the holidays, there are so many people who find themselves spending the holiday alone, whether transgendered or not. And then there are those who do spend the holidays with their relatives and come back even more depressed and/or vulnerable than before they left.
Family and holidays can be very difficult even in the best of times. No matter what, whether spending holidays with friends and family, or spending them alone, I would recommend that no one make major life changing, irreversible decisions.
For those who find themselves depressed or alone during the holidays, the secret to success is to just get through them!
Survival is success!
The sun will come out tomorrow. There will be a chance for a new day and new beginnings. And hope does not take a raincheck during holidays. It is still there, even if it seems harder to grasp.
As you have doubtless heard many times before, even if you don’t feel like doing something, DO SOMETHING! A walk, a movie, reading a good book, or an activity. Invite another friend over for tea, or meet for a lunch or dinner. Some online support forums can be quite helpful during these times as well.
Solution Focused Therapy provides three very simple, yet effective, suggestions:
- If it is not broken, don’t fix it
- It it is working, do more of it
- If it is NOT working, change it
Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for help. It is not a character flaw or a weakness to ask for help. On the contrary, it is one of the healthiest things a person can learn to do – knowing when to ask for help. This link http://gendersanctuary.com/resourceshelp.htm lists a number of resources that can be helpful during difficult times.
Make the time less about the holiday, and more about self-care.
But most of all, never use a temporary situation to make a permanent, unalterable decision. Never.
Hope and peace are always in season.
.
December 3, 2011
My Little Monster and Me [helensartblog.wordpress.com]
We all have our personal monsters…
Sometimes we just need to face them…
And in facing them we find out how frail, vulnerable,
and frightened our “monsters” really are…
Let’s go for a walk and a chat, shall we, my little monster and me?
http://helensartblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/ink-sketch-facing-my-monster/
November 29, 2011
6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries Read more: 6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries [cracked.com]
by Eddie Rodriguez / Cracked.com
In real life, people don’t suffer freaky events like getting struck by lightning or getting part of their brain removed and then suddenly find themselves with new superpowers, like heat vision or flight. However, people do apparently suffer freaky events and then gain the ability to do art.
It’s a poorly understood phenomenon, but according to the experts who’ve studied them, these people aren’t just messing with us.
#6. Man Has Mystery Illness, Gains Super Memory and Painting Powers
Quick: Picture in your mind what your neighborhood looked like when you were 4 years old. Even better, try to draw a picture of it, in fine detail. Hell, most of us couldn’t do the latter with a room we saw five minutes ago. To unlock that ability, apparently all we need is a severe, life-threatening fever to jar it loose.
When 30-something Italian immigrant Franco Magnani arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, he came down with just such a fever — to the point that he sometimes became delirious and had seizures. In the aftermath, Magnani started having insanely vivid dreams/memories about his childhood hometown of Pontito, Italy. The man hadn’t visited the place in more than 30 years, but his dreams were intense and filled with detail, as if his seizures had somehow surfaced a bunch of old image files off his brain’s hard drive, perfectly intact.
Magnani became so engulfed by the memories that he started to draw and eventually paint them. If the below paintings look like random pictures of streets and alleys you could see on anybody’s wall, you have to see them next to a photo of the real scene to understand why they’re remarkable. The photo is on the left. The painting on the right was painted from a three-decade-old memory from early childhood:
Can we call “Photoshop” on a painting?
Again, Magnani did not have that photo to work from – that was taken later, probably by somebody trying to find out if he was full of shit. And keep in mind, painting at all was totally out of character for him, given that he had been a cook in Italy and a woodworker when he came to San Francisco. Yet even though he’d never so much as held a brush in his life, he was suddenly overcome with an urge to paint these scenes, with as much detail as his memory provided him. Yes, there are variations in the pics — for instance when he paints the view from his old bedroom window, he’s remembering it being zoomed out a bit:
Via Exploratorium.edu
Photo, again on the left.
What you’re seeing is the product of what had become an obsession. According to one of his friends, Magnani was known to leave his favorite bar mid-drink if he got a memory that he wanted to paint. Later, when word of Magnani’s story got out, doctors said that what he had was probably “temporal lobe epilepsy,” which is known to sometimes create an obsessive personality in sufferers.
Via Francomagnani.com
Photo on left.
When Magnani’s work was eventually shown in art galleries, it was put up next to photo comparisons of Pontito taken from the same angles as his paintings. You can see the result for yourself.
And to think, all he had to do was have himself a fever and a couple of seizures. We’re betting any aspiring artist will take that deal over three years of putting up with stuck-up assholes at art schools.
Read more: 6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19504_6-people-who-gained-amazing-skills-from-brain-injuries.html#ixzz1f7lIVi6r
November 24, 2011
Being Transparent [huffingtonpost.com]
by Gretchen Peters / Singer, Songwriter
My least favorite word when people ask me about my son is “become,” as in, “When did he decide he wanted to become a man?” When do we decide to become the gender we are? Does it happen at toddlerhood, at school age, at puberty? My son has always been male. The only difference between him and me and probably you is that his body betrayed him, once at birth and again, traumatically, at puberty. Being the parent of a transgender child has led me to some interesting analogies. Being trans is a state which most of us cisgender folks can’t quite wrap our heads around, at least initially. But this question ofbecoming vs. being reminded me a lot of something that’s bothered me about the music business (I’m a singer-songwriter) for years: people used to ask me the same question after I’d had success as a songwriter and was making my first album as a recording artist. “When did you decide to become an artist?” I felt a similar sense of indignation. I’ve always been an artist. You just didn’t know it.
Learning that my child was transgender was like turning a key and feeling all the tumblers fall into place. Everything made sense: his firm conviction at 3 that he was a boy, his refusal to wear dresses, his persistent dis-ease throughout childhood, his reaction to puberty (horror), and, most alarmingly, his bouts during his teens with suicidal feelings. He knew who and what he was — he always had. When he finally told me, I knew in my bones that it was true. I’d even had inklings before he summoned the remarkable courage to come out. None of that makes the emotions any less raw upon learning that the child you raised as a girl for 26 years is, in fact, a boy. This is the child to whom I gave a girl’s name, imbued with my own girlish hopes, nurtured the mother-daughter bond that I had with my own mother — a bond based, it seemed to me, on our common gender. What was my relationship with this person if he is my son? How do I learn how to have a son? I’d thought of myself as the mother of a daughter for a quarter of a century.
As a songwriter, singer and musician, I explore the emotional terrain of everyday life on a regular basis. I am interested in shining a light into some dark corners, even compelled to do it, to take the secrets that we all keep and bring them into the light, give them a name, treat them with compassion and humility, but, above all, to tell the truth. Art has the power to transport us into other people’s lives, and thus, ultimately, into our own hearts. The act of empathizing with another, no matter how different, breaks down the walls built by secret-keeping and fear, and forever binds us together in our humanity. So naturally, I turned to music to help me process this sea-change in my life and my son’s.
I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I thought about my struggle to own my identity as an artist in the world. I thought about my son’s struggle to stand up and be seen for who he is. So many people prefer you to assume a role that makes them comfortable. But life is not about making other people comfortable. This idea seeped into the songs that were coming out of me — the old adage, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I wanted to say what seemed unsayable. That life is tough, heartbreaking, unfair — and short. And that there is unspeakable beauty to be found. My son unknowingly gave me a tremendous gift last year when he bravely shared his truth with me. He gave me the courage to share mine.
June 16, 2011
A Call for Written Stories from Transgendered Individuals
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow
from Helen Hill LMFT
One of the most powerful catalysts for change is telling your story. It doesn’t need to be your entire life. In fact, for the purposes of effectiveness, it should not be your entire life. People often relate to events such as sudden change, loss, triumph, grief, acceptance, love, rejection, challenge, redemption and the like.
A story can humanize the experience of transgendered people to those who have never experienced a transgendered individual. Let’s face it, there’s just not that many of us around! (According to a UCLA study there’s only 700,000 of us in the USA out of 360 million people!)
If you have a short story you’d like to share that you feel taught an important lesson, I would be honored to place it on my blog.
There are a few caveats:
- Your story, you, and the people involved will remain anonymous.
- No references to outing identifiable others.
- No one should be personally endangered by the telling of your story.
- Your story needs to focus on one important event or life lesson to be shared.
- Please, nothing prurient, no fetishism or exhibitionism, no encouragement of self-harm/self-destruction.
- I will only EDIT your story for grammar, punctuation and anonymity.
For an example of what I mean about a short story, please see my example, “A Transition Story: The High School” (Of course, since I’ve already “outed” myself years ago, anonymity does NOT apply to me!)
You can email me your stories at: helenhillmft@gmail.com
Thank you and let’s get writing!
June 5, 2011
My Faith: How I learned to stop ‘praying away the gay’ [cnn.com]
By Don Lemon, CNN
“School day, time to get up, sleepy head. School day.”
Although she’s been gone since 1998, my grandmother’s words ring in my head just about every morning of my life. That’s how MaMe, as I called her, got me out of bed and off to my Catholic school when I was growing up and in her care.
But before I shuffled my way to the bathroom to begin my morning routine, I had to hit the floor on my knees to pray, just as I had the night before.
It was usually The Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”) followed by asking God to watch and guide me through my day until I returned to the safety of my home that evening.
But MaMe (pronounced MAH-me) didn’t know that at a very early age her favorite grandson had begun to pray, silently, that God would change him from being different, from having crushes on boys, from being more curious about boys than girls.
By age four or five, I was too young to sexualize my infatuations but I knew that everyone else, including my family and friends, would think it was wrong.
Perhaps it was the conversations I overheard from adults around my hometown of Port Allen, Louisiana, who’d mimic gay people, calling them “funny” or “sissy” or “fagots.”
Perhaps it was Sunday mornings at our Baptist church, where preachers taught that liking someone of the same sex was a direct and swift path to hell. And that if that person would just turn to the Lord and confess his sin, then God would change him back into the person He wanted him to be – a person who only had crushes on the opposite sex.
All of which meant that, from a very early age, I began to think I was dirty and that I was going to hell. Can you imagine what that feels like for a kid who was just learning to read and perform basic arithmetic? It was awful.
And talk about guilt – I was a Baptist attending Catholic school!
I prayed the silent prayer for God to change me every chance I got until I started attending college in New York. That’s when common sense began to take hold and I realized that no amount of prayer would change me into something that wasn’t natural to me.
With my religious upbringing, I’d had the opportunity to study religious doctrine. But I learned from different perspectives, from Catholic Mass on Fridays to Baptist services on Sundays to vacation Bible school in the summer to Bible study with a Jehovah’s Witness as a teenager.
As I got older I began to realize that all these people and institutions interpreted the Bible somewhat differently. I had a sort of epiphany: the Bible was about the lessons you learned, not about the events or words.
When I became old enough, intelligent enough and logical enough to discern the difference between metaphor and reality, everything changed. I realized that Jonah living in the belly of a whale was a parable written in the same vein as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saying that he had “been to the mountaintop.”
Neither Jonah nor King had actually been to those places. They were metaphors for lessons for those of us who cared to absorb them.
So many of us, especially in the black community and in churches, tend to think that religious teachings happened word for word as they were written in Scripture. I think that’s naïve, even dangerous.
That type of thinking – or non-thinking – keeps many religious people enslaved to beliefs that they haven’t truly stepped back from and examined.
That type of thinking causes people who are otherwise good to shun and ostracize young gay people.
It causes people to want to control and change people who aren’t like them. And who wants to be like someone else?
Imagine if we had allowed Christian doctrines and teachings that supported slavery, segregation and the subjugation of women to pervade our society all the way up until the current moment. What kind of world would that be?
Instead, we got on our knees, just as I did as a little boy, and prayed that slavery, segregation and the subjugation of women would end. In the United States, at least, those prayers have largely been realized.
I’m no longer the member of any church but I do believe in a higher power.
It’s time for us, especially black people, to stop trying to pray the gay away and to get on our knees and start praying that the discrimination of gay people ends.
What we’re doing to our young gay people now is child abuse. It’s plain old bigotry and hatred. And if African-Americans don’t know what that feels like in America, I don’t know who does.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/22/my-faith-how-i-learned-to-stop-praying-away-the-gay/
April 19, 2011
Suicide Rates for Gay (and Straight) Teens Higher in Conservative Areas [Associated Press]
by Lindsey Tanner, AP Medical Writer
CHICAGO (AP) — Suicide attempts by gay teens – and even straight kids – are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don’t have programs supporting gay rights, a study involving nearly 32,000 high school students found.
Those factors raised the odds and were a substantial influence on suicide attempts even when known risk contributors like depression and being bullied were considered, said study author Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher.
His study found a higher rate of suicide attempts even among kids who weren’t bullied or depressed when they lived in counties less supportive of gays and with relatively few Democrats. A high proportion of Democrats was a measure used as a proxy for a more liberal environment.
The research focused only on the state of Oregon and created a social index to assess which outside factors might contribute to suicidal tendencies. Other teen health experts called it a powerful, novel way to evaluate a tragic social problem.
“Is it surprising? No. Is it important? Yes,” said Dr. Robert Blum of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The study “takes our relatively superficial knowledge and provides a bit more depth. Clearly, we need lots more understanding, but this is very much a step in the right direction,” he said.
Blum serves on an Institute of Medicine committee that recently released a report urging more research on gay health issues. Blum said the new study is the kind of research the institute believes has been lacking. The independent group advises the government on health matters.
The new study was published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
Previous research has found disproportionately high suicide rates in gay teens. One highly publicized case involved a Rutgers University freshman who jumped off a bridge last year after classmates recorded and broadcast the 18-year-old having sex with a man.
The study relied on teens’ self-reporting suicide attempts within the previous year. Roughly 20 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had made an attempt, versus 4 percent of straight kids.
The study’s social index rated counties on five measures: prevalence of same-sex couples; registered Democratic voters; liberal views; schools with gay-straight alliances; schools with policies against bullying gay students; and schools with antidiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation.
Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens living in counties with the lowest social index scores were 20 percent more likely to have attempted suicide than gays in counties with the highest index scores. Overall, about 25 percent of gay teens in low-scoring counties had attempted suicide, versus 20 percent of gay teens in high-scoring counties.
Among straight teens, suicide attempts were 9 percent more common in low-scoring counties. There were 1,584 total suicide attempts – 304 of those among gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
Hatzenbuehler said the results show that “environments that are good for gay youth are also healthy for heterosexual youth.”
