Lordy

Image:  Facebook

Even by Trumpian standards, this one was bananas.

In the Oval Office on Thursday, Donald Trump declared that states are snatching people's children and forcing them to transition.

"Where your child leaves your house, and they take your child from you, in some cases . . .  Think of it, in six states, they take the child and do what they want to do. What they do is, is— I don’t even want to talk about it! No transgender mutilization of your children."

That's not a typo. He really said "mutilization."

I know it's easy to say our president is a buffoon, but now he actually sounds just like Moe Howard of The Three Stooges, who often threatened, "I'll murderize you!"

Why, I wonder, have states gotten in the habit of kidnapping and performing surgery on kids? Is it a moneymaker, a way of paying for roads and bridges? Or do state officials simply like to dress up as the Child Catcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?"

Trump failed to mention which six states are doing this dreadful thing. So I'm forced to guess:  East Dakota, Upper Carolina, Lower Slobbovia, Calisota, Missitucky, and Moosylvania.

And they should all be ashamed of themselves.

The Cat's Meow

Image:  Facebook

At the Tony Awards on Sunday, Qween Jean captured the award for Best Costume Design of a Musical, and that made her the first ever openly transgender Tony winner.

Reading about her triumph, I realized Jean is every single thing the Trump administration hates. The show she worked on, "Cats: The Jellicle Ball," draws from ballroom culture. Jean is also an activist, having founded an outreach organization called Black Trans Liberation. And, she was born in Haiti.

A Black, transgender, activist, immigrant theater artist. I guess a celebratory Big Mac at the White House is out of the question.

Color Me Impressed

Image by Janet Reddick from Pixabay

As red states go, Texas is downright crimson.

But sometimes crimson has a blue undertone, and this week that distinction belongs to the city of San Antonio. For the first time, the San Antonio City Council issued a proclamation recognizing Trans History Week, a global event that starts today.

Will this move amount to waving a red flag to the bull? Will conservative Texans go red in the face? Are they being tossed red meat? Is the proclamation crossing a red line?

I could stop, but that would make me blue.

Balance in 2026

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Yesterday evening I volunteered at a fundraiser for a group that helps transgender people with limited means flee red states and move here to western Washington.

The event highlighted an inherent tension in the group's efforts. With all the official and unofficial threats against trans folks right now, the group considers secrecy paramount. But fundraisers require publicity. How the hell do you publicize an event you can't talk about?

The answer is very carefully, and I'm pleased to say the room was mostly full last night. But obviously we could've brought in many more donors with unshackled publicity. It's a tough balance to strike.

One attendee told me she wanted to shout out before the program began, "Will the FBI informant please stand up and leave?" I would've added, "Please donate before you go!"

Making a Meal of It

Image:  Facebook

Each year the Vatican holds a lunch for the poor, and in 2023 Pope Francis invited transgender women to the event. In 2023 and 2024, two of the women were chosen to sit at the pope's table.

What, queer Catholics and their supporters wondered, would the new pontiff do in 2025? On LGBTQ matters, Pope Leo XIV has so far played it close to the vest. Or vestment.

At the lunch yesterday, some 1,300 people dined on lasagna and chicken cutlets. The guests were migrants, disabled folks, homeless people—and 48 transgender women. They made the cut. However, none ate with the pope.

Vatican observers dissected the lunch as though they were Hedda Hopper at the Brown Derby.

"That he’d mingle, that he [sat] close to [us], that’s a good sign, right?" said a trans woman who attended. A liberal priest who ministers to transgender women said they weren't able to meet the pontiff, but they were seated "very, very close to the pope."

Success as measured in terms of feet and inches. This is Europe, so make that meters and centimeters.

Another trans woman admitted to some disappointment that none were included at the pope's table. "But we still received a sense that the church is not going to close the door that it opened," she said.

Who can say? If, in 2026, the transgender women are again invited but need binoculars to see the pope, we'll know the door is closing. Likewise if they're served one olive and an arugula leaf.

Face It

 

TDOV 2025!

 

International Women's Day 2025

 

Dead Letters

Image:  Facebook

The transgender flag still flies at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, but something else is missing.

On the National Park Service's Stonewall website, "LGBTQ" has turned into "LGB." Our community has suffered an amputation. Without benefit of anesthetic.

This can only be due to Donald Trump's spastic efforts to wipe out all evidence of trans people from the federal government. If you have another explanation . . . I ain't buying it.

Multiple ironies leap to mind. First, the site meant to memorialize the start of queer liberation now can't say the word "queer," at least not online. Second, the L's, the G's and the B's were also definite outcasts not long ago, but now have achieved enough standing that the government isn't aiming to make them disappear. Yet.

The third irony I see is that gay people often used to ignore the part played by transgender and gender non-conforming folks at Stonewall. The community largely clawed past the racism and classism and gave the likes of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera their due. Now we're watching them be disappeared again.

Some aren't having it. On X, New York's governor decried  the sudden removal of trans and queer references as "just cruel and petty."

Protesters gathered yesterday at the Stonewall Inn. A transgender woman told CBS News, "I served in the military. I didn't say I had bone spurs to get out of it."

As far as I know, no bricks were thrown at the protest, just brickbats. And the politicians in attendance were for us, not against us. Things have changed a great deal since 1969. Which is precisely what scares many Americans, and part of what propelled Trump to victory.

We have our work cut out for us in 2025, to stop the reversal of what began in 1969. If you want to make a party out of it, wear 1969 fashion to the next protest. I didn't look good in it then—I was six—and I don't now, but I'm willing to take one for the team.

The Keystone Kops

Image by dcandau from Pixabay

Here's a whoops we all saw coming.

You'll recall that following the November election of openly transgender Rep. Sarah McBride, Rep. Nancy Mace raised a ruckus about trans women using female bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol. Speaker Mike Johnson then mandated that restroom access be determined solely by the gender assigned at birth.

It's taken a nanosecond for egg to land on Republican faces.

On Thursday, a male reporter saw Rep. Lauren Boebert "bursting out of the House Women's restroom during this afternoon's vote series." She complained to security of "a guy" in the bathroom. Boebert went to the House floor to round up Mace, and the matched pair of Dolores Umbridges stormed into the bathroom. Seconds later, they came back out and returned "quietly to the floor." 

Boebert later said, "I made an error regarding a mistaken identity. I apologized, learned a lesson, and it won’t happen again."

The hell it won't. As long as the self-appointed potty police are on patrol, this sort of thing will happen again and again, to everybody's embarrassment. Reportedly the duo thought the person was McBride herself. Imagine being that cisgender woman they confronted? Imagine being so hot to make political points by snagging a transgender offender that your eyesight deserts you?

I'd like to know whether the Un-dynamic Duo missed any votes while conducting this charade of a crusade. Actually, now that I think about it, this could be an effective method of keeping the reactionary pair from voting. We should arrange a constant stream of cisgender, androgynous women, both gay and straight, occupying the bathroom so that Boebert and Mace are always too absorbed with monitoring the stalls to cast any actual votes. 

Hey, they assigned themselves this task. Just because they screwed up royally, they can't stop now. America expects them to be conscientious commode cops. It's a tough job, but these two are clearly suited to spending their days perched outside the restroom, trying to deny entrance with crossed toilet brushes.

And We're Off!

Image:  Katie Rainbow at Pexels

One of the zillion executive orders Donald Trump signed after being sworn in as president yesterday had this unwieldy title:  "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

A more accurate title would've been "Erasing Transgender People for Fun and Profit."

The premise of the order is that women need protecting from all those men who claim to be women so they can gain access to women's shower facilities. It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

Nevertheless, to thwart the "ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex," this country's new firm leader has given us a new firm policy:  "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality."

Bull pucky.

I know too many transgender people too well to buy the lie that they're somehow making up their gender dysphoria. This executive order and all the anti-trans campaigning that led to it are about fear, ignorance, power and religious extremism, not gender extremism.

The conservative flunkies who wrote this order were thorough. It seeks to wipe out acknowledgement of trans people at the federal level in a variety of ways, from insisting passports "accurately reflect the holder's sex" to forcing all government agencies to remove any statements or policies that "promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology."

The list goes on. But no matter how much Trump panders to his fans, transgender people have always been here, and they aren't going away. They're simply, cruelly, being marched back into the closet.

All under the pretense of protecting women. As a woman, I know that transgender women don't threaten my personal safety. It's Trump, the assaulter in chief, and a number of his wannabe cabinet members who do.

As Thanksgiving Approaches

 

Awareness

Image:  Katie Rainbow at Pexels

It's Transgender Awareness Week, and every transgender person in America is aware that his or her life just got harder thanks to the election results.

How can the rest of us help? I'm glad you asked. 

Over the last few years, as state legislatures began targeting trans folks, some faith communities noticed. I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and my Seattle church is involved in a national effort to help transgender and gender-divergent folks escape red states.

We're a kind of aboveground Underground Railroad. Perhaps we should be called Thomas the Transgender Tank.

Anyway, my minister said that calls from frightened trans folks escalated after the election, which is no surprise. So we who are helping with the local endeavor realized we needed to up our game.

During both services today, a transgender congregant laid out how dire the situation is around the country. The money that was donated to the collection plates will be divided between the national Pink Haven Coalition and our local branch. I staffed the info table and was gratified to see church members signing up to join our group, work on fundraising or provide housing.

The refugees, whether individuals or families with kids, lack the resources to move across the country, so we'll help with temporary housing, grocery cards, info on medical and social resources, etc. And someone should probably be there with smelling salts when they first get a load of Seattle prices.

As the service I attended wrapped up today, our resident mezzo soprano launched into "You'll Never Walk Alone," and we were encouraged to join in. I did, and tears began to fall. Damn that Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I know all too well how hard it is to watch the news these days, or to do anything but fume. Unfortunately, time is tight, as wretched individuals will soon be coming for innocent people. This is what I'm doing about it. What can you do?

Election Day Eve

Image by Azmi Talib from Pixabay

I can think of a hundred reasons why Donald Trump shouldn't be president. And that's without benefit of caffeine.

But for my queer-centric purposes, I'm zeroing in on just one reason here on this day before Election Day: the appalling transphobia of Trump and his fellow travelers.

The "PBS NewsHour" put my stomach in knots over the weekend by reporting that, between Oct 7 and Oct 20, the Trump campaign and allied groups dedicated over 40 percent of their enormous advertising budget to anti-trans ads.

That's an amazing figure. In the final days of the election, Republicans believe the winning strategy is to demonize the most vulnerable part of the queer community. If this were a debate class, they'd all flunk for such an irrelevant closing argument. (If they hadn't already flunked for the way Trump treats microphones.)

Since the main issues in this election are the economy, immigration and abortion, noted a "NewsHour" host, why the anti-trans push in the closing stages? A transgender journalist replied that "the purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you're willing to throw everything else away because you're scared."

It strikes me that Trump could cover all the bases by running just a single ad attacking a transgender poor immigrant who aborted a kindergartner.

It wasn't at all long ago that Republicans fear-mongered around gay rights and same-sex marriage for political gain. Now transgender folks are their victim of choice. Who in the LGBTQIA+ community will be next? It's hard to imagine conservatives getting whipped into a froth over genderfluid asexuals.

The bottom line is which will happen first: They run out of fear or we run out of letters?

This Week's Quote

Image:  Facebook

My third grade teacher called my mother and said, "Ms. Cox, your son is going to end up in New Orleans in a dress if we don't get him into therapy." And wouldn't you know, just last week I spoke at Tulane University, and I wore a lovely green and black dress.

Laverne Cox

Source:  AZ Quotes

Modern Meaning

Image by PDPics from Pixabay

I receive a word-of-the-day email, and today's word is "unbosom."

It's a verb defined as to disclose one's thoughts or secrets. But in this era, I'm picturing a giddy trans man being wheeled into top surgery while yelling, "Time to unbosom myself!"

Transformation

All Persons

Image:  Facebook

I read something remarkable today in the magazine of The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Before creating the 1.2 mile All Persons Trail, located within a TNC swamp preserve in Manchester, N.H., designers held listening sessions with communities that face barriers to nature. Disabled people weighed in.

But they weren't the only ones. "One participant spoke about the need for a private space, such as an all-gender restroom, for trans people to bind or unbind their chest." That restroom came to fruition, and the trail's signage includes depictions of different sexual orientations.

I'm so pleasantly surprised that TNC asked for input. I do believe welcoming efforts like this trail will be appreciated and effective, even as I know there will always be a portion of the LGBTQ community whose interest in nature is confined to sex on the dunes.

Last Sunday

Transgender Day of Visibility is observed annually on March 31. This year it happened to coincide with Easter. So when President Biden issued a proclamation in honor of TDOV, a number of conservatives spluttered that he'd hijacked the holiest Christian holiday just to show support for transgender people.

Some were so irate they practically accused Biden of sacrificing Jesus all over again.

The ruckus made me glad that I'm not a Christian. I belong to a Unitarian Universalist church whose spring festival for children and youth on Sunday was billed as "Celebrating Easter and Trans Day of Visibility." Activities included an Easter egg hunt and a drag queen story hour.

Conservatives are none too fond of Unitarian Universalists, either.

Different Agendas

Image:  Facebook

Today President Joe Biden issued a proclamation recognizing March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility.

Today former President Donald Trump issued a statement recognizing his wife Melania and Casper the Friendly Ghost as masters of invisibility.