NEWSTRANSGENDER ISSUES

Pressure is increasing on Apple to remove their online store from the “Christian Values Network” (CVN), after several other corporations have removed their stores this week. More than 3,500 people have signed Western Washington University student Ben Crowther’s Change.org petition to Apple. CVN is used as a fundraising tool by several anti-gay, anti-women organizations like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

Late Thursday, the Wells Fargo and Delta Airlines online stores were removed from CVN. Prior to removing their store, Wells Fargo was offering up to $300 to the religious charity of the shopper’s choice, money that could be donated to “Focus on the Family” or the Family Research Council. Delta offered $3.00 per ticket.

Jessica Beavers, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo told Change.org. “Occasionally team members may act on their own to place ads on various sites that do not meet Wells Fargo’s brand and marketing standards.”

“We requested the removal of this ad because it was not compliant with Wells Fargo’s brand and marketing standers,” Beavers said.

When asked if this was a reaction to Wells Fargo’s brand being used to raise money for the anti-gay “Focus on the Family” and the Southern Poverty Law Center identified “known hate group”, the Family Research Council, Jessica Beavers reiterated, “We have really strong and tight marketing standards. We have compliance standards in place and any time we see those violated we ask the site to remove our brand.”

Beavers continued, “Wells Fargo has very clear policies in place to support our LGBT team members and the LGBT community. In 2011, Wells Fargo was ranked number 2 in Diversity Inc’s list of top 10 companies for LGBT employees.”

She also mentioned Wells Fargo’s 100% HRC Corporate Equality Index score. Which she said Wells Fargo was, “very proud of.”

William Penn wanted Philadelphia to be a mecca for tolerance. The city’s name even translates to “brotherly love.” The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) has decided that this love shouldn’t extend to gender non-conforming and transgender citizens. SEPTA’s current gender-identity policy involves a mixture of singing “la, la, la, la!” and wearing earplugs.

If you haven’t been following Change.org’s posts on SEPTA, the transit company currently requires its monthly transpasses and trailpasses to be marked with M or F stickers denoting a passenger’s gender identity. To add further insult to injury, SEPTA recently stopped all debate about the policy at the board level, silencing discussions between many of those with the power to change the policy. About three months ago, a Change.org petition was started to stop SEPTA from discriminating against transgender and gender non-conforming transit riders. So far, SEPTA is ignoring our emails.

Speaking to Change.org, SEPTA spokesperson Jerri Williams said, “I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing, but I think that the complaint and the general displeasure is in the passes themselves. The incidents where a person has been questioned do not happen as much as people think … The policy itself is what the issue is as opposed to if a person is actually confronted.” Williams went back and forth over whether her company had received complaints about gender-identity discrimination as she sifted through the transit giant’s bureaucratic red tape.

It is always worth remembering that no amount of progress is irreversible, especially in a time where the culture war seems to be as prevalent and potent as ever.

Back in February I wrote about a significant victory for LGBT people in Kansas. Manhattan, KS (home of all things purple and Wildcatty) passed an ordinance that prohibits discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. I had also written about attempts to stop it and undo it. But ultimately, the ordinance passed, and I couldn’t have been more proud.

But after April’s city commission election, it looks like all of that hard work may be undone. Two of the original supporters of the ordinance have been ousted, and replaced with people who would love to see the ordinance repealed.

More than 140,000 Change.org members have petitioned McDonald’s to dismiss the employees who encouraged two women as they violently attacked a transgender woman in a Baltimore location. But pressuring for punishment for these individuals doesn’t address the deeper issue at hand: McDonald’s needs to establish better policies for the inclusion of transgender people at all levels of their operation.

So today, to help keep up the pressure on the petition effort and also ask McDonald’s to address the underlying issue, we’re asking everyone to send a creative Follow Friday tweet to McDonald's encouraging them to adopt policies that will help prevent another incident like the one in Baltimore in the future.

Please take a second to send this tweet:

#FF @McDonalds but only to see if they adopt policies to protect transgender employees & customers http://chn.ge/fPkkhm via @change

Unlike President Obama, my birth certificate has very little to do with my life. I’m not 100 percent sure I even know where it is. (Note to self: FIND IT.) It’s easy to forget that, for some, the information found on a birth certificate has incredible consequences, like whether you can be legally discriminated against in marriage, housing, and a host of other areas that most people take for granted.

For most people, gender and biological sex match up. But it doesn’t work that way for everybody. When this happens, a person may live as their gender, and not their biological sex. The ability to change one’s birth certificate to reflect one’s true gender is important, especially for purposes of marriage.

Not every state allows trans people do this. In my home state of Kansas, for example, your biological sex at birth is always your sex. (Which, incidentally, leads to some absurd results. For example, two women can marry if one of the partners was originally male. But other than that, no gay marriage for you!) Texas, perhaps counter intuitively, is a state that allows a trans person to change his or her birth certificate through a court order.

But, maybe, not for long.

A few weeks ago, clothing store J. Crew ran an ad showing company president and creative director Jenna Lyons painting her son Beckett's toenails. The tagline read: "Saturday with Jenna: Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."

The far-right promptly had conniptions. Dr. Keith Ablow of Fox News worried about  "homogenizing males and females" and "psychological sterilization."

But one of the best responses to the far-right has been from the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a nonprofit that "takes an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights." HPA says the fact that almost every major media outlet ran a story about the ad was "an act of bullying":

More than 120,000 people have joined a viral petition campaign calling on McDonald’s and Maryland authorities to take action over the severe beating of a transgender woman at a franchise of the fast-food chain near Baltimore, Maryland.

The assault, captured on film by a McDonald’s employee, shows 22-year-old Chrissy Lee Polis viciously attacked by several customers while McDonald’s employees watch. Polis is punched, knocked to the ground, dragged across the floor by her hair, and kicked in the face until she appears to experience a seizure.

To date, only one McDonald’s employee has been held responsible, with the company continuing to say that it’s investigating the situation and “will take appropriate action as necessary.”

The attack has caused widespread outrage, with hundreds of people attending a vigil and rally outside of the Maryland McDonald’s to protest anti-transgender violence. In response to the attack, Adrian Leigh Cowan, a Baltimore resident, also launched a campaign on Change.org, the fastest-growing online platform for social change.

When I first saw the video, I was brought to tears.

A young woman in her early 20s, beaten as she tries to use a restroom at a McDonald's in my home state of Maryland. Several assailants punch her, knock her to the ground, drag her across the floor by her hair, and kick her in the face until it appears she experiences a seizure.

As the video spread over the Internet on Friday – first through the blogosphere and then to mainstream press outlets – the facts on the ground became even more troubling. We learned that the video was filmed by McDonald's employees, several of whom seemed to cheer the assault on from behind the camera. And we learned that the victim was a 22-year-old transgender woman, later identified as Chrissy Lee Polis.

That’s when it hit me: yes, this was a disturbing attack, appalling on a sheer human level for its heinous nature. But this was also a hate crime, and representative of the violence and harassment that too many transgender people face in this country when they try to access public accommodations like restrooms.

When it comes to the subject of transgender discrimination in Massachusetts, the statistics are grim. According to a study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, upwards of 76 percent of all transgender residents in Massachusetts face harassment or mistreatment in the workplace. On top of that, a full 20 percent have said that they've been fired from a job, solely for being transgender.

Stark statistics like this make it all the more grim that for months upon months, legislators have sat on a Transgender Equal Rights Bill that would add "gender identity and expression" to the state's civil rights laws -- ensuring that transgender residents in Massachusetts would be legally protected from discrimination on the basis of employment, housing, public accommodations, education, and credit.

Now a group of religious leaders in Massachusetts are coming together to push lawmakers on transgender rights, and urge them to get behind the Transgender Equal Rights Bill. According to the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality, about 135 clergy throughout the state of Massachusetts are coming together to push for this bill. That includes Bishop M. Thomas Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who told the Boston Globe that religious people have a commitment to help root out discrimination wherever it appears.

Want to ride the bus in Philadelphia without coming out to your fellow commuters? Good luck with that.

In January, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) greeted the New Year with a special resolution. The company will continue its discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming passengers for up to three more years by refusing to remove gender stickers from its monthly passes. Please kindly bear with the humiliation, expense and possible threat to your person while SEPTA makes its upgrades.

All of SEPTA’s monthly passes, including, ironically, the “transpass,” must have an “M” or an “F” sticker denoting the bearer’s gender identity. Somehow, the sticker policy is supposed to keep people from sharing passes. SEPTA hasn’t done a study to see if the system reduces pass sharing, but I only have male friends and family so the policy really works well for me.