
From our fabulous News Hawks!
Have you seen a TG-related news story online or in your local paper? Send it in to TGF and become a News Hawk! Don't assume we know everything that's out there, because you are our eyes and ears. To file a story, send it in to Cindy .
Teen CD Attacked
Shortly After Shepard Vigil
Contributed by Bobby G
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
October 13, 1998
An 18-year-old cross-dresser was attacked by a man wielding a broken
beer bottle in Madison Tuesday evening, shortly after hundreds of people
attended a vigil for a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten
to death.
Madison police tentatively labeled the attack a hate crime because the
victim was a man dressed in women's clothing. Police said they don't
think the victim attended the rally. The Madison man was hit on the
back of the head with a full 40-ounce bottle of beer and then stabbed in
the abdomen with the broken glass bottle, Madison police spokesman Dave
Gouran said. He was wearing women's clothing, including a padded bra,
when he was attacked in a south side neighborhood as he walked with two
friends. He apparently crossed paths with the suspect while walking
across a convenience store parking lot, and the suspect followed him,
yelling obscenities.
"Because he is a cross-dresser, the suspect referred to him as something
like a 'he-she,' " Gouran said Wednesday. The comments from the suspect
"didn't address his sexual orientation or the perceived sexual
orientation."
Police were called to St. Mary's Hospital about 9:45
p.m. with a report of a female patient who had been stabbed. Hospital
officials later discovered the victim was a man. Between 50 and 60
stitches were required to close his wounds, officials said. After
giving police a fake name, the man gave his real name and later fled the
hospital when officers discovered there was a warrant for his arrest on
a traffic violation, Gouran said.
Police were searching Wednesday for
the victim and attacker involved in the 9:30 p.m. incident, which
occurred minutes after a rally ended for slain Wyoming student Matthew
Shepard. A candlelight vigil in Shepard's honor drew 750 people to the
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Shepard died Monday from the
injuries he suffered after he was lured from a campus hangout, beaten
and lashed to a split-rail fence near Laramie, Wyo. The attack has
spurred calls nationwide for hate crime legislation protecting gays.
Police said robbery was the main motive but that Shepard apparently was
chosen because he was gay. DeEtte Tomlinson, executive director of
OutReach, a Madison gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender center, said
crimes against gays are increasing. "It is very distressing to see it
happen in Madison," Tomlinson said. "Unfortunately, this year an
atmosphere has been created where this is happening more often, not only
in Madison but across the country."
Madison police statistics reflect
this. Complaints of crimes against gays and lesbians have jumped from 12
in 1996, to 16 last year, to 43 this year.Gouran said most of the hate
crime complaints concerning gays and
lesbians involve vandalism and disorderly conduct. An attack as serious as the
one Tuesday is rare, Gouran said. "A lot of people were shocked,"
Tomlinson said. "They were very upset that this incident happened on the
heels of such a tragedy" like the Shepard slaying.
World's Only Openly TS Mayor
Beyer Wins in NZ
Contributed by Rachelle Austin and Elizabeth Parker
via News Planet
October 10, 1998
Final results are in from New Zealand's elections, which were held by
mail-in ballots due October 10. Georgina Beyer of Carterton, believed to
be the world's first openly transsexual mayor, was returned to office with
an overwhelming 90% of the vote, while an unusually high number of eight
mayors nationally were being replaced.
Transsexual Jacqui Grant failed to
take the mayoralty of the Grey District, but was returned to her council
seat there. In Auckland, where the lesbian comics the Topp twins made a
satiric bid for mayor, the candidate they threw their support to, Member
of Parliament Christine Fletcher (Epsom-National party), ousted three-term
incumbent Mayor Les Mills by a solid margin of nearly 5,000 votes. Open
gays Damien McLeod and Lindsey Rea won seats on Auckland's Western Bays
and Eden-Albert Community Boards, respectively, but five other Auckland
gay candidates were defeated.
The Auckland City Council overall was significantly changed from the
personnel who denied funds to the annual gay and lesbian HERO parade AIDS
fund-raiser, as eight of its nineteen seats changed hands. The vote ended
45 years of right-wing rule in New Zealand's largest city.
Reportedly the
gay and lesbian community there was galvanized for the election as never
before, although there was also widespread dissatisfaction with the
outgoing council's huge Britomart transportation center contract, for
which Flectcher immediately demanded an accounting.
Four Citizens &
Ratepayers (C&R) party councilors who had voted against HERO funding were
ousted, while four other councilors who had opposed HERO were returned to
office by substantially reduced majorities (including "Xena" star Lucy
Lawless' father Frank Ryan). One of those, David Hay, was returned to the
council, but will not again be serving as deputy Mayor. The remaining 15
members of the incoming council are viewed as gay-friendly. The final
lineup by parties is seven C&R (three of them gay-friendly), two Auckland
Now (new right), five City Vision (center-left), two Labour, and two
independents. Fletcher will be continuing as MP as well as Mayor for
Auckland at least through March.
Married TS Seeks Birth Certificate Change
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker
via PA News
October 14, 1998
A transsexual who hid her background and illegally married a man almost
20 ago years today revealed her secret in a bid to have the
relationship made legal.
Liz Bellinger, 52, and her husband, Michael,
married at a London register office in 1981 after meeting at a hospital
where she was a patient and he was a visitor. The only other person who
knew that she had been born a man other than Michael was the judge who
granted her legal custody of his daughter.
Three weeks ago Ms
Bellinger, who moved from Devon to Lincoln, took the decision to tell
the girl, now aged 24, that she is a transsexual. Although she has so
far not had the courage to tell her friends or her husband's relatives
about her secret, she says she is going public to get her marriage
legalised.
Although she underwent surgery in 1981 and considers herself
a woman, Ms Bellinger's birth certificate says she was born a male and
as a result she could be prosecuted over the marriage. She wants the
certificate changed.
In the wake of a storyline in the ITV soap
Coronation Street about transsexual Hayley Patterson, Ms Bellinger has
invited MPs, including Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown to a
meeting next week in Parliament. She told The Guardian: "The public are
supporting Hayley. I'm saying - Hayley is a manufactured character ...
support the real Hayleys who are downtrodden by the government and
experiencing a form of imprisonment."
Her husband said: "I supported
her for the last nearly 20 years and I'm with her."
In July, British
transsexuals Kristina Sheffield and Rachel Horsham lost their battle to
be legally recognised in their new gender as women. The European Court
of Human Rights in Strasbourg said the refusal to provide the two, who
had been born men, with birth certificates acknowledging their new
gender was not a breach of their human rights. The pair had argued that
the Government's refusal to accept their new sexual status as women was
a breach of their right to respect for private and family life,
guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention.
The Human Rights Convention
states: "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family
life, his home and his correspondence." But the court ruled that that
right was not breached when, for legal purposes such as court
appearances and obtaining insurance and contractual documents,
transsexuals were forced to show certificates revealing their previous
names and gender.
Rachel, who claims she is forced to live in exile in
Amsterdam because she wants to marry her male partner, has already been
issued with a birth certificate showing her new name and sex by the
Register of Births in the Hague. But a request to the Office of
Population Censuses and Surveys in the UK to amend her original birth
certificate was rejected. The existing UK legislation follows a High
Court ruling in 1970 that laid down that sex is determined at birth.
Since then changes to birth certificates have only been allowed in
cases of ambiguous sex where the mistake becomes apparent within 12
months or, at the latest, puberty.
Japan's 1st SRS To Go Forward
Contributed by ElizabethParker
via Kyodo News
October 14, 1998
URAWA, Japan -- Saitama Medical College will perform the
nation's first legally approved sex change operation Friday on a Japanese
woman at the college's general medical center, college officials said
Wednesday.
A special team of doctors at the college, located north of Tokyo, will
perform the operation in two stages on a 30-year-old woman from
northeastern Japan.
The first stage, to be carried out Friday from 9
a.m., will be mainly to remove the womb and ovaries, which doctors
believe will take six to eight hours. The woman was admitted to the
hospital Wednesday to prepare for the operation, college officials
said. The sex-change operation was originally scheduled for Sept. 11,
but was delayed because of allegations that the college conducted in
1993 a similar operation without the permission of the facility's
ethics committee.
An in-house investigation later found the 1993
operation, in which a womb and ovaries were also removed, was
treatment for endometriosis -- not sex-change surgery. In May, the
college's ethics committee gave approval for the 30-year-old woman
with transsexualism, gender-identity disorder, to undergo a sex change
on condition complete mental support measures be provided afterward.
The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology said last year that
sex-change operations should be permitted under certain conditions,
including that the patient undergo psychoanalysis and hormone therapy
following the procedure. Some 2,200 to 7,000 people in Japan want to
live as a member of the opposite sex, according to one estimate.
Sex Change Councillor Delisted For Election
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker
via PA News
October 14, 1998
A sex change councillor has been told that she cannot stand for the
Labour party in the forthcoming local elections. Bristol city
councillor Rosalind Mitchell has been deselected by the local party.
Officials have claimed the transsexual councillor did not know enough
about Labour's national policies. But they deny she was being
discriminated against. Mr Richard Leonard, area organiser for the local
Labour party, maintains she was not selected because she did not pass
the selection stage. Ms Mitchell, however, maintains that the
deselection was a "clear case of discrimination", and claims it was
hinted she would not be a suitable ambassador for the party.
She said:
"Nothing was said in so many words. But I am a prominent person and a
transsexual. The old guard of the Labour party are not happy about that
and are not comfortable about having me around. Ms Mitchell was elected
in 1997 and made national headlines initially after her sex change and
later when she was ousted by from the women's group of the local Labour
party.
She maintains: "The Labour party made an issue about the rights
of minorities and made a show of offering support for myself. At the
end of the day some minorities have better deals than others. "It seems
the Labour party is standing by and letting discrimination take place
against transsexuals." She is to appeal and believes that her
constituents will be "as mad as hell" about the deselection decision.
FTM Heiress Confirmed Dead
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker
via Associated Press
October 16, 1998
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A skeleton found hidden on the remote estate
of a missing transvestite millionaire has been identified as the
woman's remains. Authorities also said Thursday that the woman,
champion dog breeder Camilla Lyman, had been murdered. Her skeleton was
dumped into a septic tank.
Lyman, who dressed like a man and called
herself Cam, disappeared from her Victorian house in Hopkinton in 1987.
The daughter of an affluent Bostonian will finally rest in peace in her
family's plot in Massachusetts. But who wanted her dead? And why?
"No
comment," said John Scuncio, chief of the Hopkinton police, who is
conducting the murder investigation along with state police.
The
skeleton was discovered in Lyman's septic tank on Sept. 24, 1997, by
two men who had purchased her 40-acre estate. Little police work was
done to find Lyman after she vanished. A fellow dog breeder who took
care of her business affairs, George O'Neil, said at the time it was
not unusual for her to leave home for extended periods.
Fifty-four
years old when she disappeared, Lyman had few friends and built a
stockade-style fence around her house.
She grew a mustache with the
help of steroids intended for her dogs, sported a man's haircut and
wore herringbone jackets. She had little contact with her family. She
was the daughter of Arthur T. Lyman, who before his death had more than
30 years of public service in Massachusetts, including stints as
commissioner of corrections and commissioner of conservation.
The first
real investigation into Lyman's disappearance was opened early last
year by Scuncio, shortly after he took over as police chief. A former
state police detective, Scuncio brought in a cadaver-sniffing state
police dog to search the grounds of Lyman's estate.
Greg Siner and
Gardner Young, the property's new owners, thought the septic system had
overflowed. When they opened the tank, they saw Lyman's skull bobbing
in the muck. There had been little, if any, doubt that the remains were
Lyman's. But proving it took more than a year and required the aid of
dental records and use of the FBI lab in Washington, D.C. After Lyman
disappeared, her spaniels and her property were maintained by O'Neil.
He was one of Lyman's few close friends, had power of attorney over her
affairs and was the sole beneficiary in her will, according to
testimony at a 1994 probate hearing dealing with Lyman's estate. O'Neil
has denied having anything to do with Lyman's disappearance. Police
learned that Lyman had vanished in December 1988, when her brother
filed a missing-persons report with the Hopkinton police.
Charles John
Allen, a private investigator initially hired by Lyman's siblings to
locate her, has been assisting police. He has been attempting to locate
as much as $4 million in stocks and other assets once in Lyman's
possession. "She had a fairly extensive stock portfolio when she
disappeared," but that was reduced to "a couple of stocks," he said.
Mary Margaret Goodale, Lyman's sister, had long assumed her sister was
dead and is relieved the body has been identified. Some years ago, she
had a headstone for Camilla put up at the family plot. "Finally," she
said, "I can have her buried in the family cemetery."
|