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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."

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