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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.



TG MD Fired:
Transitioning
On Job

Contributed by Claire Howell
via IYF Newsletter
December 20, 1998

THE NEW JERSEY TIMES REPORTS that Dr. Carla Enriquez, a pediatrician, has filed a suit against West Jersey Health System (WJHS) alleging that they failed to renew her contract last year because she was transitioning from male to female. Enriquez, a trustee of The College of New Jersey since 1984, was 'terminated' on 22 Oct 97. Said her attorney, Lee Fiederer, "We brought the case under the New Jersey law against discrimination which protects individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or affectation."

The suit alleges that officials at WJHS were openly critical of Enriquez throughout her transition, and that WJHS denied her employment based on their disapproval, rather than any measure of ability. She began transitioning in Sep 96. She legally changed her name from Carlos to Carla and made the change in her physical appearance from male to female over that winter and the spring of the next year.

The complaint alleges that in 1997 Dr. John Cossa, Vice President of WJHS, told her to "stop all this and go back to your previous appearance." After Enriquez refused to comply with these demands, WJHS took action to deny her employment. "We have a brilliant doctor, recognized nationally in her field, who was terminated solely based on her sexual affectation and orientation," said Fiederer.

Riki Anne Wilchins, GenderPAC Executive Director, commented on this case on Court TV. She said, "That such blatant discrimination can happen to a fine doctor emphasizes the urgent need for employment protection at the local and state level and especially within the context of ENDA. The experience of this woman is echoed in the scores of responses we are receiving from people across the country to our National Survey on Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Workplace."



Students Protest
Transgender Deaths

Contributed by W. Snow
via Associated Press
December 15, 1998

Members and supporters of the Harvard queer community gathered last night to draw chalk body outlines on footpaths in the Yards, symbolizing transgendered people slain in hate crimes.

About ten people gathered to participate in the event, which came in the wake of the Nov. 28 murder of Rita (originally William) Hester, a transgendered man to woman, stabbed over 20 times in her Allston apartment. Next to the chalk outlines (which number about 40), flyers were taped to the ground with the names of Deborah Forte, Rita Hester, Tyra Hunter, Brandon Teena, Rufus Turner, Kristen Page and Chanelle Picket. Each were trans-people killed in recent crimes of hate.

Under the name of the individual killed, the flyers read, Remembered because of (his/her) gender identity. TransLiberation NOW." Anna M. Baldwin '00, who borrowed the idea of chalk outlines from the group Transexual Menace, an international transgender advocacy group, said she organized the event to give more attention to crimes that go unnoticed by the media.

"I think that hate crimes against transgendered people have been generally ignored by the press," Baldwin said. "I felt that Rita Hester's murder was also given less attention because not only was she transgendered, she was also African-American and working class, and those biases also come into play." Ari M. Lipman '00, who helped draw outlines and tape flyers last night, said the media attention given to Hester paled in contrast to Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in October.

"The parallel that comes to mind is the huge public outcry after Matthew Shepard's death versus the virtual silence after Rita Hester's equally brutal murder," he said. Nikki L. DeBlosi '99, co-chair of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters' Alliance (BGLTSA), said that although her organization did not sponsor last night's event, it advocates for the ransgendered. "I want to reassert that the BGLTSA thinks it's definitely important to speak against violence and prejudice against transgendered people, because they are definitely part of the queer community," she said.

Both DeBlosi and Baldwin said that some people have used Hester's occupation to justify her murder. "She was a sex worker, which some people think invited her killing, because of prejudice against sex workers," Baldwin said. BGLTSA is tabling outside the Science Center today to raise awareness of Hester's murder.



TG Chosen As
St. Paul
Deputy Mayor

Contributed by Jodie Miller and Linda Fitzpatrick
via Associated Press
December 15, 1998

Susan Kimberly, a former St. Paul, Minn., city council president and a transgendered woman, was appointed Monday by St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman to be the city's deputy mayor effective January 4, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The appointment surprised many because Coleman has supported the repeal of human rights protections for gays and lesbians.

Kimberly, who was known as Bob Sylvester before undergoing sex-reassignment surgery 15 years ago, also worked for Coleman's opponent in the 1993 campaign. "Liberals believe in handouts and proclamations," the Republican mayor said, explaining the appointment. "I believe in recognizing people for their talent and competency. Susan Kimberly is a very able and talented public servant. She's smart, she's tough, and she shares my vision."



Toledo, OH
Adopts TG Rights

Contributed by Jodie Miller
via News Planet
December 12, 1998

Months of hard work by activists yielded a unanimous vote by the Ohio city's council to recognize L/G/B/Ts as human under the law.

The Toledo, Ohio City Council on December 8 unanimously (with one absence) added sexual orientation as a protected category under the local human rights law. Transgender people are also protected, since the measure defines sexual orientation as "real or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or gender identity." The existing ordinance made it a first-degree misdemeanor to discriminate in areas of employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, handicap, and age. The new amendment added a section to also prohibit "intimidation" based on any of the categories, defined as a crime committed against a person or group because of bias. Mayor Carleton Finkbeiner is expected to sign the bill into law, which will make Toledo the eleventh Ohio municipality to ban anti-gay discrimination.

Although the unanimous vote and the unanimous applause that followed it made passage look easy, it was actually the culmination of months of groundwork by members of Gays and Lesbians United and others before openly gay first-year Councilmember Louis Escobar formally introduced the measure early last month. Just the day before, some residents had expressed serious reservations about the bill during two hours of testimony at a public hearing attended by 140 people. However, among those testifying in support of the measure were Toledo's police chief, fire chief, state Representative, and three clergymembers; nine City Councilors co-sponsored Escobar's measure.

The city joins a growing list in the U.S. that have adopted TG rights laws including San Francisco, Cambridge, Mass., Seattle, and the entire state of Minnesota.



That Sly Don't-Come-Hither Stare

Contributed by Jodie Miller
via New York Times
December8, 1998

It sounds like a catalog from the nightmare side of the collective male memory: The woman yawns, frowns, sneers, cleans her nails, picks at her teeth, stares at the ceiling and makes an excruciatingly minute examination of her hair's split ends. "Sorry, what were you saying?"

These are weapons in the battle of the sexes, or, to use their scientific name, female nonverbal courtship-rejection behaviors.

According to a new study, they work -- except with some real jerks or when the lighting's too dim.

Dr. Monica Moore, a professor of psychology at Webster University in St. Louis, has been hanging around natural observation posts for courtship behavior -- singles bars -- for 20 years, one of a growing number of researchers applying ethnological techniques to the study of what she described recently in a telephone interview as "how people decide where to end the night."

A substantial body of research has been compiled on courtship techniques -- flirting -- and on the role played by gestures like the quick glance and the casual touch of the arm.

It became clear in the course of these studies that there was a nonverbal vocabulary for the opposite message as well, and Dr. Moore, in research published last month in the journal Semiotica, set out to categorize such rejection behaviors and gauge their role in courtship encounters.

Back to the singles bar. Dr. Moore and research assistants posing as boring, ignorable couples took tables in a local pub, where they randomly selected, in visits spaced over more than two years, 210 single females for observation.

What they found was a relatively consistent array of 17 behaviors that Dr. Moore broke down into facial and head patterns, gestures and posture patterns.

They also found that the silent brushoffs were generally effective, at least if used enough. "Across the sample, these behaviors did serve to cause a man to lose interest" and break off the courtship attempt, Dr. Moore said, although, she added, "sometimes it took several behaviors."

On the other hand, Dr. Moore noted: "There are those guys whose feelings get hurt easily and who give up too soon. What I tell men is that if somebody looks like she's blowing you off, give it one more try -- in a polite, respectful way -- and then, if it doesn't work, give it up."

All in all, she added, "It's a tough world out there for singles."



Couple Face Charge
In Child's Forced Crossdressing

Contributed by Jodie Miller
via Associated Press
December 10, 1998

CARLSBAD, N.M. -- A man and woman face child abuse charges after allegedly putting an adhesive bandage on a 4-year-old boy's privates and making him dress as a girl as punishment for striking a girl at school.

The defendants, the child's mother and the man whose home she shared, allegedly told the boy his genitals had been cut off. And the boy's father in Maine said his son asked him: "Am I a boy or a girl today?"

Defendants Beulah Melvin and Frank Salazar are due in Eddy County Magistrate Court on Jan. 13, Carlsbad police Sgt. David Edmondson said Tuesday. They face charges of child abuse and conspiracy.

The father in Bangor, Maine, told police he spoke to his son by phone Nov. 4 and learned of the punishment then. Edmondson said the father's and son's names were being withheld.

The defendants allegedly held the child down, placed the adhesive bandage on his genitals and made him wear a dress and girl's panties.

Edmondson said police were notified Nov. 23, and he met on Nov. 24 with the boy, the father and the boy's grandfather, a Carlsbad resident. The boy told Edmondson that his mother and her friend had put the adhesive bandage on his "wee wee" and told him they had cut it off.

"The child was ashamed. He was ashamed of what happened to him, and he was ashamed to tell me about it. He didn't want to talk about what they did to him," Edmondson said Tuesday night.

While the child was not physically harmed, he said: "This is just a different form of child abuse. It's more emotional than it is physical or sexual." But he added: "It's still abuse."

The mother told Edmondson her son had struck a girl at school a couple weeks earlier, probably in the first few days of November, Edmondson said. He didn't know what that incident was all about.

Salazar allegedly provided the bandage used in the punishment and the girl's clothing, which belonged to his daughter who lives with her mother in Albuquerque.

Police said the defendants, both of Carlsbad, describe their relationship as landlord and tenant, not boyfriend-girlfriend. Ms. Melvin is in her 20s and Salazar in his 30s, Edmondson said.



Body Scanners Offer The Perfect Fit

Contributed by Jodie Miller
via Reuters
December 7, 1998

LONDON (Reuters) - British computer scientists have developed a sophisticated bodyscanner which provides shoppers with a ``virtual changing room'' where 300,000 points all over your body can be measured with perfect precision.

``It will be the biggest revolution in shopping for a generation,'' said Philip Treleaven, project leader at University College, London on the fashion scanner awarded a 3.4 million pound government research grant.

``Going to the shops and trying on clothes could become a thing of the past. You could do it all from home, never go into a changing room again if you don't want to,'' he told Saturday's Mirror newspaper.

The scanner is shaped like a photo booth. Infra-red lights act as an electronic tailor to provide the perfect identikit picture of the shopper's every contour.

``I expect within 12-18 months, we'll have what the manufacturers want and our first users will be in place,'' Treleaven said of the scheme that has been warmly welcomed by the leading clothes retail chains.



Weak Bones Among Men Are Linked to Estrogen

Contributed by Jodie Miller
via Reuters
December 8, 1998

New research is challenging the medical textbook view of osteoporosis as largely a women's disease linked to the singularly female experience of menopause. It now seems that osteoporosis is more prevalent in men than was previously thought, and that although men do not go through menopause, the main cause of the degenerative bone disorder is the same in men and women: an age-related drop in estrogen.

Several recent studies show that men's levels of this sex hormone decline with age and that the decline leads to a loss of bone mass, the signature symptom of osteoporosis. Some of these studies were presented last week at a meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and the International Bone and Mineral Society in San Francisco.

"This is surprising," said Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs, a professor of medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who has found that estrogen naturally falls in men after about age 65. "Three years ago, none of us would have thought that estrogen loss was a factor in male osteoporosis." Although men and women have estrogen, it is more abundant in women and plays a central role in female reproduction.

The National Osteoporosis Foundation in Washington estimates that of the 10 million Americans who have osteoporosis, more than 1.5 million are men, and that half of women and one in eight men over 50 will have an osteoporosis- related fracture. But because osteoporosis is underdiagnosed in men, the numbers for men are probably higher, the organization's literature says.

Medical textbooks describe osteoporosis differently for men and for women. In women it is linked mainly to the sharp drop in estrogen after menopause, because estrogen is known to slow the natural process of bone loss that occurs with age. In men, however, osteoporosis is said to result from abnormally low levels of testosterone, a sex hormone more plentiful in males. The cause of low testosterone is usually a rare condition called hypogonadism, in which the testicles are underactive.

Two studies presented at last week's meeting indicate that estrogen plays a more central role than testosterone in osteoporosis in men. Researchers following residents of Framingham, Mass., over five decades studied 382 elderly white men for eight years, tracking bone density, estrogen levels and signs of hypogonadism. Men with the highest bone density also had the highest estrogen levels; the connection with hypogonadism was negligible.

In another study, doctors in Germany measured bone density as well as estrogen and testosterone levels of 300 men with osteoporosis for five years. Forty percent of the men had low estrogen; 20 percent had low testosterone.

"We didn't see a pronounced effect of testosterone on the males' bone-mineral density," said Dr. Peter Kaps, an orthopedic surgeon and the lead author.

Dr. Pamela Taxel, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, said: "These are suggestive findings, but larger studies are needed to understand the mechanism of estrogen and testosterone on bone health in men."

Dr. Taxel is studying the use of estrogen supplements to treat men with osteoporosis. She said research was needed to develop a form of estrogen that helps men without causing side effects like prostate disease or impotence.



Thais Promise
Sympathetic Gender Tests

Contributed by Elizabeth Parker
via Reuters
December 7, 1998

BANGKOK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Tolerant Thailand on Monday promised more sensitive and sympathetic gender testing of Asian Games athletes than if the event was held elsewhere.

Dr Chintana Sirinavin, head of the medical and health services sub-committee responsible for genetic verification at the December 6-20 Games, said her unit would not evade its responsbilities.

But, she added: "We will do our utmost to ensure that athletes are spared the shame and stigmatisation of a positive test.

"In Thailand I think we have an open mind and accept the difference between people better," she added. Counselling would be part of any conclusive finding on gender bending, she said.

Dr Chintana said she anticipated "quite a few" initial positive tests from first examinations mainly based on hair follicles.

But a positive test at the prelimnary stage does not lead to automatic and immediate diqualification of an athlete.

"Athletes that test positive can still compete as long as they don't have any obvious advantages," she said.

The most common factors in initial positive tests are Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and Testicular Feminisation Syndrome. These are "normal" conditions, she said.

An athlete with these genetic defects will have a feminine appearance and normal hormone levels because the male gene is unable to act.

At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, about one in every 400 women athletes tested male but all were cleared in subsequent physical examinations.

Gender testing has been a hotly debated issue among world sports organisations ever since it was first introduced at the Mexico Olympics in 1968.

The International Amateur Athletics Federation abandoned gender testing in 1992 and the Commonwealth and World University Games followed suit, arguing the tests are an invasion of privacy, unethical and unreliable.

The Olympic organisation of which the Asian Games is a part still conducts the tests.

Concern that sex cheats hold unfair advantages in sports first arose in 1932 when 100 metres Olympic gold medallist, Stanislawa Walasiewicz, died and was found to have been a man.

But in Thailand, a largely tolerant attitude exists towards "gender-bending," both in society and in the sporting arena.

The country has a transsexual volleyball team and earlier this year, a 16-year-old transvestite Thai kickboxer, complete with lipstick and eyeshadow, stepped into the ring.

Fearsome fighter Prinya Kiatbusba showed opponents no mercy, but broke down in tears when officials ordered him to strip to be weighed.

Dr Chintana works in the genetics department at Bangkok's Sirirat Hospital, a leading institution for sex change operations in Asia.

"We are well aware of these particular conditions and the sex problem in the general population. From our experience we get quite a few cases," she said.

She insisted positive tests would be treated as purely medical.

"I don't want people to mix up physical and psychological sex testing.

This will only lead to the humiliation of the athlete," she said.

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