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Banker Shows Up In Drag For Court Hearing
Contributed by Sabrina, Stephanie Gray and Andee W
via the London Times
Monday, November 11, 1998
A LEADING City investment manager dressed for the occasion when he
appeared before a London court on fraud charges yesterday.
Peter Young arrived wearing lipstick and makeup, a calf-length skirt and
low heels - and asked to be known as Elizabeth.
Mr Young, 40, was formerly a sober-suited fund manager at Morgan
Grenfell Asset Management. His thick-brown hair now reaches his
shoulders though he still wears the small round glasses that gave him
such a studious appearance in his heyday.
He and three other men are charged with a conspiracy to defraud the
trustees or investors of three Deutsche Morgan Grenfell investment
funds,
which at one point held £1.3 billion on behalf of 180,000 investors. The
funds managed by Mr Young were for a while the top performing
European equity funds, encouraging many investors to turn to Morgan
Grenfell.
But problems at the company two years ago caused Deutsche Bank, the
firm's German parent, to inject £180 million into the funds.
Subsequent
compensation payments to investors have cost the bank a further £200
million.
Shortly after Mr Young was suspended in August 1996, his wife,
Harmanna, told of a shopping trip on which he bought 30 jars of
gherkins.
Mr Young is charged with Erik Langaker, Jan Helge Johnsen and
Steward Armer.Mr Armer, who is studying in Chile, was not in court for
the preliminary hearing yesterday, when City of London magistrates
remanded all four on bail until March 15.
Who's That Girl?
Contributed by Penelope
via Time Out New York
November 12,1998
Meet Gaku, the "Pat" of the modeling world. Host of one of Japan's
top-rated talk shows and a budding supermodel, this bi-gender beauty has
graced Japanese runways, graced the pages of English magazines Face and ID
and appeared in ad campaigns for Gucci, Armani, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme
des Garcons. Now Gaku is Storming New York. The fine-boned, pale one is
scheduled to walk six runway show during Fashion Week (Nov. 2 through 6).
Wondering whose team this model plays on? Even though he gets a ton
of work hawking women's clothing and has cheekbones and arched brows that
most women would kill for, Gaku is a man. Through a translator, Gaku
(dressed in tight Jordache jeans, a Helmut Lang sweater, high heels and no
makeup) professed: "I'm open-minded. I think both girls and boys are
beautiful."
Hunter Trial Finally Starts
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker, Rachelle Austin and Bobby G
via Associated Press
November 12,1998
Jury selection began Monday in a lawsuit based on
allegations of bigotry, negligence and dereliction of duty in the death of
a transvestite at a municipal hospital in the nation's capital.
``It's long overdue,'' said Margie Hunter, who in February 1996 filed a
$10 million lawsuit alleging that emergency medical technicians failed to
do their jobs and a doctor at D.C. General Hospital contributed to the
death of her transvestite son.
Tyrone ``Tyra'' Hunter, 24, a hairstylist who dressed in women's clothes,
was a passenger in a car being driven by an acquaintance when the vehicle
was struck by another car in Washington on Aug. 7, 1995.
Margie Hunter contends that emergency medical technicians laughed at her
son and refused to treat him. Her lawsuit also claims Dr. Joseph Bastien,
the physician at D.C. General who oversaw her son's care, was not properly
certified.
The suit contends that Bastien failed to get Hunter into surgery to stop
internal bleeding, and he died without receiving a blood transfusion.
Among the witnesses expected to testify are several residents who pulled
Tyrone Hunter from the car and allegedly overheard comments made by one of
the emergency medical technicians when it was discovered that Hunter was a
male. Those paramedics allegedly stopped treating Hunter for at least five
minutes after the discovery.
Rally Over Attempted Hate Murder
Contributed by Rachelle Austin
via News Planet
November 10,1998
Activists responded quickly to the attempted hate murder of a cross-dresser
and determined to "take back the street".
Three hundred people turned out for a rally in Baltimore, Maryland November 6 at the site of the hate shooting of cross-dresser Lynn (Leonard) Vines. Vines somehow survived being shot six times -- twice
in the arm, twice in the chest, once in the back, and once in the shoulder -- on October 28 by one of a group of
perhaps 20 young men and women who were commenting about not allowing any "drag queen faggot
bitches" on their street. It was the neighborhood Vines had grown up in, and he was visiting his cousin at the time
to pick up the key to an apartment he was thinking of renting, but as he tried to explain this and repeated
that he didn't want any trouble, one young man struck him in the face. When Vines tried to run away, someone
carrying a cane used it to trip him. "I heard someone say, 'Mike, shoot the bitch,' and the next thing I
knew, I was shot in the chest, and I went into shock," Vines said. After the shooting, the young people left the
scene while Vines was bleeding on his cousin's stairs, but luckily a paramedic in a nearby fire station heard the
shots, took off in an ambulance and Vines' cousin flagged down. Vines spent a week in the hospital and faces a
lengthy period of recovery before he can return to his work as a housecleaner and drag entertainer. Police
are looking for the suspect, Paul Bishop, to charge him with attempted first-degree murder under a warrant
issued November 5.
Shanghai Shocked by Drag Act
Contributed by Rachelle Austin and Jodie Miller
via Reuters
November 11,1998
Shanghai police detained two male singers for
performing in women's clothes and shut down a night
club on its opening night. Shocked patrons called police to
the city's Guoling Dance Hall after discovering two singers wearing
make-up and dresses were men, the Xinmin Evening News said
Thursday.
The two performers swayed on stage, stroked their
hair coquettishly and batted their eyelids at the audience
before breaking into song, the newspaper said. "Unexpectedly, as
soon as they opened their red lips, the rough male sound
came through the microphone," it said. The dance hall was
immediately plunged into chaos and some patrons called the
police.
Musto and Springer Get Lucky
Contributed by Jodie Miller
via New York Post
November 11,1998
Page Six of the New York Post reports: "It's bound to be a night of mayhem
on Wednesday when Jerry Springer presides as ringmaster at the Lucky
Cheng's birthday bash for Village Voice columnist Michael Musto. Previous
guest hosts have included Brooke Shields, John Wayne Bobbitt, and Divine
Brown. This year's invite says, 'Jerry, please help me! I'm a young lady
trapped inside supposedly male gossip columnist Michael Musto's body!' The
party will undoubtedly make Springer's chaotic TV freakfest look tame in
comparison. And the eatery's gender-bending troupe of transvestite
waitresses plans to parody Jerry's show with a skit in which they rip each
others' wigs off."
TSs Challenge Denial of UK Public Funds for SRS
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker
via PA News
November 10,1998
Three transsexuals today challenged the legality of a health
authority's refusal to fund sex change operations. In the first case of
its kind, they are seeking to overturn North West Lancashire Health
Authority's decision that it was entitled to take into account its own
resources and refuse to pay for surgery. The three, described as
females trapped in male bodies at birth, have already started "gender
reassignment" treatment and are now in an "acutely distressed mental
and physical state", a High Court judge hearing the test case in London
was told.
They had started hormone treatment, mostly with NHS help,
which had led to "irreversible" changes to their bodies, including the
growth of female breasts. Their QC, Nicholas Blake, said four similar
cases had already been settled. The three were the first to come before
the court on a full application for judicial review. He accused the
health authority, which covers Blackpool and Preston, of operating an
unlawful blanket ban since 1995 on funding sex change operations. The
authority had said it would fund where there was an "overriding
clinical need", but that phrase was "meaningless", said the QC. To
refuse funding to patients who had already started sex change treatment
on resource grounds was a false economy because of the cost to the NHS
of continuing to treat the psychological and physical distress they had
to go on enduring. "Miss A", aged 21, "Miss D" and "Miss G", both aged
50, are already living their lives as women, Mr Justice Hidden was
told. "Miss A" had actually undergone three operations before the
health authority adopted its policy and all treatment ended. The three,
who are legally aided and cannot be named for legal reasons, are
seeking final treatment and surgery which will allow them to live more
fully in their female identity, which they believe has always been
their true identity. None can afford the treatment privately, which
they say can be as high as 110 an hour. They were refused gender
re-assignment surgery in 1996 and 1997 after it was decided none of
them had shown a demonstrable overriding need for treatment.
Mr Blake argued that the health authority was under a duty to take into
account the nature of an illness when deciding whether or not to provide
funding. All sides were agreed that gender identity disorder was an
illness.
In these cases the authority had fettered its own discretion and taken
into account an erroneous and flawed view - that transsexuals could be
counselled into being reconciled with their biological condition. But
this was a "useless" form of treatment "which merely adds to their
distress". Mr Blake argued the correct treatment, once a case was found
to be genuine, was counselling to assess and enable a person "to live
in their gender reassigned role", with hormone treatment and probably
surgery if a patient was deemed suitable.
It was not a case of
"operations on demand". For every 100 males who started out on the
process, only 15 were assessed as suitable for surgery, according to
the Charing Cross clinic in London for gender identity disorder. The
health authority's claim that exceptions to its policy would be made in
cases of a demonstrable clinical need was "meaningless", said Mr Blake.
He added: "It is only in cases of proven and demonstrable clinical need
that drastic treatment is offered or recommended as suitable in the
first place." All three applicants had undergone hormone treatment
which had led to irreversible changes to their bodies, including the
growth of female breasts that could now only be removed through
surgery. Mr Blake said the health authority was under a misapprehension
about the nature of "gender identity disorder", more commonly known as
transsexualism. Health chiefs had mistakenly concluded that sex change
treatment, including surgery, had no proven health benefits when
undisputed evidence showed it was highly successful. Medical experts in
the US, Canada, the UK and elsewhere in Europe reported percentage
success rates "in the higher 80s and 90s", and it could not therefore
be described as ineffective. Whilst agreeing that gender identity
disorder is an illness, Mr Gerard Clarke, for the health authority,
will argue in a hearing expected to last two to three days, that
refusal to fund was neither irrational nor perverse. He will contend
the authority acted within its powers and the court should be slow to
intervene in cases when clinical judgments were made about allocating
scarce healthcare resources. Although the health authority said
operations would be allowed if overriding clinical need could be shown,
in practice it was operating an unlawful blanket policy. The policy was
also contrary to the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act and the EU equal
treatment directive.
One of the authority's definitions of "overriding clinical need" which
could lead to funding was that a patient was suicidal, said Mr Blake.
But, according to expert opinion, a person suffering from psychotic
illness, in addition to being transsexual, was unlikely to be a
suitable candidate for surgery. Mr Blake said the vast majority of
health authorities in England and Wales were now prepared to fund this
treatment and "treatment by postcode" had been recognised as
undesirable. Other European countries, including France and Germany,
also provided funding. The health authority had wrongly compared sex
change treatment to treatment designed to improve self-image, beauty or
lifestyle, such as breast enlargement, weight loss or tattoo removal,
or operations to improve the size or shape of a person's nose. "These
simply cannot compare with the psychiatric illness and disorder caused
by gender identity disorder. This is just not cosmetic surgery to make
yourself look more attractive," he said. There had been a "strong
response" from medical experts, who found those arguments "deeply
offensive to their lifelong work and expertise in this difficult area".
He added: "This is a disease, an illness, a serious disorder recognised
internationally and with an appropriate form of treatment."
Female Flies Turn Macho
Contributed by Rose Prescott
via New Scientist
November 10,1998
Gender-bending experiments on fruit flies suggest that sexual orientation
is irreversibly "hard wired" into the brain at the point when maggots turn
into flies. Researchers say the findings could help to tease out new
insights into the genetic and biochemical roots of sexual behavior.
The team leader, Rolf Noethiger from the University of Zurich, stresses
that sexuality in people is very unlikely to be as fixed as in fruit
flies. "The same thing might happen in humans, but not with the same
rigidity," he says. "Human sexual behavior is clearly much more complex."
Noethiger was working with postgraduate student Ben Arthur and others on
fruit flies with a mutation in a gene called _transformer_. Normally the
gene confers the equivalent of femininity on the fruit fly. The mutation
cancels out development of female sexual behavior. Through further
genetic tinkering, the researchers enabled the mutant flies to develop
their usual female anatomy. "These pseudo-female flies behave as if they
had male brains, even though they look and smell like females and have
female genitalia," says Noethiger.
This creates bizarre situations where "macho" females try in vain to mate
with other females, while being pursued by normal males. Males with the
same mutation as these females behave as normal, because the gene is
switched off in males anyway.
Noethiger and his colleagues have now shown that _transformer_ will only
affect the fly at one critical stage of its development. If the gene is
not activated until later, male behavior remains imprinted in the brain.
The researchers equipped mutant flies with a working copy of the
_transformer_ gene, which they tethered to a genetic switch. This allowed
them to activate the gene at will by suddenly raising the temperature.
The team found that _transformer_ only restored femininity to mutant
females if activated within a critical 30-hour period during development,
just at the point where the larval maggot metamorphoses into a fly. If
_transformer_ was switched on earlier or later, the mutant flies remained
macho.
But with correct timing, female mutants were "refeminised" and male
mutants adopted female sexual behavior. In other words, genetic
programming of sexual behavior comes in parallel with anatomical
development of sexual organs during metamorphosis (_Current Biology_, vol
8, p 1187).
Noethiger plans to look for anatomical and biochemical differences in the
brains of flies that can be traced to the activity of _transformer_. He
stresses that this mechanism may not be common to many animals. Hs team
has not yet found an equivalent gene in house flies. And although a gene
called _transformer-2_ which is required for the _transformer_ gene to
work also exists in humans, its function is unconnected with sexual
development.
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