Students take part in candlelight vigil (Photo by Todd Heywood)

About 250 people showed up and listened as speakers shared their experiences with bullying and encouraged each other to stand up for others.

Dr. Lee June, vice president of student affairs and services, addressed the crowd by discussing the suicide of an 18-year-old Rutger’s University student. The student had been secretly recorded in intimate moments with his same sex partner. His room mate and another student set up a camera in the dorm room, and invited others to watch. The student jumped off the George Washington Bridge as a result of the public outing.

“We need to do things to make sure what happened there doesn’t happen here, or anywhere else, again,” June told the crowd.

Sarah Midzackowski, chaplain for Canterbury MSU, an Episcopal church group on the campus, also spoke.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that so many of you have experienced spiritual harm at the hands of religious leaders,” she said. “More than anything else, I want you to know you are loved.”

Nick Pfost, chair of the MSU Alliance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Students, and the first openly gay men to be elected to an MSU homecoming court, also spoke to the crowd. His opening remarks brought laughter when, after introducing himself and his various positions on campus he quipped, “I am not being stalked by the Attorney General.”

“What strikes me the most is not the bullying that happens on the campus — people throwing garbage and such, that’s horrible — but the bullying in the home,” Pfost said. He recounted the terror of meeting the mother of his male partner. The mother was unaware of her son’s sexuality.

Ultimately, Pfost sees hope in the future.

“I hope that when we’re parents that we’ll be better parents than the people causing these problems today,” Pfost said.

The problem of bullying-related suicide, or bullycide, is not something happening in other states, says anti-bullying activist Kevin Epling of East Lansing. Epling’s son, Matt, committed suicide as a result of bullying and legislation pending in the state Senate bears his son’s name.

But Matt is not alone in having taken his life. Epling says at least seven Michigan youth have committed suicide as a result of bullying: Tempest Smith, 1988-2001; Matt Epling, 1988-2002; Chrystal Eaton, 1988-2003; Kristina Calco, 1989-2005; Austin Murphy, 1991-2007; Alex Harriso,n 1993-2009; and Kimberly Linczeski, 1998-2010.

State lawmakers have been struggling to pass legislation to address bullying since 2000.

“When Matt’s Law failed to pass in 2008 the only real reason I heard was that Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-DeWitt) did not have time to read it, although it had been in committee for almost a year and very little had been changed in two years. Both Democratic and Republican leaders talked with him at the time and he refused to let it be read,” Epling said of the legislation. “I have not heard anything this session from his office. We will be reaching out to his office yet again. We also have some Senators (and outside entities) falsely claiming the bill provides special protections. There is nothing in the bill that affords that, yet it is still talked about that way. Which in a way harms every child in our schools because it has delayed passage.”

Epling is referring to comments made by the American Family Association of Michigan’s Gary Glenn and other national leaders. They say the anti-bullying legislation is way to push a “homosexual agenda.”

“They’re using their own bigotry and bias to get in the way of common sense reforms,” says Dee Hurlbert, assistant director of the MSU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center. “There is no other group for which it is open season in school like LGBT youth. I can see no motive for [the opposition to anti-bullying laws] other than tacit approval of bullying in schools.”

“I think anti-bullying efforts are important for those being bullied and those who bully,” says Denise Maybanks, senior associate vice president for student affairs at MSU. “Legislation or not, it’s essential we address those issues.”

(Creative Commons photo by fadogirl via Flickr)

The new TV ad funded by opponents of Kalamazoo’s proposed anti-discrimination ordinance isn’t all that new. But until next week’s vote, its ability to sway votes in this southwest Michigan city remains a mystery.

The ad, nearly identical to an ad used by opponents of a similar measure on the ballot in Gainesville, Fla., earlier this year, warns viewers that the anti-discrimination ordinance on the ballot in Kalamazoo — which includes protections for gay and transgender people — would allow men to prey on young girls in public bathrooms.

Calls to the main group opposing Ordinance 1856 to explain the ad were not returned this week.

The ad serves once again to highlight the starkly different way both sides in this fight characterize the proposed ordinance — supporters saying it promotes basic fairness and equality, opponents saying it opens the bathroom and locker-room door to “cross-dressing men.”

That divide shows no sign of receding. Nor does the relentless focus on gender identity from the opponents of the ordinance. Meanwhile, very few open transgender men or women have been quoted in traditional media outlets covering the campaign in Kalamazoo.

Michigan Messenger sought out a couple transgender voices from Michigan as the Kalamazoo campaign winds to a close. (Another local transgender voice was featured in this story from earlier in the week.)

“Transgender issues are the hot button issues in this campaign,” Amy Hunter, a transgender woman and Kalamazoo resident, confirmed in a recent interview.

No official number of transgender people in Kalamazoo exists, but Hunter said the number is “at least” in the dozens.

Hunter, 50, an accomplished lighting designer and theater director, says she’s been living as a woman since the morning of Oct. 5, 2006. “When I left to go to work that day, I left the house that day as Amy, and I never ever appeared again in public or private as a male.”

A mustache-less Hunter put on some new clothes and a little makeup, and prepared for an anxious beginning:

That day that I left the house I was fully aware that it could go very badly or it could go OK. I adopted an attitude of, I don’t need to apologize myself anymore. I want to be an effective person. And I know, I absolutely know in my soul, that the only way that’s going to happen is if I live authentically.

Since then, Hunter said she’s experienced no hassles living and working in Kalamazoo, a city she said “has always had a tendency to be a very progressive community.”

Last year, after the initial drafts of the ordinance were being written, Hunter was moved to get involved.

“It came to my attention that the ordinance had been drafted without a transgendered person on the committee,” she said. Hunter was determined to change that, and would later become director of operations for One Kalamazoo, the group supporting Ordinance 1856. She recently resigned, but she said that wasn’t due to any problem with the campaign.

“I’m not a spring chicken anymore,” she laughed. “Campaigning is a young woman’s job.”

Rachel Crandall, a native of Southfield, is the executive director of Transgender Michigan. She’s been publicly advocating for anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity for at least a decade, she said.

Asked for her reaction to the new TV ad by Kalamazoo Citizens Voting No on Special Rights Discrimination, the group opposing Ordinance 1856, Crandall doesn’t refer to its content.

“My reaction is I wish they could get to know me. Most people who are so anti, are people who really don’t know a trans person,” she said.

Crandall, 49, says she’s determined to educate people about transgendered people — transgendered women in particular.

“These are not just men who wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I’ll wear a dress today,” she said. “These are people, a lot of them who really have been transgendered at least inside for most of their lives, and that’s what we’re trying to educate people about the difference.”

Her personal story, she adds, is similar.

“I’ve always know what I was, and it just began pounding on me from the inside, that I really couldn’t lie about it anymore,” she said. “For so much of my life, I tried to run away from it.”

Both Hunter and Crandall say that the social gains that gays and lesbians have achieved as more and more have become open about their sexual orientation, are just around the corner for the transgender community.

“If you know me, you can’t demonize me,” Hunter said. “It’s impossible.”

Crandall, for her part, lamented what she thinks is the probability that many opponents to Ordinance 1856 have never met a transgendered man or woman. “I really wish that people would just try to go out of their way to actually meet someone,” she said. “But isn’t that what prejudice is all about? Most of the people that people are prejudiced about are people they really don’t know.”

(Creative Commons photo by celesteh via Flickr)

Even though the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn’t bother to keep count of those who say they’ve been fired because they’re transgendered, Southfield attorney Denise Brogan-Kator knows the number is greater than zero.

“In my case, I’ve been fired more than once for my gender identity,” she said matter-of-factly in a recent interview. Recalling the final encounter at a Michigan law firm in the late 1990s, Brogan-Kator recites the exchange with her then-boss as if it were yesterday.

“I said I was transitioning,” she said, “and I was told I should do that somewhere else.”

While Kalamazoo’s proposed Ordinance 1856 would bar discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, it’s the second category that has generated the most controversy.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines “transgender” in the following way:

of, relating to, or being a person… who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that differs from the one which corresponds to the person’s sex at birth.

Denise Brogan-Kator

“Transgender identity is still a fairly new concept in most people’s minds,” Brogan-Kator, the president and board chair of the Triangle Foundation, a Detroit-based LGBT organization, said. “The fact that we’ve been around since the dawn of time seems to be irrelevant. The whole transgender movement is only a few years old.”

Perhaps because the “T” in GLBT remains the acronym’s least understood category, efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations — as Kalamazoo’s proposed ordinance would do — have highlighted the confusion and in turn, have been met with stiff opposition.

If fact, equating transgendered women with bathroom perverts has become increasingly routine.

Last year, after the city council in Gainesville, Fla., enacted a nearly identical anti-discrimination charter amendment to the proposed ordinance in Kalamazoo, opponents successfully petitioned a public vote — and they kept their message to voters simple.

“Keep men out of women’s bathrooms” became the semi-official opposition mantra. A memorable TV ad featured a young girl stepping off a merry-go-round and walking into a women’s restroom. After the door closed, a bearded man in sunglasses and a baseball cap entered ominously behind her. Then a question is posed: “Is that what you want in Gainesville?”

Voters in Gainesville ultimately backed the anti-discrimination charter amendment this past March.

Over the last several weeks in Kalamazoo, campaign mailings and door hangers have revived the same molesters-will-prey-on-women-in-the-bathroom approach from Gainesville – even utilizing some of the identical graphics.

Mara Kiesling

Mara Kiesling, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Transgender Equality, is well aware of the tactic.

“I understand there are some people who are uncomfortable. But you know what? They’re just uncomfortable,” she told Michigan Messenger. “That’s what civil rights are about — minorities who are not allowed to have the same lives as the majority because of our cultural biases. Most of these people are still uncomfortable with straight men being in a restroom with gay men. And there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable about being in restroom with people of different races,” she said.

None of that, Keisling argued, is a good reason to indulge discrimination. “Trans people are at the vanguard of civil rights right now,” she added.

Keisling also noted that anti-discrimination protections for transgendered men and women have been on the books in Minneapolis since the 1970s — without a single bathroom incident.

“It’s not that it doesn’t happen much, it doesn’t happen,” she said. “Yet still, Americans are worried about what they see as their personal private space and they don’t want somebody they see as the other in there. And you know what? Right now, trans people are still a little bit of the other and so we need some education to overcome that.”

Beyond more education, Brogan-Kator, managing attorney for the Rainbow Law Center, cited legal protections as a baseline indicator of a community’s inclusiveness.

“It’s important from a perspective of feeling like you belong,” she said. Moreover, Brogan-Kator added, enacting basic anti-discrimination protections is key to proving bias even when perpetrators don’t fess up to discriminatory hiring practices. She sketches out an example:

It’s very rare that someone won’t hire you because you’re black, for instance. They may never say that. But what happens is that over time you learn what the various indicators are that suggest there’s a bias at play and you find evidence. That’s part of what lawyers do through the discovery process. You find evidence that the reason given for the hiring or firing decision was just made up.

Keisling said she recently hosted a “virtual house party” for One Kalamazoo, the campaign organization pushing for passage of Ordinance 1856, focusing on messaging. She acknowledged that transgender people are a small subset of the LGBT community, and that beyond a need for more exposure there’s an even more basic need.

“We still don’t have oodles of out, prominent trans people. President Obama still hasn’t appointed a transgender person to a high-level job,” she said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, we have a hell of a lot of transgender people who need to work.”

For good measure, Keisling ticks off a few more needs.

“People need a chance and trans people need a chance. And we also need to shop and we need to go to restaurants,” she said with a laugh. “All the Kalamazoo law does is give us the same chance.”

Robinson claims the Twitter folks allowed an unknown individual to create an account using her name and the identification of WomanWithAPenis. She told the Idaho Fox affiliate that her complaints to Twitter went unanswered. But the account has since been disabled by Twitter officials. Robinson’s original Twitter account remains active.

Robinson, who is from Michigan and was born Charles Stalens Jr., is an also-ran politician. She ran for the State House 68th District in 2003 and the State Senate 23rd District in 2006. Both seats represent portions of Ingham County and Lansing. She also ran for Mayor of Lansing in 2003. Robinson sued the state alleging that a law forcing her to identify her previous name was unfair and fed into discrimination against transgender people.

According to a blogspot post by Robinson she left Michigan in Feb. 2008 after her house was repossessed. She moved to Seattle, then to Nampa, ID.

“We took a look at our product line and what other insurers were covering in other markets,” she said in a phone interview late Tuesday night. “Most don’t cover this type of surgery. So we are aligned our products.”

Michigan Messenger reported Tuesday that BCBS of Michigan had received permission from state regulators to change insurance coverage offerings, and elimination of gender reassignment surgery was one of those approved changes.

Stojic said the insurer, which is mandated by state law to offer coverage to those other insurers will not cover, reduced the cap for maternity coverage in the new alignment as well. The changes impact only single payer plans.

Stojic said the company posted a $133 million loss in the single payer plans last year, but could not give an estimate of how much of that was a result of gender reassignment surgery.

The decision, approved in Feb. has been decried by a coalition of groups working for gender equality, and state regulators called the decision “unfortunate.” Stojic was not particularly warm to the concerns expressed, however.

“We certainly understand that people who are particularly interested in [transgender health] may not be happy with [coverage elimination],” she said. “We have to compete in the market.”

“We are concerned that BCBSM underestimates the profound impact of these medically necessary procedures,” said André Wilson of MCGE. “Gender reassignment surgeries can be a critical part of the transition process and these new exclusions will place many transgender individuals and their families at real risk.”

The change was approved in Feb. says Jason Moon, a spokesman for the Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation. He called the change “unfortunate,” but noted the law did not define gender reassignment surgery as a necessary medical care area. Moon said such areas were things like breast cancer and diabetes.

Gender reassignment surgery is often used to treat gender dysphoria, the medical diagnosis given to transgender persons. The surgery is considered medically necessary by advocates and the American Medical Association.

Julie Nemecek, co-director of Michigan Equality, said the state’s comment about the change being “unfortunate,” gave her hope the policy might change again.

“It gives me a lot of encouragement they recognize how bad a decision it was on their part,” said Nemecek.

Gender reassignment surgery can cost $20,000 over a two year time period.

The State Department’s spokesperson Robert Wood issued this statement:

The United States supports the UN Statement on “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity,” and is pleased to join the other 66 UN member states who have declared their support of this Statement that condemns human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity wherever they occur.
The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world. As such, we join with the other supporters of this Statement and we will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora.

Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT political group based in Washington D.C. applauds the reversal.

In a press release, HRC President Joe Solomonese said:

“This is a welcome step forward as it signals to the world that, after years of a hostile administration, the United States recognizes the humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people at home and abroad. (snip) We applaud the Obama administration for joining the other 66 member nations that have officially recognized that basic human rights include the equality of LGBT people.”

The U.S. joins 60 other countries in signing the statement which calls for an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Most of the supporting nations are western industralized nations.

It’s now come to light that Johnson was murdered on Nov. 9. From the Eyewitness News in Memphis:

Memphis police say it happened just before midnight at Hollywood near Staten Avenue, Sunday, November 9, 2008.

According to detectives, when officers arrived at the scene, they found the body lying in the street. Police say a witness heard gunfire and then saw three people running away from the scene. Investigators do not have any suspects at this time.

Johnson’s lawyer confirmed her identity with the news station. Johnson was suing the city for $1.3 million based on her assault while in custody in February of this year.

Well-known African American and LGBT blogger Pam Spaulding has a statement at her blog from the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition, which reports Johnson’s death and mourns her passing, while asking for justice for violent crimes against transgender victims. The report can be read here.

While the conservative blogs and news outlets were praising former Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, many in the LGBT community remembered the hatred and bigotry he ushered in during his 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. The video above was created by AIDS activists when they covered Helms’ home with a giant condom to protest his advocacy against funding HIV/AIDS education and research. The protest happened in 1991.

By now, everyone has probably read about Helms’ blocking of gay rights measures and stopping HIV prevention and research funding. Some may even know that toward the end of his 86 years, the senator took to working on HIV/AIDS — in Africa, saying he didn’t care about the disease in America because it was a sodomite disease. And some may even recall his nasty re-election bid against Harvey Gantt, where Helms played out the race card in one of the most disgusting political advertisements in recent political history.

Continued -But Michelangelo Signorille adds one last bitter note to the goodbyes for the good senator by reminding us that the man behind his bigoted campaigns, and a man who remains a Republican operative, is also a gay man. The man’s name is Arthur Finkelstein and he was outed byBoston Magazine, and a few years ago he and his partner quietly got married in Massachusetts.

It goes to show, behind every bigot is a closet case.

Far right anti-gay leaders making McCain beg for votes?

The man behind Ohio’s anti-gay marriage amendment, Phil Burress, is doing a little political flip-flopping. After supporting former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s bid for the Republican nomination for president, Burress told The Los Angeles Times that while he might support the ultimate winner of the Republican primary by casting a vote for him, he was unlikely to support him.

Burress, who led the successful campaign for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage, said he would vote for McCain, largely because he said an Obama victory would lead to new liberal Supreme Court justices and more emphasis on abortion rights. And he suspects that McCain’s coolness toward conservatives could be a calculated gamble to win centrists. But he will not work directly for McCain, and he suspects that many conservatives will stay home on election day. “They think we have no place to go [other than the Republican Party], and in some respects, that’s true,” Burress said. “But it’s going to take a whole lot more than that for him to win.”

But how times they are a-changin’. That was from June 9. Just last week, The Los Angeles Times reported after a heart-to-heart meeting with McCain, Burress was now on board. McCain indicated that he would take seriously their requests that he choose an anti-abortion running mate and that he would talk more openly about his opposition to gay marriage — a pledge he carried out later in the day by endorsing a ballot measure in California to ban gay marriage.

“It was obvious there were a lot of changed hearts in the room,” said Phil Burress, who led Ohio’s anti-gay-marriage ballot measure in 2004. “We realized that he’s with us on the majority of the issues we care about.”

Even with Jesse Helms dead, the LGBT community is still good for scaring up the GOP Christianity hijackers. As a side note, the Times story also noted Burress was pushing hard for the Huckster to be McCain’s choice for veep.

Social Security for gay partners? No. For children of same-sex relationships? Yes.

In a bizarre ruling by the Social Security Administration (SSA), children of same-sex couples are now eligible for survivor benefits. The SSA continues to deny survivor benefits for the adults in the couple. To explain how this looks in reality, let’s create a lesbian couple — we call them Linda and Sue. Sue enters the relationship with biological children from another relationship, but Linda doesn’t adopt the children as her own. Linda dies suddenly. Now Sue’s children are eligible to collect Linda’s survivor benefits. But Sue is left in the cold.

It’s a twisted logic, but it is a step toward recognizing same-sex couples and providing them with the same survivor benefits that are automatically bestowed upon married couples.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that last year the Social Security Administration sent a formal request to the Justice Department to clarify if the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevented the distribution of benefits to children of same-sex couples. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) deputy, Steven A. Engel, wrote in the opinion that the Defense of Marriage Act has no bearing on Social Security benefits for children.

The OLC’s deputy, Steven A. Engel, wrote in the opinion that the Defense of Marriage Act has no bearing on Social Security benefits for children. “Although DOMA limits the definition of ‘marriage’ and ‘spouse’ for purposes of federal law, the Social Security Act does not condition eligibility for [child insurance benefits] on the existence of a marriage or on the federal rights of a spouse in the circumstances of this case.”

How many days before this one gets a new bill rushed through Congress to stop providing this benefit to children?

Transgender booted from gay dating Web site

Boston-area((hyphenated)) single Nick Teich created an account on the social networking site Bisexual Dating Now. In his profile, he identified himself as a female-to-male transgender and within a few hours was getting responses. But an undisclosed technical problem with the site led Teich to call for assistance. That’s when things went surreal.

Teich’s profile was deleted because the company said it did not have any online forum for transgenders and because Teich had signed into the network as a lesbian on the lesbian network. Customer service representative Kiar Dupuis said all the sites are linked, and once a person signs up in one area, gay male, lesbian or bisexual, they are tracked from that profile. Men, Dupuis said, were never allowed to join the lesbian site.

Fromthe Boston gay newspaper Bay Windows, here is the company’s take on the issue:

BisexualDatingNow.com is owned by the Seattle-based company TangoWire, which owns a network of personals sites catering to a range of interests, from the LGB community to different racial and ethnic communities to motorcycle enthusiasts. An FAQ section of the BisexualDatingNow.com site describes TangoWire as a gay-owned and -operated company: “TangoWire was founded by, is directed by, and is run by gay personnel. We don’t discriminate against our straight co-workers — they’re cool people, too, and just as committed to your great experience on our site.”

Prior to transitioning from female to male, Teich had joined one of TangoWire’s lesbian sites but hadn’t been an active user. When he registered with BisexualDatingNow.com, he assumed it was a completely new site but, in fact, the profiles for both sites are linked to one massive database, meaning that someone on one of the bisexual sites could view the profile of a member of one of the lesbian sites. One of Dupuis’ e-mails to Teich accused him of trying to force his way onto the lesbian site.

“We do not have a site appropriate for transgenders. You joined our lesbian site, which is not your sexual preference. You then listed yourself as a bisexual man. This is absolutely a violation of our community rules because we do not allow any man on a lesbian site,” wrote Dupuis. “You are NOT a lesbian therefore you cannot and will not be a part of our lesbian community.”

Female-to-male transman gives birth to live baby

Nope, this is not a headline from The National Enquirer, this is the real deal. Thomase Beattie who made international news when he announced he was pregnant, gave birth to a healthy baby girl, The Advocate, a national gay magazine is reporting.

Beattie ended up a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show, where he said, “I feel it’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have the right to have a biological child.”

No word yet on whether The American Family Association will launch a boycott of the hospital where Beattie’s child was born.

Unfortunately, not all categories of self-identification have received the same level of acceptance in the media.

In the last three weeks, Michigan has seen three sizable errors in the mainstream media in their coverage of transgender issues.

The first occurred in Detroit when police found the body of a person they identified as a “man in women’s clothing.” This identification was blared out on local television and radio. Michigan Messenger ran a piece citing Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, in which she said Detroit police were mishandling the murder. Keisling specifically discussed how inappropriate police were in referring to the victim as a “man in women’s clothing.”

The second and third occurred late last week, one right on top of the other.

Continued -The second one was a Saginaw News piece about Dr. Julie Nemecek’s visit to a Saginaw church. Nemecek made headlines, including in the Wall Street Journal, when she announced she was transgender and facing firing from her job at the conservative Christian Spring Arbor University, located 20 miles southwest of Jackson,Mich.

Nemecek, who had been hired as John Nemecek, is an ordained Baptist minister who has been diagnosed with gender identity disorder, and one of the prescriptions from doctors was for her to live out her female life. When she told Spring Arbor University, she said the school’s president was supportive, but shortly thereafter she was removed from many of her assignments, and she was asked to sign a new contract that barred her from teaching classes on campus or from showing up on campus wearing women’s clothing or accessories. She was also banned from identifying herself as a Spring Arbor University employee.

In late 2006, the university took action to fire her because it claimed she had violated the prohibition of identifying herself as an employee by wearing a Spring Arbor University T-shirt while in a local grocery store. She filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the university. In February 2007 she changed her legal name from John to Julie, and the university dismissed her from all responsibilities. Spring Arbor University and Nemecek met in arbitration shortly thereafter and settled for an undisclosed amount of money.

In the Saginaw News article, staff writer Justin Engel referred to Julie as a “cross-dressing transgender,” and that was mirrored in the article’s headline. Had the reporter taken a moment to visit the AP Stylebook Supplement — the stylebook is the most-used manual for journalists — created and provided for at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Web site, he would have found the following definitions:

transgender (adj.): An umbrella term that refers to people whose biological and gender identity or expression may not be the same. This can include preoperative, postoperative or nonoperative transsexuals, female and male cross-dressers, drag queens or kings, female or male impersonators, and intersex individuals. If an individual prefers to be called transsexual, etc., use that term. When writing about a transgender person, use the name and personal pronouns that are consistent with the way the individual lives publicly.

cross-dresser: Preferred term for person who wears clothing most often associated with members of the opposite sex. Not necessarily connected to sexual orientation. See transvestite.

Transvestite: Avoid. The term has developed a negative connotation and is now seen as crude and old-fashioned, akin to “colored.” See cross-dresser.

And from the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Reference Guide:

Cross-Dressing
To occasionally wear clothes traditionally associated with people of the other sex. Cross-dressers are usually comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth and do not wish to change it. “Cross-dresser” should NOT be used to describe someone who has transitioned to live full-time as the other sex, or who intends to do so in the future. Cross-dressing is a form of gender expression and is not necessarily tied to erotic activity. Cross-dressing is not indicative of sexual orientation.

In short, calling Nemecek a cross-dressing transgender was redundant at best, and misleading at worst. One who has spent time covering transgender issues could easily have read the article and the headline as “man who dresses as woman who dresses as a man,” which is confusing. It is also important to note that transgender is a broad term, but has come to mean a person who completely identifies as the opposite gender of their biological gender. Using a term like “cross-dresser” is a reference to a person who casually and occasionally wears clothing of the opposite gender.

In an e-mail on the subject, Nemecek said: “The whole transgender umbrella idea is a point of tension even within the trans community. Some of those at the cross-dressing end see transsexuals as getting all the attention and some of those at the transsexual end are not happy being lumped in with cross-dressers. The issues these people face (as well as those who are gender queer, intersexed, etc.) are different enough that the transgender umbrella becomes quite strained sometimes in trying to cover them.”

Hence, it is clear that cross-dressing, or casually wearing clothing of the opposite gender, is a very different label than is transgender, which is a label applied to a person who lives their life as the opposite gender of their biological birth. By categorizing someone as both, it confuses people. The job of a reporter is to inform, not confuse.

The third issue that happened this week was a story on radio station WHMI in Howell about the five-year anniversary of the death of Nikki Nicholas. Nikki, who was born Anthony, was found shot to death on farmhouse property in Green Oaks Township. The 19-year-old female impersonator had lived her life as a woman, but WHMI throughout its coverage of the story referred to her as “him” and always used the male name “Anthony.”

This is considered offensive, said Michelle Fox, a Detroit-based transgender activist. In an e-mail she wrote: “This article is very demeaning to her, her family and the trans community.”

Why, one might ask, is this offensive? First, remember that the NLGJA’s Stylebook Supplement specifically says, “When writing about a transgender person, use the name and personal pronouns that are consistent with the way the individual lives publicly.” Now Nikki lived her life as Nikki, not as Anthony. Secondly, imagine for a moment your name is Jack and you died. Following your death, the media continued to refer to you as Jill. Would this not bother your family? Would it not hurt your memory? It would be just as offensive to change your preferred gender identity as it is to change the lived identity of a transgender who was murdered.
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