Gay, lesbian groups call for public restroom equity in Taipei
Gay and lesbian student activists yesterday called on universities to alter public toilet designations to accommodate gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) students’ needs.
“Because public toilets at schools are designated as either men’s rooms or women’s rooms, it creates a lot of trouble for GLBT students who may not always look the way mainstream opinion would expect someone of their gender to look,” Tsai Pi-jung (蔡璧嶸), president of National Chengchi University’s (NCCU) Gay Student Club, told a press conference in Taipei.
“We suggest that schools change the designation on public restrooms from marking the gender to marking whether it has toilets or urinals or both inside,” he said.
Tsai then showed two restroom signs he had made. On one, the shape of a toilet is drawn to indicate that “there are only toilets inside,” and the other has a shape of a toilet and the shape of a urinal drawn to indicate that “both toilets and urinals are inside.”
“This way, public toilets would be designated by ‘function’ instead of ‘gender,’” he said.
NCCU’s Lesbian Student Club president has short hair and dresses in jeans and a T-shirt. People sometimes mistake her for a man, she said.
Wishing only to be known as “Strawberry,” she told the press conference that women sometimes asked her what she was doing in the women’s restroom.
“Whenever that happens, I have to explain that I am a woman. Then I’m asked why I dress like a man,” Strawberry said. “Why do I have to go through all this questioning when I just want to use the bathroom?”
A student from Shih Hsin University Graduate School of Journalism who wished to be known only as “Hsiao Mo (小莫),” is a man who likes to dress in what would be considered women’s clothing. He usually encounters the same problem. See Gay, lesbian groups call for public restroom equity Taipei Times
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Transgender woman wins birth certificate ruling
A 67-year-old Los Angeles native, now living in Kansas, won a state appeals court ruling in San Francisco on Friday that makes it easier for California-born transgender people to change their birth certificate, a document that can be critical in a security-conscious age.
Gigi Marie Somers was born male but has lived most of her life as a woman, and underwent sex-change surgery in 2005. She got a driver’s license with her new name and gender and sought a new birth certificate, but learned that Kansas was one of the few states that will not change a resident’s sex designation on a birth certificate.
Somers then turned to a California court, only to discover that a 1977 state law requires an application for a sex change on a new birth certificate to be filed in the county where the applicant now lives.
But Friday, the First District Court of Appeal said the law violates the rights of someone like Somers to be treated the same as a transgender person who still lives in California.
Any law that penalizes someone for moving to another state restricts the constitutional right to travel and can be justified only if it meets an urgent government need, which doesn’t exist in this case, Justice James Marchiano said in the 3-0 ruling.
For anyone in a similar situation, the case is important because of “the emphasis placed on identity documents in our post-9/11 world,” said attorney Matt Wood of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which represented Somers.
He said the federal government and employers are increasingly requiring birth certificates or passports to establish the identity of applicants for various programs and jobs.
Legislation that would have the same effect as the court ruling, AB1185 by Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), was introduced in February but hasn’t passed yet, Wood said.
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Gay, married and outlawed
The questions and answers volleyed back and forth last week during the California Supreme Court’s televised proceedings on Prop 8, the state’s recently enacted ban against gay marriage.
And in a dark classroom at Chapman University, watching it all with a focused intensity, was law student Tiffany Chang.
In Chang’s view, the discussion was riveting. Did Prop. 8 simply “take away the label of marriage,” as one justice put it? Chang has heard all of the arguments, including those that say that same sex couples enjoy domestic partnership rights in California, so why insist on the designation of “marriage.”
You could say there was twice as much at stake for Chang, who tracks the legal debate for reasons both scholarly and personal.
Two years ago, in front of friends and family in Long Beach, Chang and her partner Lindsey Etheridge exchanged marriage vows in an unofficial, non-legally binding ceremony. Then, exactly a year later, on July 14, 2008, during the short window when same-sex marriages were legal here in California, Chang and Etheridge filed for “official marriage paperwork.” Then they married in a legal ceremony.
Chang says the event was life changing.
“We were in the clerk’s office and there were people there we don’t know, but they represented the government, validating our relationship,” says Chang, 28. “After it was all done, that sense of security, it was tenfold at least.
“I never could have known what that felt like, to truly be equal in our society,” she adds. “I don’t think you know what that feels like until you’ve got it.”
Chang was part of a “friend of the court” brief filed with the state’s Supreme Court in support of those who have legally challenged Prop. 8. And, in her declaration, she elaborated that on the day “I walked out with my head held higher than I thought was even possible.”
The brief was drafted by attorneys Katherine Baird Darmer and Ronald Steiner, who are also law professors at Chapman, and includes declarations from other people connected to Chapman, as well as from members of the Orange County Equality Coalition, a community group that says it educates and advocates for marriage equality in California.
For Chang, Prop. 8 isn’t just a matter of nomenclature; it’s a matter of denying a minority group the rights afforded to all others. Since the law passed in November, Chang has been speaking out in public. She says she’s come to realize that until a person is treated like a second-class citizen it’s difficult for them to understand what it’s like to be on the other side.
See
Gay, married and outlawed
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Lowery’s Preaching, Not Warren’s, Will Illuminate Inaugural Day The Nation.
No one should be surprised that President-elect Barack Obama would choose self-promoting Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural. Warren has been hustling for years to make himself the “new Billy Graham” — seeking to fill the vacating role of spiritual adviser to presidents, be they born-again Republicans or born-right-the-first-time Democrats.
Obama, always on the watch for ways to broaden his base of support, has been developing a relationship with Warren for many years, as he has with other fundamentalist preachers who try to put a smile on their intolerance.
Back in December 2006, when he was merely a senator with unannounced presidential ambitions, Obama delivered a smart, sensitive address at Warren’s “2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the Church,” a high-profile event on the pastor’s Saddleback Church campus in Lake Forest, Calif.
Twenty months later, as the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee, Obama went back to Saddleback for an unfortunate joint appearance with Republican John McCain — the last major misstep of the senator’s bid for the nation’s top job.
Past is prologue, and Obama’s dalliances with Warren, for better or worse, always pointed to the placement of this particular pastor on the inaugural stage.
What will be significant about Warren’s remarks, however, is that they will be so insignificant.
Warren’s invocation will be forgotten five minutes after it is finished.
Indeed, the only “news” that will come from his appearance at the inaugural is the controversy surrounding it — and the protests that controversy may spark.
Far more significant, and encouraging, than his off-putting selection of Warren to deliver the invocation is Obama’s choice of a genuine spiritual progressive to deliver the benediction.
It is the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery who will present the far more uplifting and meaningful religious message on Inauguration Day. And in his appealing selection of the 87-year-old Lowery, Obama has made a choice that is far more adventurous — even, dare we say, radical — than his unappealing designation of Warren.
Lowery was the longtime president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he co-founded in 1957, before Obama was born, with the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. An essential player in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Lowery was sent by King to deliver the demands of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and it was to Lowery that Wallace apologized three decades later.
Long after King and most of the other founding fathers of the civil rights movement had been buried, Lowery carried on the struggle. He led the 1982 drive to extend the federal Voting Rights Act. In 2005, when it came time to renew the act once more, Lowery famously cornered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a memorial service for Rosa Parks to ask for maintaining voting rights protections. Why did Lowery choose so somber a setting to make his appeal to the most prominent African-American member of President Bush’s Cabinet? “Because I knew she could not move,” he explained.
See Lowery’s Preaching, Not Warren’s, Will Illuminate Inaugural Day The Nation.
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Watchdog: Recog-nize the intersexed
Gender designation sought for use on official documents such as driver’s licenses, passports.
Tags: Designation, Passports, WatchdogWatchdog: Recog-nize the intersexed
Gender designation sought for use on official documents such as driver’s licenses, passports.
Tags: Designation, Passports, Watchdog
