How ID Laws Can Put Trans People In Danger

July 10, 2020

Since 2015, at least 85 trans women have been murdered across the country — most of them black trans women and gender non-conforming people. Savannah: It’s like, if I was searching for a place to move to like where do I go? Where would I be safe? Turns out a lot of these cases have something in common… [news clips: “She was a transgender woman police identified as a male when she was killed.” “In just the past 90 minutes, Jacksonville police have released that victim’s birth name.” “Who was identified initially as a man by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.” “JSO is referring to the victim as a black male in his 20s who appears to identify as a female Cheap London Escorts.” The way cops are investigating these crimes…could be delaying justice.

Transgender people are more likely to face violence and discrimination than the average U.S. resident. One of the reasons they’re often at risk is their IDs – a simple document that many might take for granted. When the gender marker on state-issued ID doesn’t match the outward appearance of a transgender person, it opens up a world of harassment, and sometimes violence. Savannah: When it comes to getting a job. You know this could be the best job ever. And then now all of a sudden they see my gender marker and now they’re treating me differently. They can be afraid to show their IDs while driving, at a bar, or to vote, for fear of someone finding out that they’re transgender. Savannah: The scary part is for me, being stopped by the police. You just never know who’s stopping you. You don’t know if these people are homophobic. You just don’t know. [Savannah at church: “Even in my unworthiness he calls me friend. Aren’t you glad this morning that God doesn’t look at your circumstance or look at your issues.” Singing: “You are everything to me.” According to a 2015 survey of transgender people, nearly a third of people with mismatched IDs reported being harassed, denied services or attacked.

They can also lose access to medical care, become homeless, or be forced into sex work. Savannah: A lot of times our trans women they’re resorting to things such as prostitution because society has made it so hard. Every girl may not be as feminine or look passable as we love to say in our community. What do you do when you’re hungry? What do you do when your rent is due and your lights are about to be cut off, but you can’t get work because you don’t fit into the norm. Because your friends? They’re in the same situation as you and your family wants nothing to do with you. So you walk the streets in unsafe environments just so that you can feed yourself.

The discrimination trans people face in life can continue after they die. In Jacksonville, during murder investigations, the police often identified victims by names they no longer used, instead of their preferred names. In the trans community — whether this happens in life or death — it’s called deadnaming. The police have also systematically denied the victim’s identities by incorrectly describing their gender. Savannah: If they were known as a woman and that’s who they lived their life as, they’re refusing to do that. In addition to the disrespect – deadnaming can slow down a murder investigation in its most critical hours. Savannah: You don’t get to choose what gender I am. Those people that knew me in the streets or wherever, they knew me as a woman. So you’re saying, oh a man. You’re misnaming me and giving my biological name, how do you expect to solve a case, if nobody knows that. What if I was murdered in a hotel and people saw a woman go in and then you’re saying a man, that’s not what they saw. That’s not that’s not who they are.

This is part of a national pattern. ProPublica contacted all law enforcement agencies in locations where trans people have been killed since 2015, and found that 87 percent of victims were deadnamed or misgendered by authorities. Many police departments cite an internal policy to go with the name and sex listed on a victim’s state ID. Savannah: I need my gender marker to reflect what it is. So that I can be respected. I feel like it’s a prison. It’s a prison and I have a release date. But I have no keys to get out of my cell. Savannah has recently started the process of legally changing the gender marker on her ID. But turns out, switching that tiny “M” or “F” can be incredibly hard. There are no federal policies to address gender marker changes on documents like driver’s licenses. So it’s left up to the states. Some are generally more trans-friendly than others. While others require a court order, an amended birth certificate, or proof of surgery. Trystlynn Barber: The laws are so convoluted across the United States, state to state.

And it does not make any sense. Supposed to be united right? Trystlynn Barber lives in Georgia and has been in the process of changing her ID. But it’s not been easy. Georgia law requires proof of gender reassignment surgery, which is a high barrier for most people. Trystlynn: The cost of gender reassignment surgery at the low end that I’ve seen in research in the United States is 15,000 dollars. The problem is getting health coverage to cover something like that. To be hit with a solid wall of not being able to move forward is heartbreaking. It can destroy people. But she later remembered a crucial detail. Trystlynn: I wasn’t born here. I was born in New York. The State of New York, with a less restrictive policy, required only a doctor’s note stating she was transitioning. They sent her a corrected birth certificate within a month – which she’s used to update most of her documents.

There it is. That’s a certified copy grey seal. With my name. My changed name and my correct sex. And I was half way back from the mailbox. When I open this up. I had other mail in my hands, everything else fell from my hands I fell to my knees. I started crying, in the middle of the grass right out here. I’m sorry. After thinking that I was not going to be able to ever get it done. Was the most amazing feeling. I’m sorry. As for Savannah…she’s working with a lawyer in Jacksonville to get her ID changed. Savannah: When that day comes for me when my gender marker is changed, it will be like the missing piece to my puzzle. It’s that important. She hopes it will keep her a little bit safer…but knows this problem is bigger than a letter on her ID. After we saw her, another trans woman was murdered in Florida, this time a few hours south of Jacksonville. The Sheriff’s Office described the victim as a man “wearing a wig” and “dressed as a female.” Another case of deadnaming and a murder that’s yet to be solved.

 

 

Transsexual Escorts

April 1, 2021

I met this really sexy woman. Well, at least I thought it was a woman, but it turned out to be a man. Normally I would date London escorts, but for one reason or another, I ended up going on a pub crawl with a couple of friends in Soho. That was when I met her. She was just as sexy and gorgeous as the London escorts that I date, and I really felt that she was a special lady. But, I did not have a clue that she was transexual. In other words, it was a man dressed as a woman, It was not until the 3rd date that I realised that she was a man in drag if you like. I know that it is not really the right thing to say at all, but she is a man. She is thinking about changing sex but she is not sure. What about me? Well, I am not sure how to handle the situation and I feel conflicted. Since I found that she is actually a he, I have been out on a couple of dates with London escorts. To be honest, my new friends feels just as much as a woman as my favourite girl at cheap escorts. Can you date transexual London escorts? Since I have met my new friend, I have been thinking about transsexuality a lot. I am sure that there are transexual London escorts and that you can date them. However, how do you manage a relationship with a transexual person? It can’t be easy. I feel so confused as I think that I am in love with my transexual friend. Finding guidance about this kind of relationship is not easy. As a matter if fact, I am not sure how many straight men could handle a transexual relationship. I am not sure that I should continue to date my transexual friend. It would be great to have a long term relationship with someone, but I am not sure that being in a transexual relationship is for me. I know what to expect when it comes to dating London escorts, but I am not sure what to expect from a relationship with a transexual man. How would my friends react to him? That is one of the things that I would like to find out more about. Am I in love? I find it easy to fall in love. Since I have been dating London escorts, I have fallen in love on numerous occasions. I am pretty sure that I am in love with my transexual friend. I do feel that I can kiss him, but something is stopping. If you have ever fallen in love with a transexual person, you will probably know exactly what I mean. It is difficult to know what to do. I have even been debating with myself if I am too hung up about sexuality. You would have thought after all of this time dating London escorts, I would be more open-minded. Perhaps I am open-minded, it is just a matter of taking the first step.

Photos On Pinterest?

December 7, 2020

I get really turned on when men take naked photos of me. Of course, I never tell any of my London escorts clients that I am into nude photography. Instead, I hook up with a bunch of guys outside of London escorts and let them take photos of me instead. I find it a real turn on. The problem is that I have ended up with lots of different sexy photos of me. At the moment, they are sitting on my lap top not doing anything. What should I do with my naked photos? Can I publish them on Pinterest? First of all, it is best not to keep your naked photos on your lap top? What do you do if the lap top goes? If you do have a lot of naked photos of you, it is best to store them on a memory stick or memory card. Make sure that the stick or card is not marked up with what is actually on the images. You are not the only girl at cheap London escorts who have got naked photos of them. Many cheap London escorts have interesting hobbies that are perhaps different from your average hobby. The answer is to that question about publishing your naked photos on Pinterest, is that you can’t do so. I know that like most other London escorts, you probably want to make some money out of your photos, but there are other ways of doing so. One of the best ways to make money from naked photos, is to sell them to websites that accept contributions from private individuals. Can you point out that you work for a London escorts agency? You can do but it is not strictly necessary to do so. Not all men get turned on by London escorts. How much money can you make? There are those London escorts who make a lot of money from their hobbies. One girl that we spoke to make a decent income from selling both her photos and her lingerie online. You can set up your own website very easily and showcase some of your work. It is best not to show you face. If you do want to show your face, you should try to disguise yourself as much as possible. A good idea is to wear a different color wig or heavy make-up. Getting recognized by friends and family is the last thing you want to happen. Photos of sexy women are used in many different ways. There are some companies out there that buy photos of sexy girls to turn them into wall paper and use them as screen savers. That is a great way to make money from your photos. Once you have established a working relationship with a Cheap London Escorts client, it can become an interesting sideline from London escorts. A great way to earn extra money when you are not escorting. And don’t worry, you are not the only escort in London that enjoys being photographed naked or in her lingerie.

Gender Identities

July 10, 2020

A Romaine and kale salad with avocado, cucumber, shishito peppers, and four kinds of cheese. Sprinkled in balsamic straight from Italy. Wow! In my day, salads only had two ingredients, a rock hard wedge of iceberg lettuce and a stinky old dried up tomato. Sorry, guys, I’m going to have to eat fast. Alex is stopping by in a few minutes to work on a robotics project. Alex, is that the girl with that weird dog or the boy with the hat with the wings that flap? No, Uncle Jay, this is Alex. Oh, OK. I remember. A very nice young, hmm. Come to think of it, well, is Alex a boy or a girl. Actually, Alex doesn’t define themselves as boy or girl. What else is there? Back in your day, most people understood the world in terms of just boys and girls. But now, we know gender is more complex than that. Wait. Aren’t we just talking about whether you’re born with a – or a – . When you’re born, your sex is assigned in a medical way.

But the sex listed on your birth certificate may not necessarily match your gender identity. Gender identity is a person’s inner experience of who they are in terms of gender. Their deep personal sense of being male, female, a blend of both, or neither. And while many people have a gender identity that’s the same as their assigned birth sex, a female or male, that’s not always the case because gender exists on a spectrum.

Like transgender, which means a person whose gender identity is not consistent with their assigned birth sex. Non-binary, which means a person whose identity doesn’t fall in the category of either male or female. And genderqueer or genderfluid, which means a person who does not identify themselves as having a specific gender at all. Does gender identity have to do with being straight or gay? Actually, no. Gender identity has to do with the way you feel about yourself. While sexual orientation is based on the way you feel toward others, the people you may or may not be attracted to. You know I really like Alex. And I can tell they’re a good friend to you. But I’m still pretty confused about all of this.

That’s OK. You don’t have to fully understand someone to respect them. To start, try not to make any assumptions about a person’s gender. And use the name and pronouns that they ask you to. Above all, be a friend or ally for people of all gender identities. That’s right, mom. Alex is here. Come on in. Hey, everyone. Oh, hey, Alex. Care for some salad? The balsamic’s right from Italy, you know.

Safety in Numbers: A Trans History

Different kinds of communities start in different ways and so the trans community in order to start had to overcome secrecy. And the secrecy was a matter of survival. There have to be a few brave souls who are willing to put their heads up and say here I am. One by one by one they started to build connections and started to realize that there are numbers and that there were power in numbers. And we can harness those power in numbers to build something better for ourselves.

(group chattering) The experience of being a young transperson today is radically different in many ways. Young people today do not go through that period of thinking they’re the only ones in the world. – The first memory I had when I discovered that something was not quite sis about me. I was actually through a social media website where I found somebody else who was trans and I didn’t know what the definition meant. So I looked it up and immediately felt like maybe there was some sort of word to describe the way I had been feeling. – I wrote my parents a letter. I basically told them, hey, read this, and I ran upstairs and then they were totally fine with it. It took a little bit of adjusting but it was okay. – I told my mom and it was met with a lot of… You’re sick, you’re not a boy, you’re hanging out with the wrong people. I just think she did a lot of growing too as I grew through my transitions she also grew a lot too. She’s come a long way, yeah. Mom’s like the best number one ally now.

Yeah, it’s like a 360, like, not 360, 180? Yeah, 360’s going back. – Yeah. – Okay, no, we don’t wanna go back. 180. – If we go back in history what we’ll find is that the experience of transpeople is very very different from what we see today. If you talk to most people who are adults today what you will find is that pretty much every single one of them will tell you that they passed most of their lives feeling that they were the only one in the world who was like them. – I knew at age three that I really was a boy. But I didn’t know there was anyone else on the planet like myself. I didn’t know the word transexual or gay or lesbian or homosexual.

So I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. I felt suicidal in I think when I was around 13. – I felt like I was probably the only person and continued to feel that way for obviously a very long time. I couldn’t at that point dress the way I wanted to and I didn’t know there was surgery available or any other thing and I thought what is the rest of my life going to be like? – My earliest memories were I wanted to be a girl. I couldn’t sort of say to my parents or my mother, you know, I’d like to be a girl. Something like that just wouldn’t be available to me because I knew it was forbidden basically. – For people who grew up thinking they were the only one in the world, really the only thing you can conclude is that you are unimaginable freak.

– When I was younger I was mortified every single day by what I had to wear. I would carry bags of clothing, boys clothing, to school with me to change in the restroom. – If we look back and ask transpeople did you know anything about being trans. What they’ll tell you is that they did occasionally see something come up in the media. – The first person I heard about who was transsexual as an expression used, was Christine Jorgensen. (upbeat classic music) – In 1952 a story broke that a young person had gone off to Denmark as a man and had come back to the United States to New York City as a woman. A glamorous woman. Many people of the generation have told me that that was the first time they realized that there was somebody else in the world like them and it also meant to them it was something that there was something that could be done about it.

And so the physician who was named in some of the media reports received hundreds and hundreds of letters from people desperately asking can you help me too? Part of her story also is after that great moment of fame she was not able to ever have a life that was not completely overshadowed by the fact that she was a transsexual. She could never get a regular job. And she spent the rest of her life performing in various ways. Some of them speaking in universities, some of them going on media, and a lot of her time was spent making a living by having a nightclub act where she sang and told her story.

She was a survivor and she said, okay, if this is the only work I can get I’m gonna use it to educate people. Virginia Prince was another somewhat reluctant activist. And in the very early 1960s she was already a fairly longterm cross dresser. The Hose and Heel club was one of the first actual organizations that brought together transpeople and again this was cross dressers for the purpose of a support group. There was concern that they might be infiltrated by undercover police officers. Because remember, what they’re doing is illegal. And so the idea was you would come to the appointed meeting location and you would bring with you a brown paper bag, the type that you might carry your lunch in. And in the brown paper bag would be your heels, your high-heeled shoes and your hose, stockings.

And at the appointed moment, everyone will open up their brown paper bag, take out their hose and heels, and put them on. And if you were willing to do that in front of everyone else the presumption was you were not an undercover police officer. (upbeat music) She started a magazine called Transvestia. And it ran for more than 20 years. Transvestia became a lifeline for people to communicate with each other to learn that there were others like them. It also had a section at the back where people could put in ads for pen pals, for the loss of another word. And they could communicate with other people so they could build community in that way as well. (upbeat music) In the 1980s, we started to see transpeople show up on television shows. (upbeat music) – So I went on the Donahue show and I said, one of the main things I wanted to do is to make sure we have an address where people who see this show can respond directly to me rather than go through the program. The show went on. We had a whole hour. The audience that he had was these little old housewives from middle America who never saw somebody like me before.

He goads them every so often saying, now, what do you think about that? And so they say, well, what do you think about that? And then, you know, I’d say my five words of wisdom and that was the end of that. – Usually on talk shows where they were the butt of the joke they were brought in for everybody to laugh at and as a freak show. The brave souls that were willing to do that however, got the message out to the fairly large audience that those shows had.

– We got 8,000 letters back. We got information out to all those people some of whom were cross dressers who never heard of Fantasia Fair. – [Aaron] Fantasia Fair started in 1974 and is still going today. It started as kind of a country retreat for cross dressers. – We actually picked the site and we started the elements of the program. And that’s the real important thing. What kind of elements of this program could we have that would be of interest to the average cross dresser who would be willing to come down and pay 300-400 bucks for room and board plus good food and a chance to parade around in their heels and whatever. And work. So in the first fair it was like (sighs) hell’s a poppin’.

Community was only one of the things and the other thing was information. Most of these people were thinking about hormones because they didn’t know who to talk to. They couldn’t go to your doctor and say, I want some female hormones. So we had a program like that. We had a program about what clothes to wear. Let me tell you, it was absolutely supremely important. It started in 1975 and continues to this day and a testament to the veracity of one area.

So there. – It wasn’t until the 90s that trans community and organizing really started to take off. Because all those isolated transpeople started to be able to find each other through the internet. (hopeful music) The start of the internet allowed transpeople to start to find each other and started to organize. The next development was it allowed transpeople to take control to some degree of the public conversation about them.

You go onto the internet and you type into Google what you want to know and often a lot what comes back is actually written by transpeople. Is actually created by transpeople. What you’re getting, what you’re learning, largely comes from the community rather than from the experts or from traditional media. And that’s a huge change. – Ether and I entrust in time however in terms of diversity around gender identity, sexual orientation, with the benefit of the internet and so on. There’s greater opportunities to learn about diverse communities and come together.

Virtually or in person. And hopefully broaden the mind and the heart and break down bigotries and so on and that’s a wonderful opportunity. We didn’t have that in the 50s or 60s or 70s. Or we forged that ourselves so I think that’s a real boon. – I suppose in a sense I think all of us can be inspirations to people because you don’t have to be a, no, it’s not just about being transsexual. It’s about anything that you are. And I think that’s what all of us should be, really. To be an inspiration and stand up and be, this is who I am and this is who you can be. – We have been able to learn a bunch about trans pioneers and stuff like that. And while doing my own research I did some but I’m nowhere close to understanding the full extent of what it was like back then. – They’re definitely like why we are here today. – I feel really glad that they kind of paved the way for us like he said.

I’m glad that I don’t have to fight those battles. Generally, my trans experience is not nearly as hard as it could have been and I want everybody’s experience to be like that. – I want it to be normal for people to be experimenting with their gender at a very young age and it to be completely normalized in social media and in society and in health care and I want it to be easier for people who come after me to go through this experience. (group chattering) – It’s wonderful to see how far we’ve come. It’s wonderful to see a generation of young people growing into a world that has a lot of room for them. That in many ways embraces the full spectrum of gender because there were great pioneers who took big risks who sacrificed a lot. To start the ball rolling. To initiate change. And to make the changes that allow the young people today to pick up that ball and keep playing with it.