Transgender Firefighter Marches as Grand Marshall in NYC Pride Parade

Transgender Firefighter Marches as Grand Marshall in NYC Pride Parade

Brooke Guinan’s family has a history of careers in fire fighting. Guinan did not think she could continue the tradition in the male-dominated fire department because she identifies as a transgender woman. But Guinan’s love of public service ultimately drove her to continue her family legacy in the fire department.

Guinan began identifying as a transgender woman in 2011, three years into her firefighting career at FDNY. She first came out as a gay man at a young age, but began to question her gender identity in college.

Since 2015, Guinan has served the FDNY as its LGBTQ outreach coordinator. In this role she has directed and produced training tools and services to better equip the FDNY to understand and work with the LGBTQ community. “The firehouse can be fun, but I am so enamored with my community and I am very pleased and grateful to do a different kind of lifesaving work in the fire department,” Guinan said. James Fallarino, spokesperson for NYC Pride, said Guinan appears to be the first openly transgender member of the FDNY.

This year the NYC Pride Parade invited Guinan as a Grand Marshall. “It is an amazing honor to be the Grand Marshal of this year’s Pride parade,” she said. “I have always found inspiration in other people’s voices and it is an honor to be given an opportunity for my voice to be heard.”

The NYC Pride March is the largest pride parade in the United States and is meant to celebrate the LGBTQ community and bring awareness to issues the community faces.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/25/us/firefighter-transgender-woman-pride/index.html

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Camille’s Anderson’s Journey to the Miss International Queen Pageant

Camille’s Anderson’s Journey to the Miss International Queen Pageant

Camille Anderson was in Thailand in early March preparing to compete in the Miss International Queen pageant. The Miss International Queen pageant has been held annually since 2004 in Pattaya City in Thailand. The pageant is open to female contestants between the ages of 18 and 36 who were born male. The contestants must represent either the country of their birth or the one listed on their passport. Gender-reassignment surgery is not required, and most contestants haven’t done it. Previous winners of the Miss International Queen pageant have gone on to movie, TV and singing careers in Asia and elsewhere. The only past American winner, Mimi Marks, has been a regular at Baton, a drag club in Chicago.

Its been a long road for Anderson to achieve her goal of competing in the pageant. Anderson was born as Mark Cordeta in Tacloban City, Philippines. Mark preferred playing with girls and by the age of 9 he was sneaking into his mom’s closets to try on her heels or bras. “I always felt like I was different,” Anderson told CNN. Mark’s devoutly Catholic family knew he was different, too. They thought he was gay, but nobody really talked about it. “It was like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing. I was always afraid of what my family would say, and what other people would say.” Anderson said.

Not until he immigrated to the United States at age 21 did Mark begin to show more of a feminine side in public. Two years later, he began transitioning to becoming a woman. Mark then became Kim, complete with a legal name change.
The transition created some distance at first between Kim and her parents. She found herself acting differently around them than with her friends. “I felt like I was living two lives,” said Anderson, who asked to be identified by her pageant name. Eventually they adjusted and became supportive.

In 2013, Anderson married her boyfriend, Marco Hudec, in a glamorous outdoor ceremony. He was the one who encouraged Anderson to compete in beauty pageants. “I never had the confidence,” said Anderson, who now lives in Torrance, California, and works as a registered nurse. “He believes in me more than I believe in myself.”

Anderson proved proved to be a natural on the pageant circuit. Within two years she had won three local and national pageants: Miss Los Angeles Pride 2014, Queen USA 2014 and Queen of the Universe 2015. Anderson met Caitlyn Jenner. And her previous crowns qualified her for the big one. It was time to go to Thailand for Miss International Queen.

Pageants for transgender women are not that different from other beauty pageants. There’s an evening gown and a swimsuit competition. The finalists are asked about their hopes and dreams by a panel of judges. Winners wear a tiara and carry flowers. There is one key difference, though. Most traditional beauty queens haven’t faced discrimination, or worse. “Many of the contestants have had trouble being accepted by their families. So we’re trying to bring up their self-esteem,” said Alisa Phanthusak, chair of Miss International Queen’s pageant committee. “It’s not just beauty we are looking for. It’s confidence.”

For Anderson, the past week in Thailand has been a blur of costume fittings, media interviews and other appearances. She likes the message she’s sending to young LGBTQ people who may be watching. “…if you become a beauty queen you become a role model. There’s a lot of visibility for our (transgender) community these days. But there also are a lot of people who will hate, so you have to stay strong. Our voices are being heard now more than before. It’s just going to take a while.”

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Companies That Support Transgender Students

Gavin Grimm is a high school student in Virginia. He is also the named party in a Supreme Court case which will determine transgender bathroom laws for students. Grimm sued his Virginia school district after he was denied access to the restroom corresponding to his chosen gender.

Fifty Three companies have pledged their support of Grimm. At Hayden’s List, we live by the motto “Support those that support us.” Here’s the list of the 53 companies that support Grimm and the transgender community:
1. Affirm, Inc.
2. Airbnb, Inc.
3. Amazon.com, Inc.
4. Apple
5. Asana, Inc.
6. Box, Inc.
7. Codecademy
8. Credo Mobile, Inc.
9. Dropbox, Inc.
10. eBay Inc.
11. Etsy
12. Fastly, Inc.
13. Flipboard, Inc.
14. Gap Inc.
15. General Assembly Space, Inc.
16. GitHub, Inc.
17. IBM Corporation
18. Intel Corporation
19. Kickstarter, PBC
20. Knotel, Inc.
21. LinkedIn Corporation, a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
22. Lyft
23. M Booth
24. MAC Cosmetics Inc.
25. Mapbox, Inc.
26. Marin Software Incorporated
27. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
28. Microsoft
29. Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
30. MongoDB Inc.
31. NetApp, Inc.
32. Next Fifteen Communications Corporation
33. Nextdoor
34. Pandora Media, Inc.
35. PayPal Holdings, Inc.
36. Postmates Inc.
37. Replacements, Ltd.
38. RetailMeNot, Inc.
39. Salesforce
40. Shutterstock, Inc.
41. Slack Technologies, Inc.
42. Spotify
43. The OutCast Agency
44. The WhiteWave Foods Company 45. Tumblr, Inc.
46. Twilio Inc.
47. Twitter Inc.
48. Udacity, Inc.
49. Warby Parker
50. Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
51. Yahoo! Inc.
52. Yelp Inc.
53. Zendesk, Inc.

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Connecticut Protects Transgender Students

Connecticut Protects Transgender Students

The day after President Donald Trump rescinded federal protections for transgender students in public schools, Governor Dannel P. Malloy strengthened Connecticut’s protection for these students.

Governor Malloy signed an executive order to protect Connecticut transgender students in public schools to use a public bathroom associated with their gender identity. “Discrimination of this kind is outrageous and has no place in our society,” Malloy said in a statement. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, the President’s regressive action must be rejected by all compassionate people, regardless of party affiliation.”

But several transgender students and advocates in Connecticut feel that even with state protections, they are worried and angry about Trump’s action.

Owen Schwartz, a Hebron, Connecticut teenager who is transgender, arrived home after Trump’s action and told his mother “Donald Trump hates me.” Schwartz said the president’s decision makes him feel less accepted, less respected and more fearful. “If the president doesn’t support who I am,” Owen said, “it’s kind of hard to go on with my daily life because it’s like the White House is against me. It’s a big deal.”

Robin McHaelen, Executive Director of True Colors, Inc., which provides support and services to LGBT students, said that transgender youth are among “the most vulnerable of the children that we serve” with the highest rates of suicide and the highest rates of “self-medication through substance abuse. For the federal government to send a message that they don’t matter is, in my opinion, absolutely unconscionable,” she said.

http://www.courant.com/education/hc-trump-transgender-bathrooms-20170223-story.html

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Update on Transgender Bathroom Laws

Update on Transgender Bathroom Laws

Progress has been made in overturning North Carolina’s House Bill 2 or commonly known as the transgender “bathroom law”. House Bill 2 states that people must use the bathroom that coincides with the gender listed on their birth certificate. CNN reported on February 11 that a judge ruled that 2 students and 1 faculty member at the University of North Carolina be allowed to used the bathroom that coincides with their gender identity. Until these three plaintiffs go to trial it is a temporary and limited block of this law but is being considered as the first step in the law being repealed.

However while that is good news out of North Carolina, on a federal level the news is not celebratory. The Obama Administration had the the Justice Department and Education Department advised public schools that they must allow transgender students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, as opposed to their birth gender, or face the loss of federal funds. Thirteen states are suing the federal government over this directive. The states are: Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Mississippi and Kentucky.

A hearing was set for February 14 but the Justice Department and the states filed a joint notice saying both sides moved to cancel the hearing. “The parties are currently considering how to best proceed in this appeal,” the motion said. Prior to this hearing these states had won a national injunction, which still stands, preventing that guidance about bathrooms from being disseminated to students. Besides the bathroom access issue, the guidance also covered making sure transgender students’ privacy is protected.

Activists of the LGBT community said the Justice Department move to cancel the hearing is not a good sign and believes it signals a shift in policy. “It is sending a signal they don’t intend to enforce the guidance in any state,” Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, told CNN. “They are fine with their hands being tied.”

This week, sadly, the cancellation of the hearings made sense as the Trump Administration withdrew all protections for transgender students. At the CPAC conference Betsy DeVos responded by saying, “This issue was a very huge example of the Obama administration’s overreach, a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach. These matters should be handled at a “personal and local level.”

Warbelow said she was “extraordinarily disappointed. The DOJ should be a champion for all students’ civil rights and by signaling a willingness to be bound by the injunction nationwide they are certainly signaling they aren’t intending to pursue civil rights for transgender people.”

Warbelow noted transgender students are not prohibited from filing a lawsuit if they experience discrimination.

The Justice Department declined comment on the filing.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/11/politics/justice-department-transgender-guidance-case/

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Progress in Texas

Jess Herbst became the first known openly transgender mayor in Texas when she came out to the residents of New Hope in early February. Herbst, a former alderman and mayor pro tem, was appointed mayor in May after the previous mayor died.

Herbst posted an open letter on the North Texas town’s website, telling her more than 600 Collin County constituents, “I am transgender.”

“As your mayor I must tell you about something that has been with me since my earliest memories,” Herbst wrote. “Two years ago, with the support of my wife, daughters and son-in-law, I began Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). At the time, I did not imagine I would hold the mayor’s position, but here I am.”

“I love my wife, and she loves me, we have no intention of change,” Herbst wrote in her open letter. “My daughters have been adamant supporters of me and are proud to tell people their father is transgender.”

She invited the residents of New Hope to visit her blog if they had comments or questions.

http://www.ajc.com/news/national/texas-mayor-comes-out-transgender/4Ec4K1p9SWz0QOFUErS72J/

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