Some good news from Gainesville!

This is breaking news from The Advocate about the recent election in Florida:

March 24, 2009

“Antidiscrimination Repeal Fails in Gainesville

Gainesville, Fla.’s Amendment 1 — which, if passed, would have repealed a number of antidiscrimination protections for LGBT residents in the college town — failed at the polls Tuesday. With the majority of precincts reporting, results have the amendment failing with 61% voting no and 39% voting yes.

The repeal movement began last year after the city commission revised the antidiscrimination law to include protections for transgender people in employment, housing, and public accommodations — including restrooms.

Opponents using scare tactics about mixed-sex public bathrooms gathered enough signatures to place a referendum of the protections on the ballot. Charter Amendment 1 would have eliminated not only transgender protections but also protections for gays and lesbians in the North Florida city. It also would have forbade the city to add protected categories that are not included in the Florida Civil Rights Act, which does not recognize sexual orientation or gender identity. ”

Another news station reports: “With 100 percent of the precincts reporting Tuesday, the vote was 11,717 or 58 percent against changing the law.”

The campaign in favor of Charter Amendment 1 was viciously transphobic, in particular. Commercials aired depicting a big, husky guy following a small girl into a girl’s bathroom, essentially equating transgender women with child molesting men.

The 4th annual California Transgender Leadership Summit is planned for March 27 - 29 at UC San Diego.

Go to this website for more information and to register!

Some of the highlights of the summit include an opening plenary on “Making History from Stonewall to Today,” with speakers Susan Stryker and Sylvia Guerrero. And on Saturday there are more than 20 workshops to help people refine their organizing/activist skills. Click on the above link for more info and to download a pdf document of the event schedule.

This comes directly from the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE):

“NCTE in collaboration with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has already heard from more than 6,000 transgender and gender non-conforming people about the discrimination we face. We need you to be part of this historic study that will provide critical data that we need as we advocate for fully transgender inclusive policies.

There are only two days left for you to be included in the largest ever study of transgender people and our experiences of discrimination. If you haven’t filled out the survey yet, please do so now. We need you. If you have already taken the survey, thank you. Please encourage others to fill it out as well.”

To fill out the Spanish-language survey, click here.

To fill out the English-language survey, click here.

If you haven’t already listened to the last episode of This American Life you’re missing out. This American Life is a weekly hour-long radio program that airs on public radio every Sunday. This week’s episode, called “Somewhere Out There,” is about the following:

Of all the 6 and a half billion people in the world, what are the odds that any two people are a real match? Stories from people who know they’ve beat the odds, and the lengths they’ve gone to do it—including an American professor who sings Chinese opera for anyone who’ll listen, to get one step closer to his mate, and two kids who travel halfway around the country to find each other and become best friends.

The two kids referred to in that last sentence are transgender. The story is about how two 8-year old transgender girls meet each other for the first time, and they become instant best friends. You can listen to the entire program by going here.

San Jose Mercury News, 2/8/2009: We are family, too: Vietnamese Gays and Lesbians join San Jose’s Tet parade, by Jesse Mangaliman: “Nguyen was one of 40 Vietnamese gays and lesbians from the Bay Area and other parts of California who marched during the traditional annual celebration of Tet, the lunar new year. It was only the second time in the parade’s history that gays and lesbians marched openly — and the first time that families joined them. For Vietnamese gay and lesbian groups, the event signaled a new kind of visibility and openness in a culture that traditionally views homosexuality as shameful — and something to hide.”

A recent Racialicious Blog post: When Xenophobia Meets Homophobia, by guest contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at Nacla and Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo: “The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.”

This is an article posted on the Common Dreams website: Gay Woman Fights over Hospital Visitation Rights in Miami court, by Luara Figueroa: “A gay woman not allowed to visit her dying partner at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 2007 hopes a federal judge will allow her claims of emotional distress and negligence to go to trial.”

An article in the New Haven Independent: Camaign Puts the “T” Back in “LGBT”, by Melinda Tuhus: “Now that they’ve brought same-sex marriage to Connecticut, advocates took on a new mission to a downtown town hall meeting: protecting transgender civil rights.”