In the News (with pictures & videos)

[Betty]

Please be careful where you go cross dressed, & who you let know you're a crossdresser. There's still a lot of hate & evil out there.

Murder of transgender woman in Olmsted Township is hate crime

Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman said the murder of a transgender woman whose body was found in a pond should be treated as a hate crime.

Dive teams retrieved the badly decomposed remains of Cemia Dove, or her given name Carl Acoff Jr., in a pond near MacKenzie Road in Olmsted Township on April 17. There was a concrete block and steel pipe tied to the 20-year-old’s half-naked remains, Olmsted Township police said.

“Cemia lived a trouble life of acceptance,” said Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman in a news release on Wednesday. “While Cemia struggled, she did not deserve to die as what is likely a hate crime. Too often we lose loved ones because of fear or hate. Violence should not be tolerated against anyone regardless of race, gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation.”

Dove was reported missing on March 27. Olmsted Township police have not released any details about possible suspects or a motive.

"The violent death of this young woman is unconscionable and needs to be addressed,” said Jacob Nash, Cleveland Transgender Community Outreach Committee Chair. “This is the third transgender woman of color murdered in April in the U.S. alone and this needs to stop.”



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[Betty]

Honey West will tell you that for the first four years of her life, she was "unedited." Her parents allowed her to play with her sister's dolls, and she was so eager to wear her sister's tutu that she would pull it off the laundry line and put it on before it was completely dry.

Trice: Musical tells transgender story

For a short while her family thought this was cute. Until it wasn't.

"It was the mid-1960s and I was this little boy growing up in Gary, Indiana, who wanted to sing and dance and be a girl," said West, who's now 52 and a transgender woman.

West, whose legal name is Errin Auxier, tells her story in the musical "Genderella," which is one of 12 new plays and musicals running this week as part of the nonprofit Chicago Writers' Bloc 2013 Festival. "Genderella," co-written by West and playwright Joanne Koch, will run Monday and be held, along with the other productions, at the Next Theatre Company in Evanston.

In a way, West's story is about her second "coming out" experience. She said that although she revealed she was gay to a small group of friends in junior high school, it would take her until age 41 to accept she was transgender.

"I come from a generation that wasn't allowed to imagine we were different," West said. "At the time, people knew what it meant to be gay, but the term 'transgender' didn't exist. So I buried who I was and my journey took a lot longer."

She began performing as a woman while still getting gigs as a man. But something unexpected happened. West noticed that as a male performer, she was ordinary. But as a female performer, she was extraordinary — a cabaret star.



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[Betty]

She should have sat down to go pee in the ladies room.

Transgender woman banned from Idaho grocery store

SALMON, Idaho -- A transgender woman whose use of a women's restroom in an Idaho grocery store reportedly upset other customers has been cited for trespassing and banned from the store for a year, police said on Friday.

A Rosauers supermarket in Lewiston asked police to charge 25-year-old Ally Robledo, who was born male but identifies as female, with the misdemeanor trespass charge on Monday, Lewiston Police Captain Roger Lanier said.

"The store security officer said he had been dealing with a problem over a couple days with the person going into the women's restroom and urinating while standing up," Lanier said.



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[Betty]

Batgirl's roommate confesses to be transgender

In Batgirl #19, the character Alysia reveals that she is a transwoman in a conversation with her roommate, Barbara Gordon (Batgirl). Taking care to distinguish Yeoh’s sexual orientation from her gender identity, Batgirl writer Gail Simone noted that the character is also bisexual.

Simone attributed the inspiration for the character to a conversation she had with fellow comic book writer Greg Rucka several years ago at the Wondercon convention, after a fan asked why there were fewer gay male superheroes than lesbian ones. Rucka, who co-created (and rebooted) Batwoman as a lesbian character, replied that it would be a real sign of change for a gay male character to appear on a comic book cover — and an even bigger step for a transgender character to do the same.

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[Betty]

Vigil To Mark Anniversary Of Murder Of Transgender Woman

A vigil was held in downtown Oakland on the anniversary of the slaying of a 37-year-old transgender woman who was sitting in her car socializing with friends when she was killed, vigil organizers said.

Brandy Martell was fatally shot April 29, 2012, in the 400 block of 13th Street in Oakland. Responding officers found Martell in a car and pronounced her dead.

Her murder remains unsolved.

Martell worked as a peer advocate for TransVision, a program within the health center that provides services for transgender people.

Besides remembering her, they want to call attention to Martell’s still unsolved murder and bring awareness to the continued violence against the transgender community.

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[Betty]

Purse snatching soccer player tackled by transvestite

A Lecce soccer player was charged Monday for stealing a purse from a prostitute and fleeing by bicycle after reneging on a deal to give her his iPhone 5 for sex. Ousmane Drame, a French national and striker for the third-division club, was reportedly chased down by a transsexual friend of the robbed Nigerian streetwalker after the incident early Monday.

The 20-year-old Frenchman is alleged to have sought the services of a Nigerian lady of the night in the Porta Rudiae area of Lecce in the early hours of Monday morning, but after failing to pay for the dirty deed with cash, things started to play out like a rejected plotline from The Hangover sequel.

[Betty]

Eddie Izzard to run for Mayor

 EDDIE IZZARD has revealed his plans to run for London Mayor, claiming only a comic can turn the country around.

The funnyman reckons he can inspire people to work harder and said he would pack in the stand-up to fulfil his ambition.

He told TV Biz: “I’m going to chuck in comedy in six years to go into politics. I’ve proved I can be determined and do things in a different way. And you need comedy in politics. There are lots of decisions to be made and people get bored talking about things that are only slightly different.

“It’s very dry so you need comedy to make it palatable.”

He also said he would rather grab people’s attention with his tours than with hellraising behaviour.

He said: “You can get people’s attention by doing huge tours and I’d rather do that than throw a TV out of a window.

“You do that and you’re a rebel. But then you have no telly and a hole in your window. And if you play gigs you earn money, which is good for someone who wants to run for Mayor.”

The comedian recently made BBC show Meet The Izzards, which saw geneticists test his DNA to show he was 2.8 per cent NEANDERTHAL.

Eddie — who rose to fame as a stand-up in the 1990s — is now touring the world with his biggest ever live show, Force Majeure. “Force Majeure means ‘force of nature’ and I think we have to be our own forces of nature because most of the time no one is going to help you." he says.



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[Betty]

Matt Mitrione, UFC Fighter, Suspended After Transphobic Rant

Matt Mitrione referred to Fallon Fox as a "lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak" in a April 8 appearance on "The MMA Hour."

"She's not a he. He's a he," Mitrione is quoted in media reports as saying. "He's chromosomally a man. He had a gender change, not a sex change. He's still a man. He was a man for 31 years. Thirty-one years. That's a couple years younger than I am. He's a man."

Calling Fox "an embarrassment" to fighters and to the sport, he added, "The woman that's fighting him, props to you. I hope you beat his a**, and I hope he gets blackballed and never fights again, because that's disgusting and I'm appalled by that."

According to Yahoo! Sports, the UFC quickly denounced Mitrione's "transphobic" remarks and moved quickly to suspend him.

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[Betty]

More men seek 'domination' in Ireland

 Foreign sex workers operating in Ireland say that there is a distinctive market here for "domination" from male customers. Many of the sex workers offer the service where they do not find to be as much in demand in other countries, they say. Prostitutes who provide the service are not otherwise involved in what might be termed dominatrix-type activities.

They say there are two distinct areas of interest in Bondage and Discipline, Sadism and Masochism (BDSM). There is the 'sex industry BDSM', which may or may not include sex.

Some sex workers offer sado-masochistic services but there is a relatively small market for professional sex workers, a female sex worker said. She too said that domination is a frequently sought service by Irish men. She said she has found that the demand for this is less common elsewhere.

She said that men and women with a predilection for "dressing up" mostly find an outlet in scenes where they meet in particular venues once or twice a month.

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[Betty]

Vatican downloads transsexual porn movies

Torrentfreak.com, a website that analyzes file sharing, reports that an IP address in Vatican City has been downloading eyebrow raising torrents from pornographic websites featuring transsexuals and other fetishistic clips.

Torrenting is a way of file sharing that is popular in pornography because the clips become hard to trace.  Unfortunately for proud Catholics everywhere, TorrentFreak wanted to uncover if any illegal downloading was going on in the Vatican after learning about a film club.

An owner of a DVD rental shop sparked the research when he claimed a Limerick priest admitted to seeing the film ‘Lincoln’ before its release date, the SiliconRepublic reports.  With the help of another website ScanEye, which track and analyzes online activity, the team was able to discover shocking downloads.

The IP address location read ‘The Holy See – Vatican City State’ and had many adult torrents including one that clearly says Tiffany Starr, a transexual porn star, the Irish Independent reports.

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