Free Republic

In a roundtable interview with MSNBC's Chris Jansing..... former Sen. Barbara Boxer said "we" have to "make" the middle class understand that Trump is not their friend. The panel included Jamie Lee Curtis, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D), a Black Lives Matter activist, and Tony Goldwyn, star of ABC's Scandal and grandson of MGM studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

When Susan Allen was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2012, she became the first openly lesbian Native American woman to win office in any state legislature. But framing that achievement as one for the lesbian community alone obscures another aspect of Allen’s identity, and one that is directly connected to her Native American ancestry: Allen also identifies as “two-spirit.” While Americans are increasingly familiar with the elements that make-up our modern LGBTQ abbreviation, other, often older queer identities like two-spirit remain unappreciated to the point of erasure. But if Allen and other two-spirit folks have their way,...

As Oakland’s tightknit arts community continues to grapple with dozens of deaths in the Ghost Ship warehouse blaze, it is also being roiled by heightened scrutiny over the safety of similar living spaces. ... “We’ve been in the shadows for a long time for a reason ... and it worked really great for a lot of people for a long time until this one incident,” said Scrivani, a photographer who also produces art shows. “Right now the spotlight is on us.” ... Sam Lefebvre, a music journalist who has been covering the fire for the weekly East Bay Express newspaper...

Max Ohr considered himself the creative director, the “go-to guy,” the “camp counselor” at the Ghost Ship warehouse, and on that Friday night, he was also the doorman. He had spent the day getting ready for an electronic music party upstairs, arranging the sound system and cleaning up the fantastical bohemian space where he and about two dozen of his fellow artists lived. Before 9 p.m., the lanky jewelry maker with a scraggly beard and crescent tattoo on his cheekbone began welcoming visitors. They arrived in small groups, more than 100 guests in all from a tight-knit music and art...

Some of the Oakland fire survivors broke bread with Derick Ion Almena for the first time since the tragedy -- despite him getting blasted for alleged dangerous conditions in the building. Witnesses tell us the group sat down at a Denny's in Oakland Wednesday night, had a meal ...

For those who can bear to watch. I am watching on C-SPAN.

Washington, D.C. has the highest rate of transgender-identifying residents in the country, according to a recently released study by the The Williams Institute, which is associated with the University of California/Los Angeles School of Law. Of the estimated 1.4 million transgender-identifying individuals in the United States, about 14,550 — or 2.77 percent of the total — reside in D.C., according to the think tank, which specializes in “sexual orientation and gender identity law”. The District of Columbia “had a notably high percentage of transgender-identified adults (2.8%) and is considered an outlier due to its unique geographic (urban) and demographic profile,”...

The Pentagon announced Thursday that transgender people will be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, ending one of the last bans on service in the armed forces. Saying it’s the right thing to do, Defense Secretary Ash Carter laid out a yearlong implementation plan declaring that “Americans who want to serve and can meet our standards should be afforded the opportunity to compete to do so.” .... Under the new policy, by Oct. 1, transgender troops should be able to receive medical care and begin formally changing their gender identifications in the Pentagon’s personnel system. And a year...

A Texas BBQ restaurant has made their transgender bathroom policy abundantly clear — “No Men Allowed in Women’s Bathroom.” A cross-dressing cowboy truck driver has been stirring-up trouble in the Texas BBQ joint. The trucker likes to come in dressed in a skirt or hot pants and a blouse and six-inch stilettos. The sign in the small Texas town restaurant now politely warns, “No men allowed in the women’s bathroom please.” The restaurant shares the building with a Texaco service station.The establishment in Cresson, Texas, was forced to put up the sign in response to the trucker who has come...

A “transmasculine” teacher at an Oregon elementary school has been awarded $60,000 by her school district as compensation for harassment she claims to have suffered on the job, including being referred to by the wrong pronoun. According to The Oregonian, Leo Soell was born a woman, but now prefers to identify as “transmasculine” and “genderqueer,” meaning she does not consider herself to be male or female. After getting breast cancer in late 2014, she had her breasts amputated to create a more masculine appearance and changed her name to Leo. Once she returned from medical school in May, 2015, Soell...

The familiar voice coming over the radios of tens of thousands of Boston area drivers on the way to work Wednesday was the same. But the name had changed. WBZ-AM traffic reporter Scott Eck signed off as Kristen Eck for the first time, another step in a decades-long struggle with her gender identity. […] … (A)lthough Eck, 45, was aware of the heightened public interest, her decision to live as a woman was deeply personal. She said she knew at age 5 she was supposed to be a girl. …

When retail giant Target announced their new policy of allowing anyone to use whichever bathroom they wish in their stores it was completely predictable that a firestorm was going to follow… and boy howdy, has it ever. While the SJW crowd cheered the decision, realists around the country signaled their collective displeasure with a boycott of the store spearheaded by The American Family Association. In a relatively short time, more than one million people had signed on to the protest. (Fox News) More than one million people have decided they will no longer buy their Nutter Butters or Wet...

The NYPD is investigating the alleged attack in Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn. A transgender woman reported to police that she was raped inside the bathroom at the historic New York City gay bar Stonewall Inn on Saturday night. The 25-year-old victim told police she entered the bar’s single occupancy unisex bathroom when a man claiming he needed to wash his hands walked in behind her. He then allegedly groped and raped her, before fleeing the scene. The victim left the Christopher Street bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood and returned an hour later, according to an NYPD spokesman. The victim...

The little boy who watched Obama sign Obamacare into law is no longer a boy. He’s a teenager and he’s changed his gender to female. The church of liberalism reigns supreme! Marcelas Owens watched Obama sign Obamacare into law six years ago. Right Wing News reports via CNN: Marcelas Owens … was the chubby 11-year-old African-American boy who stood next to President Barack Obama as he signed Obamacare into law at a White House ceremony on March 23, 2010. He was the miniature health care activist in the black vest dwarfed by powerful lawmakers in a famous photo of...

The young woman, whose name is being withheld for her privacy, said she went to the Cedar Springs nightclub Saturday night, Jan. 16, with her female fiancee and her fiancee’s co-worker. She had become separated from them in the crowd when she met Prince Karim, a 31-year-old Middle Eastern man that she assumed — based on the way he was dressed, his hairstyle and the fact that he was in a gay bar — was a gay man. The woman said she and Karim went out onto the S4 patio to smoke, and that while they were there, she realized...

hen the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, "God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity ("gender" was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?Their regular response was to show me their patients. Men (and...

Now that gay marriage is here, you didn’t think that would be the end of things, did you? The Column reports on colleges and universities that have sought, and in most cases received, religious exemptions from Title IX requirements. The story frames these schools as bigot colleges (“Training schools to discriminate”). Excerpts: Nearly three dozen religious institutions of higher learning have asked the federal government to waive laws that protect LGBT students, according to government documents obtained by The Column. The schools are asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive portions of Title IX that might apply to students...

An Ohio couple is defying orders to remove a zombie-themed nativity scene from their front garden. For a second year in a row, Jasen and Amanda Dixon constructed the scene, which features a spoof version of Silent Night including a demonic baby Jesus and undead wise men. A description of the display on that page describes it as "the worlds first Zombie nativity scene" and "a wonderful piece of artwork", before stating "we are not atheist".

The White house announced on Friday that it would hold a screening of the upcoming transgender drama The Danish Girl and Amazon's transgender series Transparent next week as part of its new "White House LGBT Artists Champions of Change" program. In addition to the screenings on Monday, November 23, the White House will honor nine individuals "for their artistry in advocating for the LGBT community," according to a White House press release. The event will also mark Transgender Remembrance Day, currently observed on November 20.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives has organized "KillJoy's Kastle," a "Lesbian Feminist haunted house." ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is a part of the University of Southern California's Libraries. "Lesbian Rule. Forget the dead this Halloween. Feel the pulsing throb of something larger than life in KillJoy’s Kastle," reads USC's website. KillJoy's Kastle will be a "sex positive, trans inclusive, queer lesbian-feminist-fear-fighting celebration," put together by Toronto based-artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell and organized by "ONE Archives in West Hollywood." "This haunted house of freaky feminist skill sharing and paranormal consciousness-raising reanimates the archive of lesbian herstory...