5/17/14

How do you feel Carrera's photo shopped naked Life Ball posters?

There's a few different ways a person could react to artist David LaChapelle's posters of Carmen Carrera. According to LaChapelle, the posters are inspired by the Life Ball’s theme, “’The Garden of Earthly Delights’ and Hieronymus Bosch’s utopia of a diverse society, living together passionately and peacefully, as if the Fall of Man had never happened and people had never been expelled from Paradise.”

“Gender lines are blurred and every person is unique in how they see themselves,” LaChapelle explained in a statement. “For me the body is more than something to be looked at as an object of sexual gratification. The body is a beautiful housing for the soul that we are celebrating in this picture.”

Carrera points out that the artwork’s statement, “I’m Adam, I’m Eve, I’m Me” has a special resonance for her. “Your gender should not matter in your heart or in the way you express your personality... My message is: beauty has no gender. At the end of the day beauty is beauty.”

The Life Ball is an annual HIV/AIDS charity event that this year will take place on May 31 in Vienna, Austria. It seeks to showcase the variety of ways and expressions individuals are using to fight HIV/AIDs.

When trans people look at those images, we invariably feel shock that a trans woman would allow her body to be put on display in a way which plays to haters memes. Especially so soon after she and Laverne Cox tore Catie Couric a new one for having the unmitigated gall to ask if they had sexual reassignment surgery.

Imagine Cuoric is feeling a little but put apon right about now. And how will this affect media coverage in the future?

In any case it  sends a really mixed message to the media erasing the advocacy they had accomplished just months before. For most of us in the real world it makes a world of difference how people perceive us, so in that sense her posters did us no favors.

The low road....

The Daily Mail wasted no time taking the conversation to the lowest denominator, and if you read the comments, its clear they reached their intended audience. But in the end its a waste of time trying to appease the haters, but giving them ammunition to take shots at us?

So what is the "Life Ball"? I  don't think I've heard of it before and if I had I didn't pay it any mind and probably wouldn't have now, were it not for Carrera's posters. It looks like a huge gay party fundraiser, HRC style but lets give it a chance.  I downloaded to Scribe the sites info........




5/14/14

Houston Mayor capitulates to haters throwing transgender people under the bus?

Mayor Parker capitulated to haters allowing businesses owners to subjectively
discriminate and demonize transgender people after amending her proposed
"human rights" ordnance.

The pressure was too much for Mayor Annise Parker. The mayor a political aspirant for state office appeased the haters changing her proposed human rights ordinance Tuesday to allow proprietors to decide if a person is truly transgender. This will allow proprietors to subjectively bar trans people from public accommodations.

This is an outrage. What if the bill were to be amended to allow business owners to determine if a person was white enough to use their public accommodations.

Who wait, that was how it used to be in Houston? So Parker please remind me again why you call this a human rights ordnance?

The amendment  didn't appease opponents who protested after Parker's announcement.
Look at these people Parker. These are the people you are giving permission to
discriminate against us.

The Houston Chron reports
Mayor Annise Parker and supporters of her proposed nondiscrimination ordinance announced a compromise Tuesday in hopes of deflecting controversy over a small provision that had dominated discussion on the measure.

A paragraph specifying that no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity had outraged conservatives. Church and Republican political leaders have used the clause to claim the ordinance "provides an opportunity for sexual predators to have access to our families."

Members of the gay, lesbian and transgender community were equally outraged, however, by a clause that would give businesses an out if the defendant had a "good faith belief" that the person's claim of being transgender was disingenuous.

The proposed amendment would remove that paragraph of the expansive ordinance. Transgender people barred access to a restroom still would be able to file a discrimination complaint to the city's Office of Inspector General under the process outlined for all protected characteristics, such as race and veteran status.


"The base ordinance is still the same," Parker said. "It says you can't discriminate."



How about if you ammend it to allow a propritor to decide if you are too gay and allow him to bar you Parker?