Even by the flexible moral, ethical, and professional standards of American talk radio, the May 28th segment of KRXQ 98.5 FM Sacramento's Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning radio talk show makes for a sickening half-hour of ugliness and cruelty. For once, the focus was not LGBT adults, but minors. The hosts, Rob Williams and Arnie States, devoted the segment in question to a vicious diatribe against transgender children, some as young as five, focusing in particular on the case of one Omaha family raising a gender dysphoric child, and their decision to support her transition from male to female.
Williams and States took turns referring to gender dysphoric children as "idiots" and "freaks," who were just out "for attention" and had "a mental disorder that just needs to somehow be gotten out of them," either by verbal abuse on the part of the parents, or even shock therapy.
"Allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals," they said.
For his part, States bragged that if his own son were to ever dare put on a pair of high heels, States would beat his son with one of his own shoes. He urged parents whose own little boys expressed a desire to wear a dress to verbally abuse and degrade them as a viable response. "Because you know what? Boys don't wear high heel shoes. And in my house, they definitely don't wear high heels.
"I'm going to go, 'You know what? You're a little idiot! You little dumbass!'" States sneered, adding later, "I look forward to when [the transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy."
Or dead.
In light of the well-publicized suicides this year of the two boys who took their own lives because of bullying and harassment for "acting gay" (which, in the argot of modern North American teenagers, often refers to acting in a way considered unmasculine by their peers) the stunning lack of moral sensibility on the part of States and Williams is breathtaking. But it also points to the increasingly degraded landscape of talk radio.
The causal link between Bill O'Reilly's obsessive baiting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller on FOX and Tiller's murder on Sunday, May 31st as he was ushering in his Kansas City church, is currently being explored, an exploration particularly relevant in the case of Rob, Arnie, and Dawn in the Morning, and the potential violent fallout from their inexplicably rage-filled invective against not only transgender children, but even boys who err on the feminine side of standard adolescent behavior, behavior States and Williams consider unnatural because "men are hunters and women are gatherers."
I shudder to imagine the response of the late Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover's mother if she'd had the misfortune to hear the KRXQ broadcast.
"They were always saying [to Carl] 'You're gay, you must be gay, you act like a girl'," Sideaner L. Walker told the press in April, speaking of the dead son she had to cut down from the support beam he hung himself from after months of taunts from his peers---taunts that likely bore more than a passing resemblance to the invective used by States and Williams on their May 28th broadcast.
"I'm not open-minded once I look into sumpin'" one of the two men grunted at the beginning of the segment, their voices interchangeable. "I have every right to call you a freak and judge you on that. It makes me sick. 'Mommy, I'm a girl trapped in a boy's body,'" he simpered, mimicking an effeminate little boy. "I want to wear a dwess."
They berated co-host Dawn Rossi, who seemed genuinely horrified by the rising crescendo of ugliness towards the children and their parents from States and Williams.
"You're actually defending allowing people to become freaks?" they seethed. "A boy who wants to wear a dress is a freak. A nut." Comparing transgender children to "fat bastard kids on Maury," States and Williams urged advocates of transgender children to "stop hiding behind research and laws," whose authority they wholeheartedly reject. Braying with the certitude of the jubilantly ignorant, States and Williams revealed to listeners that "transgenders [sic] did not exist four decades ago," apparently unaware of the historical fact that transgender individuals have existed in every culture throughout recorded history, including in native American cultures where the "two spirited" were revered as teachers, healers, and shamans.
By no objective standard are dumbed-down, Wal-Mart versions of O'Reilly like States and Williams journalists. Nor are they really experts on anything other than plunging the overflowing toilets of their listeners' psyches and selling the sewage back to them, repackaged as "insight," "common sense" and "plain talk" from fake-macho blowhards hiding behind radio microphones.
One doesn't need a primer on transgender or transsexual history in order to appreciate the awesome brutality of the KRXQ shock-jocks' diatribe. All one needs is to know a child, any child. They're small, they're vulnerable, and their world is populated with gods whose divinity is derived solely from their adulthood and perceived authority.
States and Williams chose to use that authority to attack a segment of the childhood population who are more vulnerable than almost any other. Transgender children are at a point in their lives when they feel their own bodies are the enemy, and alien to them. Many of them go to bed praying that when they wake up their bodies and their inner gender will be aligned.
"If the kid ever gets to be eighteen," States snarled, "and says 'I still feel like a woman!' you say, 'Get out! Go be a freak! And understand, SON, that society will never accept you because we still have some moral judgment."
As disturbing as it has become to an increasingly enlightened segment of the mainstream American population to hear LGBT adults vilified and degraded in the media as the discussion over gay marriage and Don't Ask, Don't Tell reaches a boiling point, no one with even a passing acquaintanceship with decency could have been prepared for KRXQ's May 28th pageant of brutality towards transgender children.
Who are, after all, children, first and foremost. Trusting, innocent, and vulnerable, they ought to be beyond the reach of the violent, hate-mongering adult rhetoric that is taken for granted in American talk radio. One needs no particular sympathy for transgender people to understand the prodigious boundary transgression of promoting contempt and disgust towards children,anyone's children, on a radio show.
This should give serious pause to adults of every political, economic, and social background, whatever their stand on LGBT issues. It should be of particular concern to KRXQ's advertisers and their customers.
My little godson Michael is the light of my life. His father was a hockey player and his mother is a legendary beauty. He embodies the best of those two people to absolute perfection. It's been educational to watch his awareness of his own masculine gender assert itself in the last few years. His gender identity wasn't "learned," it came to him already hardwired, in the same way studies continue to show that a transgender child's gender is hardwired. And whatever else his struggles may be in later life, I personally doubt that gender identity is going to be one of them.
But his gentleness and his vulnerability brings my protectiveness into hyper-focus. And if he wanted to wear a dress, or told me he was a girl, my instinct as an adult would be to protect him and try to understand him.
I can only imagine the perfect horror of having someone like States as a father. But if anyone ever called my godson a "sick little freak," or a "nut," or a "freak of nature," or beat him with a shoe for being himself, I could not, and would not, be held accountable for my reaction, or my inevitable response.
I know which end of the shoe I would be on if I ever met another adult who took the official Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning child-rearing advice to heart after hearing it on KRXQ 98.5 FM Sacramento.
MOVIES
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Friday, August 29, 2008
Do nine transgender and intersex films make a trend? They do if they're all playing during the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, Wednesday through Sept. 7.
Films about transgender characters are not as rare as you might think. A raft of contemporary features — 'The Crying Game,' 'Boys Don't Cry,' 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' 'Transamerica,' to name a few — dealt seriously with the issue. At least two entire film festivals — in Seattle and the Netherlands — are devoted to transgender-themed movies.
And now this bounty at Austin's running-strong gay and lesbian film celebration, movies that walk the tricky line between gender identification, be it physical, psychological, or both. All films screen at the Alamo Ritz. Find more information about each title at www.agliff.org.
'Manuela y Manuel' (5 p.m. Wednesday) — The star of this Puerto Rican feature is the transgender Manuela, a drag-queen performer who finds herself in a heap of difficulties, including having to pose as the father of her best friend's child.
'Trinidad' (8 p.m. Thursday) — An intimate look at three transgender women's lives in the rural burgh of Trinidad, Colo., the unofficial 'sex change capital of the world.' By Austin filmmakers PJ Raval and Jay Hodges.
'Like a Virgin' (8 p.m. Sept. 5 on two screens) — This mainstream South Korean hit blends pathos and comedy to etch a portrait of a fat, Madonna-adoring teenager who's trying to save money for a sex-change operation. Hilarity and heartache follow.
'XXY' (3 p.m. Sept. 7) — Born with an extra chromosome, Alex is an intersex teenager who was raised female in this popular coming-of-age drama from Argentina. Parents, romance, plastic surgery ... And you thought your teen years were tough.
These shorts are part of the Gender Queer Shorts program at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 7:
'Tranny McGuyver' — A trio of rookie cops creates a circus of winky satire.
'Clouded' —A young boy's journey to self-discovery hits dramatic familial hurdles.
'Simply Love' — A woman in Austria looks for a former lover, who is now a woman. Love really is blind in this 50-minute documentary.
'Diva'— Paris isn't always so lovely, as Vincent, in a blinding magenta dress, learns painfully.
'I, I and We' — Surreal identity games on the New York subway. — Chris Garcia
.- Citing what they call America’s “promise of equality,” the Obama administration plans to push for homosexual rights by including protections of sexual orientation, “gender identity” and “gender expression” as civil rights. His office proposes expanding hate crimes statues and the adoption rights of homosexuals while supporting full civil unions for “LGBT couples” to give them “legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples.”
The proposals are announced under the Civil Rights section of their agenda presented at Change.gov, the web site of the Obama campaign’s self-described “Office of the President-elect.”
A section titled “Support for the LGBT Community” outlines the agenda for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered activists and quotes remarks Obama made on June 1, 2007.
“While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do,” Obama said, referring to riots which followed a police raid on a New York City gay bar.
“Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."
According to the web site, President-elect Obama and vice-president-elect Joe Biden will support expand crimes legislation such as the Matthew Shepard Act. They also back the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which they claim will “prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
“While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees' domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy,” the web site states, referring to similar legislation sponsored by Obama in the Illinois state legislature.
Regarding civil unions and same-sex marriage, the site says “Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples.”
Advocating the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, the agenda plans to “enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions.”
The site also references Obama’s Senate vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which, in the site’s words, “would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.”
On the subject of adoption rights, the Change.gov web site states: “Barack Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.”
The Obama agenda further advocates the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” policy barring open homosexuals from serving in the military.
Its AIDS prevention policies also pledge to enact a “comprehensive” national strategy including contraceptive sex education and “combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception.”
| Lady 레이디 | |
|---|---|
| Origin | South Korea |
| Genre(s) | K-pop |
| Years active | 2005–2007 |
| Members | |
| Sinae (신애) Sahara (사하라) Binu (비누) Yuna (유나) | |
Lady (Hangul: 레이디) was a Korean pop group, noted as the first transgender group from that country.[1] The band consisted of Sinae, Sahara, Binu and Yuna. According to the official story, they were the best out of hundreds who tried out to be part of this band. Although only three were supposed to be in the group, a fourth was added at the last minute.
Their formation was inspired by the emergence of Harisu, a Korean singer and actress, who is also transgendered. Sinae has previously appeared in commercials with a female dance group as well as a music video by Cho PD, and Sahara is a 2003 beauty pageant winner in Thailand and a former jeans model.
Lady released their first album in 2005, consisting of only a few tracks, with many of them being remixes of their first two singles, "Attention" and "Ladies Night". There was much attention given to them by the press, given their unique status as a transgendered band in a conservative country.[2] However, they were able to perform on Korean music shows only a handful of times, while their music and videos were not well-received. In order to drum up more publicity, they released a photobook featuring nude shots of all the Lady members; [3] this also failed to catapult them into stardom, however.
Lady officially disbanded in early 2007.[4]
I had NO IDEA this world existed, and it’s pretty mesmerizing. These guys are a giant bag of contradictions. It’s like GWAR meets Labyrinth meets The Tudors meets Anime. Here’s a clip from the show. Warning: lots of coy finger pointing alternating with head-banging ahead.
According to Zhanyi, visual kei bands have a common answer to the question “Why do you dress like a girl?” Simple: The chicks dig it.
