For Tuesday, Transgender Day of Remembrance …
#1 - Another story on Michael Berke …
High on prescription painkillers and four days without sleep, Michael Berke raced his Harley to the megachurch where he’d found a home.
He barged into the church office, cursing loudly and wearing a mesh shirt printed with profanity. In his hands he held a picture of a woman with long, red hair and pouty lips.
“This is who I used to be,” he said.
“And this” — he gestured to his breastless chest, bald head and red goatee — “is who I’ve become.”
He was born a man. After a lifetime as a social misfit, he had transformed himself into Michelle, a saucy redhead. Then, three months ago, he had become Michael again — with the financial aid and spiritual encouragement of Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale.
Now, he wanted to be Michelle again, and he blamed Calvary for making him the man he had become.
…
Born a man, he became a woman, then a man again — what’s next?
#2 - Michelle Bruce is being accused of fraud …
Two unsuccessful Riverdale City Council candidates have asked a judge to halt an upcoming runoff election, alleging fraud by a candidate who ran as a woman …
The lawsuit alleges that Bruce, who identifies herself as transgendered and goes by Michelle Mickey Bruce, misled voters by identifying herself as a woman. The suit identifies her as “Michael Bruce.”
Bruce’s voter registration, notice of candidacy and driver’s license identify her as Michelle Bruce, a white female. Bruce’s birth certificate was not available Monday.
Bruce said she was “born transgendered” and declined to say if she had surgery to change her gender.
“That’s private,” Bruce said in a telephone interview Monday. “The people don’t care about it.”
…
Transgender candidate misled voters, suit alleges
#3 - Scottsdale, Arizona’s Personnel Board voted Monday evening to add deviant behavior gender identity to its list of protected classes in city’s equal employment and anti-discrimination policies …
The board voted 3-0 to recommend that the City Council add gender identity — a term often meant to refer to the transgendered — and sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in city’s equal employment and anti-discrimination policies. They will join existing protections for employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability.
The council could make a decision on the recommendation, and is scheduled to take up two other proposed anti-discrimination laws, on Dec. 4, said Neal Shearer, assistant city manager.
Issues of accommodation, such as which restroom a transgendered person is allowed to use in city facilities, will be determined on a case-by-case basis in an attempt to “devise a practical and dignified solution to these issues,” Shearer said …
Alice Porter said it could be precedent-setting.
“I think we’re playing with fire here,” she said. “I think it will have a rippling effect throughout the city.”
Roger Van Camp said sexual orientation and gender identity are issues of behavior, different from other classes like race or age.
“Deviant behavior is chosen by the individual,” Van Camp said. “I find it abominable that the city would even consider this. Their sexual orientation has nothing to do with their job.”
… The other two proposed anti-discrimination laws up for City Council discussion Dec. 4 involve prohibiting the city from contracting with groups that violate city anti-discrimination policies, and banning businesses in Scottsdale from discriminating against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people.
Scottsdale panel moves to prevent discrimination
#4 - Susan Stanton spoke at the Unity Church of Clearwater on Monday …
It’s been exactly eight months and 23 days since Steve Stanton was fired from his job as Largo’s city manager.
He was escorted out of City Hall by some of the same officers he hired during his 17 years on the job.
That hurt, Stanton told a group at a transgender remembrance day service at Unity Church of Clearwater on Monday.
Now known as Susan Stanton, she counts each day since the dismissal, when the greatest test of her will and strength began.
During that time, she has been searching to find employment.
She applied for a job in Berkeley, Calif., but the fit wasn’t right.
In despair, she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, where many people choose to end their pain.
She stood there in a “deep, dark hole.” She said she felt she had no future.
“You can feel the environment,” she said, “and that you want to jump into the hands of God.”
But she didn’t. And on Monday night, she spoke to an audience of some 150 people about her struggle to transform herself from a man to a woman …
Slender and soft-spoken, she appeared as feminine as most women in the audience who had come to hear her speak.
“It’s not like I’m going to walk around looking like Aunt Bea,” she told the Times earlier in the day. “I’m not out mowing the lawn in a dress. Sometimes I put on a T-shirt and shorts.”
She is living in Sarasota, takes female hormones and has joined a health club.
There is one downside to taking the hormones, she said with a laugh. “Without the hormones I could bench-press 90 to 120 pounds,” she said. “With the hormones, I can bench 20 pounds.”
Stanton is scheduled to have her first mammogram today. In May, she will travel to Phoenix for sex reassignment surgery.
Although the experience Stanton has endured is painful, she said it has brought her closer to her family, especially her son, one of her biggest supporters …
Sharing a life’s pain
#5 - Take those pants off, ladies …
Dresses epitomize womanhood in the Western world. Such has been the case since the western man adopted pants to replace the tunic in the sixth century (an aspect of the West’s Germanic barbarian heritage). Dresses allow us to differentiate between the silhouettes of men and women on restroom signs. Dresses are the indelible image of womanhood because of the symbolic nature of pants and dresses. If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable. We all tacitly reaffirm these attributes in our attempts to find a partner. Flirtation and courtship are reaffirmations of what it means to be masculine and feminine because it is only by fulfilling the obligation of our form that we can attract the opposite sex.
You might say these things were once true but times have changed. Not so. The nature of sexual attractiveness in women is objective, immutable and incontrovertible because it is directly related to the constant and unchanging physiology of men and women. What men find attractive in women is fixed because the physiology of humanity has been relatively unchanged. In this way, the ideal form of femininity is also unchangeable and without regard for cultural context or time period. What men find attractive in women - the form of a true lady - is objectively identifiable, just as it was in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. In short, femininity is sexy, and sexy is timeless and universal.
What’s not sexy is feminism (not to be confused with femininity), which is directly responsible for the disappearance of our beloved dresses and the adoption of pants by the “new woman.” Like all fashions, pants are symbolic of something - in this case masculinity - through their allowance of physical activity. Dresses, the antithesis of pants, symbolize femininity through grace and elegance. Men find elegance in women to be attractive, and dresses are a physical manifestation of femininity. The wearing of pants by women represents the masculinization of the fairer sex, which is not at all attractive.
In advocating the wearing of dresses, I must distinguish between the flowing elegant dresses of tradition and the more degenerate and immodest dresses of our present culture. The miniskirt, a dress of sorts that doesn’t extend below the knees, is both lacking in modesty and elegance. Elegance is essential to femininity, and the lack thereof implies a sort of masculinization. Modesty is essential to feminine virtue, and the lack thereof implies a state of whorification. Immodest, inelegant dresses constitute a degeneration and androgynization of true dresses.
The androgynous masculinization of the modern woman, through the donning of pants, suits, uncovered shoulders and unveiled hair, has in a sense led to the slow whorification of ladyhood. In discarding feminine dress, women seem to have symbolically discarded femininity and modesty (the virtues of women) in favor of sexual virility, promiscuity and immodesty (the vices of men). The ideal form of a true lady is a constant, immutable aspect of humanity, and this strange new development can only represent a bizarre aberration of a perverse and ignoble culture. Dresses are an essential part of any true lady’s attire, and they should be worn.
Who wears the pants?
So what’s hot at DARPA right now? Bugs. The creepy, crawly flying kind. The Agency’s Microsystems Technology Office is hard at work on HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System), raising real insects filled with electronic circuitry, which could be guided using GPS technology to specific targets via electrical impulses sent to their muscles. These half-bug, half-chip creations - DARPA calls them “insect cyborgs” - would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.
Two Spanish clerics, one Protestant, the other Catholic are under fire by gay rights organisations for their homophobic views.
A Quebec City trans activist and lawyer says the NDP dumped her from her candidacy in a federal Quebec City riding because of her gender identity.
For the first time since he packed Michelle’s things away, Michael Berke tugs the cord of the attic door above his garage. Surrounding him in the suburban Delray Beach garage are power tools, bicycles, sandpaper, and a lawn mower, though Berke’s prized possession — a Harley — is in the shop at the moment.
“She [Michelle] had so many purses and things,” Berke says, unsealing a blue plastic bin. He lifts out a knee-high black XOXO boot and studies it. “These were Michelle’s favorite pair of shoes,” he says, petting the leather.
An Ozarks mother says her son is being discriminated against at school and she’s working hard to keep him in class. The mother says the problem lies in the guidelines inside the Springfield Public School’s student handbook.
“It became clear to me, as I really thought about it, - and really prayed about it - that homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within. We cannot see the truth because we’re blinded by homosexuality.” - Michael
Pope Benedict has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches are defective and that other Christian denominations are not true churches.
Then, in May, Marty came to his mom frantically: “Mommy, feel this lump! You have to do something!”
New York Blade: 
When Alabama was considering hate crime legislation back in early 2006, I wrote a piece titled 