5 Questions for BuzzFeed’s First Trans Reporter
Meredith Talusan is joining BuzzFeed as its first transgendeer staff writer, so our news editor — The Advocate‘s first trans staff member — asked her five questions about herself and the community she’ll be covering.
Dawn Ennis
www.advocate.com/media/2015/08/18/5-questions-buzzfeed-s-first-trans-reporter
EastEnders funeral gay sex scene cleared by UK TV watchdog
An EastEnders gay sex scene in a funeral home was found to not have broken any Ofcom rules, it found today (18 August).
Complaints were made to the UK television watchdog, with many calling these scene from the 17 July episode ‘disgraceful and distasteful’.
It showed Ben Mitchell, played by Harry Reid, and Paul Coker, played by Jonny Labey, having an intimate moment in a funeral home with a dead body on display in an open coffin.
Ofcom received 76 complaints about the scenes.
While some of the complaints were homophobic in nature, saying that ‘disgusting’ scenes should not be shown on ‘family TV’, others had issues with gay sex being implied to take place in a funeral home.
‘It’s not that it’s two guys having sex in a funeral home that’s distasteful,’ one said. ‘It would still have been a disgrace with two heterosexuals’.
Ofcom said it assessed the complaints but ‘concluded they didn’t raise issues warranting further investigation’.
It added: ‘We found the scenes were justified in the context of a long-running plotline and sexual contact between the characters was implied rather than overt.
‘Our rules don’t discriminate between scenes involving opposite-sex and same-sex couples.’
A BBC spokesperson added: ‘The millions of regular EastEnders fans who tune in each week know and expect dramatic storylines.
‘We are always mindful of our time slot in which we are shown and the scenes in question were implied and not explicit.’
This isn’t the first time viewers have complained over EastEnders. Last year, a gay kiss received a huge amount of backlash on social media but the complaints were largely ignored.
The post EastEnders funeral gay sex scene cleared by UK TV watchdog appeared first on Gay Star News.
Joe Morgan
www.gaystarnews.com/article/eastenders-funeral-gay-sex-scene-cleared-by-uk-tv-watchdog/
Trans woman killed in Kansas after being repeatedly run over
A transgender woman has died in Kansas City after she was repeatedly run over.
Police found Tamara Dominguez, 36, lying unresponsive in a parking lot at 3am on Saturday (15 August) night.
A witness told police that she had got out of a black SUV that then intentionally knocked her down, backed over her and and ran over her again.
Dominguez was rushed to hospital in critical condition but died on Monday.
Friends and family said they did not recognize the vehicle or know who Dominguez might have been with.
‘We understand that maybe they were arguing, but it’s not fair for what he did. It ain’t fair,’ her roommate Juan Rendon told KCTV News.
Authorities are treating the incident as an aggravated assault but said it is too early to say for sure whether the attack was a hate crime.
‘I don’t think it’s fair somebody dies like this no matter what the problem was, what happened. Nobody has the right to kill someone,’ Rendon told KSBH TV.
‘I don’t think people have their mind open, they’re just close-minded. They don’t understand. For some people being transsexual or transgender or gay they think it’s funny.’
Rendon has launched a GoFundMe campaign to send Dominguez’s body to her family in Mexico.
At least 16 other transgender woman have been murdered in the US since the beginning of the year, a historic high according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.
The post Trans woman killed in Kansas after being repeatedly run over appeared first on Gay Star News.
Darren Wee
www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-woman-killed-in-kansas-after-being-repeatedly-run-over/
Victim Number 17: Trans Woman of Color Murdered in Missouri
Police in Kansas City are searching for the driver who struck and then repeatedly ran over the Latina trans woman with an SUV.
Dawn Ennis
www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/08/18/victim-number-17-trans-woman-color-murdered-missouri
China’s ministry of education sued over textbooks that ‘stigmatize’ gays
A Beijing court on Friday (15 August) accepted a lawsuit against China’s Ministry of Education over textbooks that classify homosexuality as a ‘psychological disorder’ – even though it was removed from the country’s official list of mental illnesses in 2001.
The suit was filled by a 20-year-old Qiu Bai – a student at a university in Guangdong province – after she found many psychology and medical textbooks in her school library that defined homosexuality as a sexual deviation.
One 2013 textbook listed homosexuality as a psychological disorder alongside pedophilia, zoophilia and necrophilia. It also suggested ways the ‘illness’ could be cured, such as ‘aversion therapy’ – which can include electric shock therapy.
Qiu said the teaching materials openly ‘stigmatized’ gay people and had ‘no doubt’ directly harmed the LGBTI community.
‘When I was experiencing an identity crisis, I tried to seek help by consulting these textbooks. But the wrong information has hurt me as well as other students like me,’ she told the Global Times.
Qiu said that she had complained to the local education bureau and the country’s media watchdog, but failed to get a response.
The Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 2001. However, a 2014 survey of psychology textbooks conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Campus Association in China found that 40% of those written after 2001 still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.
The post China’s ministry of education sued over textbooks that ‘stigmatize’ gays appeared first on Gay Star News.
Darren Wee
www.gaystarnews.com/article/chinas-ministry-of-education-sued-over-textbooks-that-stigmatize-gays/
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