Do you read and write well, or even fluently, in a language besides English? T-Vox needs your help!

As ever, T-Vox is striving to be as internationally accessible as possible. The wiki admins are based in the UK, and the overwhelming majority of contributors are English speakers living in predominantly English-speaking countries. This, obviously, leaves out a huge percentage of the world population. While we have managed to translate a small handful of pages into French or German or Italian or Spanish, the majority of pages remain untranslated, and obviously there are many other languages that haven't been introduced at all.

If you can help at all, whether by translating one very short page or a huge amount of content, or by checking the existing translated pages for translation errors, the community will benefit hugely, and those of us who would love to translate but aren't able to will be forever grateful!

See T-Vox: Languages for instructions on how to create a new, translated version of any T-Vox page. You will need to create an account on T-Vox to be able to create and edit pages; it's free and painless, and your e-mail address is never shared with anyone.

Pages that particularly need translating at the moment: Trans 101; Transsexuality; Main Page; A guide to transition (and the pages linked from there); Legal issues

Please cross-post this wherever you feel it's appropriate!

http://theage.com.au/national/transsexual-takes-to-the-footy-field-20090606-bz7v.html

Transsexual takes to the footy field
Jill Stark
June 7, 2009


Will, 25, who has been living as a man for two years, hopes to play competition football. Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

LIKE many young Victorian males, Will loves his footy. He dreams of joining the thousands of men who lace up their boots every weekend and play in amateur competitions. He's just like them in every way but one — he was born female.

When the 25-year-old takes to the field he will become Australia's first female-to-male transsexual to play competitive football in a men's team.
( Read more... )

Sex, not gender. Pop will make Pop's gender known pretty clearly at some point, whether or not it aligns with Pop's sex. Either way, this reminds me strongly of Baby X - A Fabulous Child's Story, which I think is fantastic.


http://thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Swedish parents keep 2-year-old's gender secret
Published: 23 Jun 09 16:24 CET

A couple of Swedish parents have stirred up debate in the country by refusing to reveal whether their two-and-a-half-year-old child is a boy or a girl.

Pop’s parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”
( Read more... )

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/12/chastity.bono/index.html

Commentary: Chastity, 'Good luck, brother!'
By Jamison Green
Special to CNN

Jamison Green is an educator, adviser and advocate on transgender issues, and the author of "Becoming a Visible Man" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

Welcome, Chaz!

Before the word "transsexual" had been coined in English, an intrepid young person whose family belonged to the British nobility set out to transform herself from female to male. He received a medical school education, obtained hormones -- relatively new substances that were poorly understood at the time -- and independently began living as a man in the early 1940s.

Eventually, he found a plastic surgeon to help him, and his physical changes were complete by 1949, but his family rejected him. The British tabloids hounded him. To escape publicity, he was forced to carve out a life for himself virtually alone. He became a Buddhist monk, and died in Tibet in 1962 at the age of 47.

His name was Michael Dillon, and he one of the Western world's first transsexual people, that is, someone who changes sex and/or gender by medical means. His extensive writings were suppressed and destroyed by his family -- only fragments survive.
( Read more... )

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7827428&page=1

Chaz Bono Gives Voice To An Often 'Invisible' Community
Trans Activists Say Chaz Bono Could Be Rare Face for Transgender Issues
By LAUREN COX and RADHA CHITALE
ABC News Medical Unit
June 13, 2009

Transgender men fighting for legal protections say Thursday's announcement by Chastity Bono, child of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, that she will be transitioning from female to a male as Chaz Bono is a welcome break from an all too common "invisible" paradox.

For reasons that are part biology and part society, transgender men say in some ways they have an easier time being accepted and recognized as masculine than transgender women have being perceived as feminine.

Yet at the same time, there has been a virtual black hole in public awareness of female-to-male transgender people.
( Read more... )

From q_transphobia.

Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman are co-editing a new book, “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation“, which aims to:

[...] collect and contextualize the work of this generation’s most forward-thinking trans/genderqueer voices—new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world’s most respected mainstream news sources.

Kate and Bear have issued a call for submissions from “non-normatively gendered/sexed voices” but add that they will “include all the good stuff we can, regardless of current identifiers of the author”.

The deadline is 01 September, and payment will be $50 and two copies of the book on publication by Seal Press later next year.

The full text of the call for submissions may be found over at Bear’s LJ – link here.

http://www.bilerico.com/2008/01/transbigotry.php

Transbigotry?
Filed by: Guest Blogger
17 January 2008 8:30 PM

[EDITOR'S NOTE:] This post comes to us from Mercedes Allen. She lives in western Canada and blogs at Dented Blue Mercedes.


Mercedes Allen

When I was about three or four years old – enough to be talking but not enough to be in kindergarten – my mother carried me through the lineup to the tellers at the bank. I had never seen a person of colour, and so I’d been awed to see a tall fellow with that “purple”-deep colour of skin. I turned to my mother and said, “Oh, Mom, I’d never let myself get that dirty.”

My embarrassed mother kindly explained that some people are simply born with darker skin, and that ended my experience of personally-felt racial bigotry. A few years later, I learned from a close friend I’d made from Trinidad that skin colours sometimes come with cultural differences. It never occurred to me that any one skin colour or culture was any better than any other.

But I did also learn quickly that others didn’t necessarily share that same blissful innocence. As much as it clearly puzzled me when people expressed their contempt for my friend, it was certainly apparent to me that their contempt was very real. Even in Canada, where hatred was nowhere near as entrenched as it was further south, racism thrived.

I’ve also experienced it from the receiving side, twofold, one from the perspective of being Métis, in a culture where Natives are largely despised. In this situation, shame is taught implicitly, where it is intimated that a person should take refuge in their French last name, or resort to referring to their nationality as “mongrel” rather than identifying themselves as Métis. While I have since learned to be proud of my culture and now mourn not having been able to learn more of the traditions associated with it, it was still a painful experience hiding and pretending that nothing was amiss.

My other experience of bigotry came from being transgender. Even though it took me several decades to finally transition, the feelings were always there, and every crass joke that people made about men in dresses or every condemnation of “those perverts” served to drive me further into hiding, further into shame and further into the nightly suffocated struggle that almost culminated in suicide many times.

So if we learn so intimately how painful it is from the side of the victim, why is bigotry so easily foisted around in our own community?
( Read more... )