Rasheen Everett – Update

There are only two people who know what went on in that apartment on that fateful night and one of them no longer has the ability to tell her side of the story. Hopefully having this man arrested will give us some insight into what led to Amanda’s untimely demise.

A young woman cut down in her prime is gone and we need to know why. I am certainly hoping Rasheen owns up to what he’s done and doesn’t attempt the ever popular trans-panic defense.

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A Manhattan man has been charged with murdering a transgender woman in her Ridgewood apartment last month and then pouring bleach all over her body, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.

Rasheen Everett, 29, was arrested in Las Vegas April 9, about two weeks after allegedly strangling 29-year-old Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in her 62nd Street apartment on March 27, the DA said. Everett returned to New York Tuesday and is awaiting arraignment in Queens Criminal Court. He could receive 25 years to life in prison if convicted on the charges of murder and tampering with physical evidence.

“The defendant is accused of violently taking the life of another human being in her own apartment and then tampering with the body by dousing it with bleach,” Brown said. “This case will be vigorously prosecuted in order to secure a measure of justice for the victim and her family.”

Everett entered Gonzalez-Andujar’s apartment a little before 9 a.m. on March 27, and several minutes later individuals heard screams and loud banging, Brown said. The defendant left the apartment about 17 hours later, carrying the two bags, according to the DA.

Three days later, on March 30, a police officer found the victim lying on the bed and reported bleach had been poured on her body, Brown said.

The city medical examiner determined the cause of death to be manual neck compression.

Gonzalez-Andujar was the first person murdered in the 104th Precinct in 2010. A total of two people were slain in the precinct in all of 2009.

Source

Real Sports chronicles the lives of Transsexual Sports writer

I don’t know how I missed this one but I found it very interesting and informative.

Hopefully you will too.

See part 2 after the jump!

Oregon opens transsexual coffee bar to help TG/TS with transition expenses

What a progressive and noble concept. Kudos to whomever is responsible for giving those who often lack heath care  and/or the funds to proceed with their transition expenses.

Hopefully this model will be adopted by other GLBT communities to assist the gender variant and moving into the next phase of their lives.

Tuff Luck, a Portland, Ore., cafe, celebrated its grand opening last month.

The coffee shop is located inside In Other Words, a feminist bookstore, and was started as a way to help transgender people raise money for health care by providing them with a side job and a venue for selling art.

“It’s mostly people’s art that they can make money off because right now we can’t really afford to pay employees,” entrepreneur Ryder Richardson told Just Out, a Portland-area LGBT newspaper. “Down the line we’d like to set up an individual development account and get organizations to match whatever people can make working here.”

The cafe is inclusive of anyone who identifies as transgender, regardless of transition status, and raises funds for a variety of health care needs, including therapy, hormones, and surgery.

Richardson’s friend Seamus Bogues created the shop with the goal of funding their top surgeries and told Just Out they eventually want to provide the same option to others.

“For a business, we’ve done it on a shoestring for sure,” Richardson said. “It adds to the charm, I think.”

Richardson and Bogues thought of the idea after a friend suggested the two work out of the bookstore instead of a coffee cart.

“In Other Words wanted to draw more business and have more people hang out in here, so it kinda worked out for them to let us use the space ’cause it’s kinda mutually beneficial,” Richardson said. “I know they’re trying to have more people of different genders feel like they can hang out here.”

Source

Transgender Parents teaching lessons to their hetero contemporaries

In our ever evolving society we are going to see the term “family” redefined as more families come out of the closet. If you don’t watch Oprah yu are probably unaware that there are many families out there, where one parent is gender variant.

Those who go against the grain are often the target of much berating and ridicule. In order to be gender variant a thick skin is a must and the same can be said for being a parent.

Let me share with you a real-life story involving a transgendered parent. A few years after Michael B. married his wife Barbara in the 1970s, he told her that he preferred wearing women’s clothing and that he felt more comfortable thinking of himself as a woman.

The marriage was a rocky one, but it lasted for almost twenty more years. In 1998, the couple divorced and a year later Michael had gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Monica. After that, Barbara went to court in their home state of Kentucky and successfully got an order prohibiting Monica from contacting any of their four children because she was now living as a woman.

But things soon got even worse for Monica. Barbara eventually remarried and she and her new husband petitioned the court to terminate all of Monica’s parental rights so that the new husband could adopt the one child out of the four who was still then a minor.

The Kentucky trial court granted the petition after concluding that Monica becoming a woman meant that she had neglected her child and caused her grave emotional harm, necessitating the termination of her parental rights. That ruling was upheld by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 2007.

Monica B.’s case is an example of the kind of pervasive discrimination faced by transgendered parents. It also tells us something important about what it means to be a parent in our society.

For many years now, gay and lesbian parents have had to contend with the argument that depriving a child of a mother (in the case of gay male parents) or of a father (in the case of lesbian parents) harms children. This argument is at its core grounded in the notion that there is something special or unique about the supposed different nurturing styles of fathers and mothers. In response, advocates for gay and lesbian parents have argued that gender in parenting is largely irrelevant because what should matter is not a parent’s gender but instead whether and how the parent loves and cares for the child.

But to some extent, the “gender in parenting” argument in the context of gay and lesbian parents takes place at an abstract level. As a result, in lesbian and gay parenting cases, we tend to ask questions such as whether mothers in general care for children in ways that are different, if not necessarily better, than fathers in general do.