ZIPLOC BAGS - male, because they hold everything in, but you can always see right through them.

KIDNEYS - female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs.

SHOE - male, because it is usually unpolished, with its tongue hanging out.

COPIER - female, because once turned off, it takes a while to warm up. Because it is an effective reproductive device when the right buttons are pushed. Because it can wreak havoc when the wrong buttons are pushed.

TIRE - male, because it goes bald and often is over inflated.

WEB PAGE - female, because it is always getting hit on.

SUBWAY - male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up.

HOURGLASS - female, because over time, the weight shifts to the bottom.

REMOTE CONTROL - female… Ha! You thought I’d say male. But consider it gives a man pleasure, he’d be lost without it, and while he doesn’t always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.

(Jokes courtesy of The Romantic.com )

These are all very personal questions and effect each and every transgender person, regardless of if they are transitioning or if they’ve found a life balance that allows them to live productive, healthy and happy lives.

One resource that you may want to consider is from a relatively new job search engine called Simply Hired Job Search Engine. Simply Hired has coupled their search engine technology with the Human Rights Campaign list of companies the have studied that support LGBT employees (see HRC Corporate Equality Index Human Right Campaign Corporate Equality Index). It’s easy to do, you simply do a search with the Simply Hired LGBT filter on and out pops the jobs!

You can reach the Simply Hired Job Search Engine with LGBT Filter at their site HERE.

Also, don’t forget to checkout the SCC Transgender Career Expo or the Washington D.C. Transgender Job Fair. Finally Dr. Weiss over at Transgender Workplace Diversity has some excellent articles on this topic in general that are well worth a read over a tall, cold iced Americano.

How would you like access to bags such as Louis Vuitton, Chloe, Jones New York and more for…$15?

Okay you can get up off the floor now.

The site works like a NetFlix for Handbags. They have a huge selection and you get to KEEP them as long as you want till you need to turn them in. Need a bag for that hot date? Need a bag for a night at the opera? Need a bag to go shopping with mom? No problem…they have bags, and good ones, for every occasion.

Swing your hips on over to Bag, Borrow or Steal to get in on this deal.

That story angered a couple named Mike and Natasha West. How could one group of transgender-women show a group of transgender-men such disrespect at a major national transgender conference they wondered? The answer, they determined, lay in lack of respect within the transgender community for each others changes. Surprisingly, for the “T” part of the LGBT community, this is harder than it looks. Mike and Natasha decided to take some action to influence the transgender community to change their own attitudes about respecting each other; male-to-females and female-to-males.

Mike and Natasha have both seen their own share of disrespect within the transgender community. In some sense, they form a small sample size for how disrespect is practiced within the community. For Mike that has taken the form of transgender women asking him, after he discloses to them his transgender status, why ’she’ would want to be a guy, why would ’she’ want to have such beautiful breasts removed and moving from the pronoun ‘he’ to ’she’. Natasha has been a victim of similar disrespect and witnessed similar events as well.

Mike’s three computers are humming in his office with various programs for his web and graphics design consulting firm as we talk. As he puts it, “The transgender community has the constant issue of dealing with respect, or mostly disrespect, from friends, family, loved ones and other members of the non-transgender community…All transgender people can relate to one another in at least some way, regardless of background. Each and everyone of us has had to deal with the looks, the gender slurs, the wrong pronouns and the rude remarks. The entire transgender community needs to respect one another. If that respect does not start with each and everyone one of us; how will we ever expect the non-transgender community to respect us?” But why does this happen at all when it appears that both transgender-women and transgender-men have similar paths?

Natasha’s sense for the cause is that both sides know the right thing to do in their hearts, but, “they have to break old ways. I think it takes a conscious effort to start and gradually it gets to become automatic”. She continued saying, “I believe low self-esteem and a lack of self-respect have alot to do with an overall lack of respect within our community. Kind of like, you can’t love others until you love yourself. The teenager in high school who picks on everyone to make himself or herself seem more popular, usually is hiding their own insecurities and flaws”. Both Mike and Natasha also highlighted that the seeds of disrespect are often sown in how people were raised as children. This baseline sense of disrespect for other people and their differences isn’t connected to being transgender or not but is rooted in deep learning at an early age. The unlearning of these lessons takes conscious effort. As they grew to understand this problem within the transgender community they realized they could be a part of the solution to improving it.

First, they co-authored a booklet, targeted at the transgender community, entitled, “Respect Starts with the Community”. This booklet encourages the transgender community to consider how to respect each other; male-to-females and females-to-males. Mike used inspiring quotes, clear guidelines and common sense examples to communicate the message of respect within the transgender community. The examples are particularly important as they provide a sense of modeling of what respectful behavior is. As Mike put it, “I felt it was necessary to spell the examples out. In my travels within the transgender and even non-transgender community, some people unfortunately do not have common sense. I think providing the examples is one of the best ways for people to get an insight on how others feel when they get disrespect. Sometimes, the examples, or stories are enough to wake some people up to different forms of disrespect”.

The booklet was the first practical step and the next was a natural outgrowth; live seminars on the topic. Mike and Natasha held one of their first seminars on disrespect within the transgender community in January 2007 at First Event 2007. First Event is one of the largest transgender and diversity conferences in the United States and is held each year in New England, usually in the Boston area. The seminar was very well attended among the 600 event goers at First Event, proving the topic of respecting others within the transgender community was more important than both Mike and Natasha had oringally believed. Mike noted the feedback they had gotten, “I have had many people come to me and say they had no clue that some of these things were going on. I have also had people tell me that they were unaware that some of the things listed in the book would be taken as disrespectful and often hurtful. And lastly in the process of talking about this topic, I have had some transwomen tell me that they are beginning to understand transmen a little more”.

The topic of disrespect within the transgender community is not one that anyone would generally think of as a hot button. And yet, respect is a fundamental need for every person and group. And, it’s fundamental to the transgender community actually supporting itself. As Natasha noted about the transgender community, “We can’t be united enough to stand up for ourselves as a whole as long as there is this rift that’s been caused due to disrespect within the community”.

© 2006 Beck’s Cafe, http://www.beckscafe.com

The LGBT Aging Project works to ensure that LGBT elders and their caregivers have equal access to the benefits, protections, and aging programs, services, and institutions that their heterosexual neighbors rely on.

Typically, LGBT elder activists replicate existing, mainstream services and provide them directly to elders. This is very important work. But the LGBT Aging Project works from a different perspective: we focus on the significant aging services infrastructure and expertise that already exists. We believe that LGBT citizens and taxpayers should have full access, and a real choice about whether or not to use it. And we teach the system how and why to create an LGBT-friendly atmosphere and culturally appropriate programs and services.

One little thing they are doing, which sounds totally cool, is to sponsor an OUT to Brunch, a gathering of Lesbian, Bi and Trans-women over 50. It sounds neat…here are the details and how to get more info:

• When is the event? Saturday September 29, 2007
• What are the times? 11 am to 1 pm
• Where is the event? Christopher’s, 1920 Mass Ave (Porter Square), Cambridge, MA
• What is the Cost? $5 (Includes coffee/tea, juice and brunch entrée)

Reservations required:

Give Lisa Krinsky a call at the LGBT Aging Project at (617) 522-6700 x307 or email: LKrinsky@ethocare.or

The purpose of these events will be to bring together representatives of government agencies, corporations and private businesses with interests in the District together with members of the District’s transgendered community for the expressed purpose of finding jobs and job training opportunities for them.

And what a list of organizers there are. It looks like people are rallying around the concept of getting people jobs. And for those of us in the transgender community this is great news. You can get a job, a new start, a bright future.

So here are the dates for our readers in Washington D.C.:

• August 18th, from 1PM-6PM will be cover topics such as resume writing, interviewing, dressing for job success, and the DC 2000 application.
• September 29th, from 1PM - 5PM will be a job fair with representatives from government, the nonprofit community and corporate employers.

You can get more details on the Washington D.C. Career and Job Fairs by visiting the District of Columbia’s LGBT affairs office at this link HERE.

Fenway Community Health did something similar in Boston in February. You can read about it at this post at Beck’s Cafe here. JobNET Boston led the career part of the Fenway Transgender expo in Boston. So don’t be afraid to contact them here in Boston for some help!

Both Lola and CAT are dedicated to making SCC fun, friendly and helpful. And the helpful part is something you don’t hear to much about but they blaze a trail of social justice that every trans-person should take note of and emulate even in some small way.

This year SCC’s innovative approach to helping the transgender community extends to finding a job! The Transgender Career Expo at Southern Comfort Conference. The Career Expo will run from 9:00AM until 4:00PM on Friday, September 14th (closed during lunch). It is an open event sponsored by SCC and The Human Rights Campaign and one need not be registered for the conference to gain value from this function.

The Transgender Career Expo is exemplary on a number of levels, from it being the first of its kind to the type of companies that are exhibiting. Here’s a partial list. Some will have actual HR Recruiting Managers present while others will simply be sending representatives as a show of support and to supply information Its a who’s who of corporate America:

• Alston & Bird LLC
• American Airlines
• Deloitte Ernst & Young
• GLAAD
• Hewlett Packard
• Human Rights Campaign
• Intercontinental Hotel Group
• JPMorganChase
• Lambda Legal
• Microsoft
• NCTE
• New York Life
• NGLCC
• Powell Goldstein LLP
• PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• Sprint / NEXTEL
• The Point Foundation
• The Mosaic Identity
• Turner Broadcasting

How important is the Transgender Career Expo? Let me quote Lola Cola and Kristin Reichman both of SCC:

Please be sure to spread the word to promote and support this extraordinary event. It is critical that we, as a community, step up and create our own place in the world just as these companies have stepped up to the realization that hiring and retaining quality employees is based upon talent and abilities and that being Transgender is irrelevant.

[information courtesy of Lola Cola, Kristin Reichman; Southern Comfort Conference]

And this is from the university that brought you the controversy on manliness and The New Feminism.

I’ll lift a mug of java to the progress shown I’d say!

The Union for Reform Judaism announced on August 7th a major revision to their 10-year old guide on welcoming individuals into the community. They are now including blessings for transgender people in the union’s 500-page resource manual for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inclusion. The guide includes two blessings authored by Rabbi Elliot Kukla for transitioning genders. You can read the official press release on this announcement by clicking to the Union for Reform Judaism site at this link HERE.

There is some news on the wire on this so here’s some additional resources for you to check out:

• Miami Herald.com coverage of this event
• Something Jewish.com coverage of this announcement

Alternet does what alot of other stories have done, covering Gender Identity Disorder and being a Transexual from the medical side and covering some of Ms. Daniels public disclosure. But the author, John Ireland, goes much further in giving an excellent survey history of transexual women in sports, and, the unexamined but very real culture of bigotry that exists in the culture of sport. He goes further to discuss those two areas in the context of Christine’s challenges today as a transexual woman sportswriter. The article is very well written and very informative.

Grab a cup of coffee and jog over to Alternet to read the article at this link HERE.

• When: Tuesday August 7th
• Where: Triangle Transgender Society, 16 River Street, Norwalk CT 06852 (The Triangle Community Center)
• Time: 7PM-10PM
• Donation: $5.00
• RSVP: Email The Triangle Transgender Society to give them a count on who’s coming, triangletgs@yahoo.com