Transgender
Season 16 of Lifetime’s fashion hit Project Runway premiered Thursday, August 17, with a focus on designing for all body types, ranging “in size from two to 22,” according to designer and the show’s judge Tim Gunn. Oh, and a "dude in a dress." Because, of course.
Leave it to the loony fringe from Its Going Down -- the folks too illiterate to use an apostrophe -- to hate on nations and borders. IGD is a pro-antifa site that was recently banned on the funding site Patreon. (Here’s their wildly spun version of events.) IGD posted a big piece called: “Borders: The Global Caste System.” Actual quote one: “The border is not just a wall or a line on a map. It’s a power structure, a system of control. The border is everywhere that people live in fear of deportation, everywhere migrants are denied the rights accorded citizens, everywhere human beings are segregated into included and excluded.”
There was a theme going on with Wednesday night programming on TLC this week: it was all about transgender teenagers. The hour long special Growing Up Evancho premiered August 9 following I Am Jazz and it, too, features a teenage boy who wants to live as a girl. It is a show about celebrity teen Jackie Evancho, who gained celebrity status from her singing performance on America’s Got Talent, and her older "sister" who goes by Juliet and is transgender. The family hopes this special will launch them into their own full series.
Thank Gaia for the Associated Press and its super-practical news you can use. Otherwise, how would you know if your four-year-old is among the .06 percent of the population that is transgender?
On Friday's The Beat with Ari Melber -- a relatively new MSNBC show that recently replaced Greta Van Susteren's For the Record program -- host Melber not surprisingly assembled a panel of lefties to discuss the week's news for the show's regular "Fall Back" segment. Former Ebony editor-in-chief Amy DuBois Barnett took aim at Caitlyn Jenner because the transgender Republican was recently seen wearing a pro-Donald Trump hat even after Trump's announced ban on transgenders in the military. Inserting race into the conversation, DuBois griped Jenner is "flaunting her residual white male privilege."
The author of a Tuesday column on CNN.com called on companies and organization to make "gender-neutral" language mandatory in the workplace, as American society supposedly needs to "move beyond the assumption that everyone should assimilate into the categories of male or female." Heath Fogg Davis, a transgender academic, proposed that employers should "require that everyone adopt a gender-neutral pronoun." Fogg Davis contended that such language would "minimize the opportunities for others to evaluate our gender and risk getting wrong something so important."
The caricature of an MSNBC conservative is a commentator with a right-leaning background who -- when appearing as a panel member on the liberal news network -- either agrees with the liberal guests or fails to rebut liberal analysis while offering little actual right-leaning analysis to the discussion. Washington Post columnist and regular MSNBC guest Jennifer Rubin may have gone beyond caricature on Monday's Hardball as she actually seemed to enjoy reporting that "social conservatives" are "dying off."
On Monday, Julie Watson and Christoph Noelting of the Associated Press spotlighted the plight of Captain Jonathan Sims, an officer in the U.S. Army who came out as transgender in April 2017. The two journalists hyped how Captain Sims, who now goes by the name "Jennifer," felt "unease" and "uncertainty" in the wake of President Donald Trump's Twitter post on Wednesday announcing he would reinstate the military's ban on transgenders. The pair cited sympathetic family members and colleagues of the serviceman, but failed to include any quotes from supporters of the President's policy proposal.
CNN host Alisyn Camerota has been making appearances recently to discuss her new book, Amanda Wakes Up, which is a fictional work that is nevertheless based in part on her past experiences working as a FNC host for the weekend edition of Fox and Friends. Camerota -- who left FNC to join CNN three years ago -- has been showing this past week a greater willingness to criticize her former employer -- yesterday on CNN's Reliable Sources, going so far as to charge that her old FNC show "unnecessarily stoked outrage" and "took a really myopic view of, say, President Obama or the current administration."
The New York Times’ Pentagon reporter Helene Cooper evidently finds the personal stories of transgender military service members much more compelling than all that boring stuff about national defense and fighting terrorism. That was the revealing if unintended takeaway from her Sunday piece, prominently placed on page 2, on Trump’s tweet announcing a ban on transgenders in the military: “When Soldiers Plead Their Humanity.” The online headline was even sappier: “A Pentagon Correspondent Keeps Sight of the Person Inside the Uniform.”
On Saturday's CNN Newsroom, two segments ran which both pushed from the left against President Donald Trump's announced ban on transgenders serving in the military. The first segment gave a sympathetic forum to a transgender activist and former Navy SEAL who ended up absurdly suggesting that the military should sextuple spending on sex change treatment from $8 million to $50 million a year. And a later segment featured two right-leaning guests who nevertheless both bashed the move from the left by using pointed words like "narrow-minded," "ignorant," and "dumb"; and by predicting that it would be "disruptive," "offensive," and "damaging" for the military.
Take your stinkin’ paws off my photo you damn dirty ape. OK, it’s not exactly Charlton Heston, but the war between Peta and a photographer isn’t Planet of the Apes either. It’s still a struggle of man vs. ape. In the original movie, apes took over after mankind had all-but wiped itself out with nuclear weapons. Today, we have worse tools at our disposal -- lawyers and eco-nuts. Alternet gave us both wrapped up in the same wacky package.