U.S. first tranny mayor
The first time in 40 years an Oregon Senate candidate beat an incumbent Senator. And in tiny Silverton, Oregon, residents have elected the man who's believed to be the first ever openly transgender mayor in the United States.
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Stu Rasmussen served two terms as the Mayor of Silverton in the 1990s. But he hadn't admitted to being transgender. He's not the same man now that he was then. Today he wears a skirt and high heels. He has breast implants, and long red hair. He looks like a woman - but he's not.
"I identify mostly as a heterosexual male," Rasmussen said. "But I just like to look like a female."
Rasmussen is a man. He even has a girlfriend. He says he's always been transgender, but he only "came out" a few years ago.
With the way he looks, he wasn't sure how his run for Mayor would go.
"The first 30 seconds they think, am I in a freak show? Is there a camera behind me? What's going on here?" Rasmussen told NewsChannel 8. "And then we get down to discussing whatever the issue is - city business or business or whatever - and they figure out this guy's different, but he knows what he's talking about."
It's Rasmussen's knowledge of the issues, and of the town, that won over so many voters. As one voter said, "Stu's very devoted to this town."
Rasmussen won by a hefty margin - 13 points. It really wasn't close.
"He wants to maintain the integrity of Silverton," voter Gail Frassenei said. And she said she isn't sure Rasmussen would be elected anywhere else. "I think it's amazing a small town like this can be so open-minded, to elect someone that's made a life change."
"I'm prejudiced, but I think this is just about the coolest town on Earth," Rasmussen said, just before he broke down, a tear gently running through his eyeliner, and onto his cheek. He can't wait to take office in January. He said he's finally confident enough to be himself, as he runs his hometown, wearing his signature heels.
While the U.S. Congress continues to be mired in a swamp of partisan bickering over health care reform, and the American Psychiatric Association refuses to remove “Gender Identity Disorder” from its Diagnostic and Statiscal Manual, Cuba’s communist government has begun paying for sex change operations for some of its transgender citizens.
The program began in 1988 but was suspended for two decades amid complaints that the government had better things to spend its money on, according to this Associated Press story. But the program has started back up now under Mariela Castro, President Raul Castro’s daughter and the woman known as the country’s biggest LGBT rights activist.
Eight trans people were involved in the initial program, and now that it has restarted, 22 more trans people are waiting to get the surgery.
Read the whole story here.
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A Colorado man who says he bludgeoned his date to death out of rage and shock after discovering she was biologically male was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder and a hate crime. Jurors deliberated about two hours before finding Allen Ray Andrade, 32, guilty of killing Angie Zapata, formerly known as Justin Zapata, 18, of Greeley last July after meeting up on a social networking website. District Judge Marcelo Kopcow swiftly sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole -- the state's mandatory sentence for first-degree murder.
Zapata, a transsexual, had dressed as female for much of her life, her family said. The case was among the first uses of a hate-crimes statute that protects transgendered people. The victim's mother, Maria Zapata, told the judge before sentencing: "It's been so hard, so hard for my family and myself. . . . I lost something, somebody so precious."
All violent crimes are reprehensible. But the damage done by hate crimes cannot be measured solely in terms of physical injury or dollars and cents. Hate crimes rend the fabric of our society and fragment communities because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. Hate crimes are committed to cause fear to a whole community. A violent hate crime is intended to “send a message” that an individual and “their kind” will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected. 
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the term "hate crime" didn't enter the national vocabulary until the 1980s, when Skinheads and other groups committed a continual series of bias-based crimes. Hangings, lynching, vandalism and cross burning have been a method of intimidation and bias in the U.S. for some time. However, the FBI didn't begin investigating what we now call hate crimes until their first Ku Klux Klan case in 1924.
Bias Motivated Violent Crime Affects an Entire Community
The hate crimes provision was not included in the final version of the DoD bill. The provision fell victim to House opponents of hate crimes legislation as well as unrelated concerns regarding Iraq-related provisions of the bill. The hate crimes veto threat issued by the White House and organized opposition by House Republican Leadership cost significant numbers of votes on the right. Iraq-related provisions that many progressive Democrats opposed cost votes on the left. Moderate Democrats, many of whom voted for the hate crimes bill in May, did not want to test the President’s veto threat and risk a delay in increased pay for military personnel. All of these factors resulted in insufficient votes to secure passage of the bill with the hate crimes provision.
