2015 was the most momentous year in trans history. From scattered events in trans prehistory - Lili Elbe (The Danish Girl) , Christine Jorgensen, Sylvia Rivera, and Renee Richards - the community finally entered the historical mainstream in 2015 with the splashy "outcoming" of Caitlyn Jenner. She changed...

This is a tale of two academic gender clinics -- for one it is the best of times, for the other, the worst.

I will start with the worst -- not only the worst of times, but the worst gender clinic in North America -- at the Centre for Addiction...

Monotheistic fundamentalists believe in different variations of the same god, but they have a common mindset. While America today may be focused on jihadi terrorists who kill in the name of Islam, we have Christian terrorists attacking health clinics in the name of Jesus here in the States and Jewish...

These have been a difficult few weeks for me, following the death of my mother. I find my expectations dashed, as I get hit with waves of pain and longing out of the blue. I cried throughout the movie, Brooklyn, last night, as I imagined my parents finding...

I buried my mother today. She had reached the end of her long and productive life, and while her last act was not as she would have chosen to play it, the scenes were, in perspective, relatively brief if emotionally difficult. She is now at peace, lying with my father,...

Thanksgiving is our annual day for family and friends, one divorced from any religion other than the civic religion of America. It's a holiday all but native Americans can embrace, from the newest immigrants to the earliest European settlers. As the country has evolved we've found innumerable ways to express...

Uncontroversial congressional debates are all alike; every controversial debate is valuable in its own way.

This paraphrase of Leo Tolstoy's famous opening line in the novel, Anna Karenina, mirrors a basic law of politics, whose statistical analogue is called the Anna Karenina Principle: there are any number...

The recent spate of change.org petitions demanding a divorce between the LGB community and the trans one, either by dropping the "T" or dropping the "L" from LGBT, has ripped the bandage off the abscess of gay transphobia which has been part of the LGBT civil rights movement since its...

As we proceed in our advocacy efforts post-HERO, no longer with any excuses to ignore the strategies of "bathroom bills" and "religious liberty" espoused by our adversaries, we need to take stock and seriously consider how we can create new allies. We've never been able to win more than a...

Let's be honest in our analysis of the Houston debacle. Many of us saw it coming, so it cannot be called a surprise. Texas might be part of the Confederacy, but Houston has elected a Democratic mayor the past forty years, and most recently thrice-elected a lesbian. The...

This morning there was an interesting op-ed by David Ignatius in The Washington Post on the cultural context surrounding the Republican primary campaign for president. He discussed the evolution of the American cultural zeitgeist from irony to awkwardness.

I have sensed that awkwardness in the response of the...

As I near completion of my third year with the Huffington Post, I've been asked a number of times to speak about the state of trans and LGBT America. In the lull following the dénouement of the campaign for marriage equality, some are hungry to learn what's next. As I...

This fall season has been marred for the LGBT community by the premiere of the movie, Stonewall. Directed by openly gay Roland Emmerich, known for his disaster movies such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, and White House Down, this film has turned into a disaster of another...

In this fall season of LGBT arts community conflict swirling around Roland Emmerich's mass-market historical fiction, Stonewall, it's my pleasure to announce a positive production of interest to the LGBT, and, particularly, trans community.

UrbanArias, Washington DC's contemporary opera company, is about to produce a really interesting and...

In the post-Jenner world, with multiple mainstream media outlets covering trans stories with increasing degrees of accuracy and respect, we are now faced with the question of who are the gatekeepers to that history. Who gets to tell the story which will become the accepted and acceptable narrative for the...

"First, do no harm" (Primum non nocere) is the first ethical axiom all medical students are taught. It takes many years to fully internalize what that means, from learning to respect the patient's determination of harm to himself, to the restraint a surgeon must exercise when she wants to clip...

As the newly elected Vice Chair of the Civil Rights Coalition of Maryland, and a longtime progressive and civil rights activist, I've watched with great hope and anticipation the rise of #BlackLivesMatter. I see this group as the first serious national grassroots movement to arise in the African-American community since...

This has been the summer of the brewing Jewish communal civil war, many years in development but catalyzed by the Israeli government's unprecedented direct interference into domestic American politics this spring and summer. As many of you know, the Obama administration, as part of the P5+1 (which includes Russia and...

The Equality Act was introduced -- what now?

My conclusions:

We give the Leadership Conference time to thoroughly vet the bill. We -- including Caitlyn Jenner, a self-avowed Republican and Christian, who has offered her assistance -- organize to lobby the Republicans whose votes are essential for passage...

Last Thursday, Senate and House Democrats, 205 in all, introduced the Equality Act (S.1858/H.R.3185). Decades in the making, and not introduced since 1974 when Bella Abzug and Ed Koch were its Congressional sponsors, it's the first comprehensive and inclusive piece of federal legislation to cover the...