How This Trans Woman Is Making #FreeTheNipple As Inclusive As Possible

“Courtney Demone is a trans woman currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy and, as such, is starting to grow breasts. This experience, she wrote in a Mashable essay published Wednesday, has led her to realize the power of #FreeTheNipple in a new way — and how it can truly benefit others.

“‘When people start to consistently see me as a woman, my privilege to be comfortably topless in public will be gone for good,’ she writes. ‘We can challenge that.’

Demone’s solution? She’s launching the hashtag #DoIHaveBoobsNow and will post topless images of herself on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. She will do so, she writes, “until those networks decide that my breasts have developed enough to be sexualized and worthy of censorship” or, ideally, change their policies.

More at Mic

Transgender Woman Says TSA Detained, Humiliated Her Over Body ‘Anomaly’

“A transgender woman said she was detained and harassed at an Orlando, Fla., airport security checkpoint Monday by Transportation Safety Administration agents after a body scanner detected an ‘anomaly’ on her.

“Shadi Petosky, who runs a Los Angeles interactive entertainment studio, said she was trying to fly out of Orlando International Airport but was stopped after entering the scanner.

“In her tweets about the situation, Petosky said that TSA agents calibrated the scanner for a woman, and the machine flagged an anomaly — ‘my penis.’

“She said she ‘disclosed [her] reality immediately,’ but the situation quickly escalated: Over the course of 40 minutes, Petosky said, officials patted her down twice, ‘fully disassembled’ her luggage and put her in an empty room with an officer holding the door.

“At one point, she said, an agent told her to ‘get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem.’

“The ordeal caused her to miss her flight, she said….”

More at LA Times

Criminalization of Queer People Worldwide

While celebrating the gains of queer people, such as the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriages, I feel it’s important to remember that you can still be arrested for your sexual orientation in 75 countries and punished by death in 10 countries around the world.

LGBT Criminalization Around the World