Change of Heart

After living 57 years as a macho man, veteran Philadelphia police officer Maria Gonzalez will retire as a middle-aged woman.
by Steve Volk


At 8 years old he tried growing an onion but killed it through overwatering. His mom noticed that he liked flowers and taught him how to grow his own. Soon an L-shaped garden decorated the backyard where Heladio Gonzalez planted morning glories and snapdragons. Almost 50 years later he found out about the fights.

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Ending trans panic

We're normally on the side of the defense lawyers when it comes to criminal-justice legislation. The state has gone way too far down the road toward a lock-'em-up mentality, and most bills that come through the state legislature limiting the rights of criminal defendants are dangerous and deserve to die.
But AB 1160, by Assemblymember Sally Lieber (D–San Jose) is different. The bill would limit the use of so-called gay panic or (more frequently) trans panic defenses: the argument that a killer was driven to rage by the discovery that a person who appeared to be female was, in fact, biologically male, and thus is not fully responsible for the murder.


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Life in hell
In California prisons, an unconventional gender identity can be like an added sentence
By Tali Woodward

Rosa casts her dark eyes downward and then looks up from under wispy bangs to say matter-of-factly, "I've been raped six times.
"At one time I was raped by five individuals," she continues in slightly tentative English.
Rosa wasn't born female, but she says she was very young when she realized "I was special." Today, she doesn't just "pass" as a woman — it's hard to imagine how anyone would see this person with the bewitching eyes and feather-soft voice as anything else. 
Except that for the past eight years, Rosa has lived in men's prisons.

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White House adds anti-gay language to security clearance requirements
By KATHERINE SHRADER

The Bush administration last year quietly rewrote the rules for allowing gays and lesbians to receive national-security clearances, drawing complaints from civil rights activists.
The Bush administration said security clearances cannot be denied "solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the individual." But it removed language saying sexual orientation "may not be used as a basis for or a disqualifying factor in determining a person's eligibility for a security clearance."


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HOMOPHOBIC ATTACK IN ENGLAND

 Detectives in the London area of Waterloo are investigating an alleged rape of an 18 year-old man in the Pleasuredrome Sauna.