The DonnaBlog

Today was my last day on the East Coast.  It’s 10pm in Phoenix and I’m home.

I had a great week.  Every day seemed jam packed from early morning until well past midnight.  I don’t think I was in bed before 1am all week.  Even so, I wasn’t able to fit everything in that I had hoped. 

I spent all day yesterday at the new National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce offices.  They’re beginning the process of creating a Transgender Business Owners Toolkit.  There are several resources available to people who come out on the job as transgender, but what if you own or are a principal in a business?  How do you tell your employees, your partners, your customers/cleints?  What are some of the unique challenges involved?  That’s the premise for this toolkit. 

One of the first steps will be to collect data from transgender business owners.  They’re creating a survey of questions and will be meeting with focus groups.  More to come on that.

One of the other exciting efforts they’re working on is a joint project with Out and Equal to create a Jobs portal.  They’ll have more to share on that, as well.

I continue to believe that the thing that remains unaddressed, but that is so  fundamentally important, is actually getting qualified trans-people hired for jobs.  I don’t want to downplay the importance of passing supportive policy, but if companies aren’t hiring anyone who can take advantage of them it’s little more than symbolic, and is actually misleading.  Some are counting on ENDA to change things, but that’s not something any of us can count on right now.  So, it’s important to fill that need in other ways.

Others see this significant gap, as well, and are working to fill it.  Jillian Barfield has been working on a transgender specific Job Site and recently sent and email indicating that it’s up and operational: TJobBank.com.  All in all, it’s gratifying to see that there is movement on this critical work.

I did a dry run today for the Conference Call next week.  Scheduling this kind of stuff isn’t as simple as you might think.  I’ll post the details in the morning. 

I also stopped by the Federal Aviation Administration to thank the person that my friend Jamy in Dallas has been working with for the past year to get her pilot health certification back.   She was very nice, and I’m glad I had a chance to share Jamy’s appreciation for all her efforts.

The Montgomery, MD saga continues as a judge ruled that the transgender discrimination protections passed unanimously by the County Council last year must be put to a public vote in November despite the protests of local GLBT organizations. (Details here)

The murder of 18-year old transwoman Angie Zapata in Greely, CO is being investigated as a possible hate crime and has become national news.  ABC News article here.  In the original story on the ABC News website the opening sentence was: “The beating death of a transgender teenager in Colorado may have been provoked by her lifestyle, police said”.  After being contacted by GLAAD, ABC News has changed it to “An 18-year-old found dead inside her Colorado apartment last week may have been targeted because she was transgender, police said”.  This entire notion that (a) her gender was a “lifestyle” and (b) she somehow bore responsibility for her brutal murder MUST be challenged.  Kudos to GLAAD for their fast work on this, however it still doesn’t change the fact that it happened in the first place.

And, of course, the HRC Gala dinner in San Francisco happens tomorrow night.  Local media are already reporting on it (see it here).  I’m betting that there will be as many people at the Left-Out party as there will be at the gala.  We’ll see.

I’d write more, but I’m tired.  The plane ride from Baltimore to Phoenix takes 4 hours and 20 minutes – it’s a long haul.  The good news is that by staying up so late these last few nights I shouldn’t have much time zone confusion to get over.  The bad news is that I’ve got some significant plans to make over the next few days.  It’ll be nice to sleep in my own bed for a change.  It’s just one of those simple pleasures…..