John and Stipe come together for Ashley Diamond

Elton John and Michael Stipe have something important to say:

We applaud the US Department of Justice for supporting Ashley Diamond and the trans community in arguing that Georgia’s policy of denying transgender inmates their medically necessary hormone treatment is unconstitutional,' it read.

'But we must do more to end the culture of violence and discrimination surrounding gender identity and expression.

'We urge the state of Georgia to embrace desperately needed changes to their correctional system.'

The forced dehumanizing of Ashley Diamond was called "cruel and unusual punishment" by the DOJ last week; The New York Times wrote about her brutal treatment:

“During intake, I kept saying: ‘Hello? I’m trans? I’m a woman?’ ” Ms. Diamond recounted in a phone conversation from prison a few weeks ago. “But to them I was gay. I was what they called a ‘sissy.’ So finally I was like: ‘O.K., I’m a sissy. Do you have a place where sissies can go and be O.K.?’ ”

They did not provide one, she said. A first-time inmate at 33 whose major offense was burglary, Ms. Diamond was sent to a series of high-security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has been raped at least seven times by inmates, her lawsuit asserts, with a detailed accounting of each. She has been mocked by prison officials as a “he-she thing” and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending to be a woman.” She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones. And, in desperation, she has tried to castrate and to kill herself several times.

It's good that Stipe and John are working together for something more important than who controls the cents coming from music streaming; it's unconscionable that it should take pop stars to teach the state of Georgia how you treat people.

Bookmarks - internet stuff: Sissy bounce

The New York Times introduces its readers to sissy bounce (even dusting off the phrase "gender bending" in the process):

And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

What, no Thurman?

Out magazine have essayed a mixtape selection of fluid sexual identity songs, which isn't a bad selection. Although it finds room for Sweet Transvestite that could have been better used by Thurman, surely?