Britain - Kellie Telesford (nee Kayiode Dexter Telesford) - death will be reviewed by police after a teenager was cleared of her murder... [2008-08-22 Croydon Advertiser]

http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/latestnews/Teen-cleared-murdering-transexual/article-283351-detail/article.html

Teen cleared of murdering transexual

22-August-2008

The case of transsexual Kellie Telesford's death will be reviewed by police after a teenager was cleared of her murder.

Shanniel Hyatt, 18, of Northborough Road, Thornton Heath, admitted being with her on the night of her death and stealing her mobile phone, freeview box and DVD player.

But a jury believed the teenager when he said he left Miss Telesford "fit and well" and had not strangled her with her scarf.

Joanna Greenberg QC, defending, suggested the 39-year-old could have died during a "kinky sex game" with another man after Hyatt left her flat in Leander Road, Thornton Heath.

Miss Greenburg said: "Her dressing gown showed signs of perhaps quite vigorous sexual activity.

"It doesn't exclude the possibility that the strangulation was either self-inflicted or was part of a consensual act with a partner."

After four hours of deliberation, the Old Bailey jury cleared Hyatt of murder and an alternative of manslaughter last Thursday.

But he now faces being kicked out of the country as an illegal immigrant.

The Jamaican was told he will remain in custody facing deportation.

After the verdict a police spokesman revealed that with a conviction not secured the case would be looked at again.

He said: "As is procedure in these circumstances the case will be reviewed before any decision regarding future action is made."

Miss Telesford had been born Kayode Dexter Telesford in Trinidad, but had been living as a woman for five years after moving to England.

Despite this her relatives in the Caribbean were unaware of her decision and only learnt about her new life after she died.

She met Hyatt outside the beauty salon where she worked in London Road, Norbury, on November 17 last year after telling colleagues she was going for a drink with a "handsome light-skinned guy".

They then headed to Miss Telesford's flat.

The victim spoke to several friends through the night on the phone as she and Hyatt had a couple of drinks and watched DVDs.

She last chatted to someone at 3am the following morning "and seemed fine" but was never heard from or seen alive again.

The court heard Hyatt left the flat at 6am carrying a large bag and was caught on camera getting on a bus 15 minutes later, using Miss Telesford's Oyster card.

He later sold her DVD player and freeview box for £10 and offered her mobile phone to his girlfriend, the Old Bailey heard.

Miss Telesford's friends became concerned for her safety when she failed to answer their calls.

Police smashed open her door on November 21 and discovered a brown scarf wrapped twice around her neck.

After her death friends left tributes on the Advertiser's website.

One wrote: "Kellie was a beautiful person with a heart of gold."

Hyatt was arrested eight days later but he denied reacting violently after discovering she was a pre-op transsexual during the date.

END

Britain - Jerry Springer's name will always be synonymous with his TV talk show... [2008-08-23 The Independent]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jerry-springer-the-holocaust-and-my-family-905317.html

Jerry Springer: The holocaust and my family

His name will always be synonymous with his TV talk show, but there's more to Jerry Springer than spoof operas and fighting dwarfs. James Rampton meets a fiercely political animal who's coming to terms with a painful family history

Saturday, 23 August 2008

I Married My Horse. Pregnant by a Transsexual. Honey, I'm a Call Girl. Here Come the Hookers. My Boyfriend's a Girl. I Refuse to Wear Clothes. Jerry Rescues a 1,200 Pound Couple. When Past Guests Attack.

These are some of the more memorable titles of episodes from The Jerry Springer Show. The programme, which has been running for 17 years to audiences of up to 25 million in the States and is now syndicated to more than 40 countries, has been held up as the dictionary definition of car-crash TV. One of the most watched clips on YouTube, for instance, is of two dwarfs having a huge punch-up on the show, while the studio audience whoop and holler their approval. It makes the Roman Arena look like a model of restraint.

Jerry Springer himself has been accused by critics of taking "the dumbing-down of America to the furthest extremes" and of being "a million-dollar pimp who seduces the worst of American culture". It's a show so tasteless that an entire opera was built around its trailer-trash crassness. So I'm bracing myself before meeting the man one columnist has dubbed "the King of Sleaze".

But upon entering the smart hotel, I encounter someone refined, cultured, immaculately tailored and possessed of a razor-sharp sense of self-irony. To pre-empt anyone else taking the rise out of him, Springer is always the first to send himself up. With a laugh, for example, he recollects bumping into the actor portraying him in the West End production of Jerry Springer: The Opera. "I offered my condolences. No one should have to go through life looking like me. I told him, 'You poor thing, have you considered surgery? It's the pinnacle of your career – and you have to play me.' Imagine having to put that on your résumé – 'I was Jerry Springer.' Oh great!" In a similarly self-deprecating moment, the presenter went on stage at the end of the first night of Jerry Springer: The Opera and simply said: "I'm sorry".

Meeting him, then, is quite a surprise. But Springer is full of surprises, as I am to find out. He starts by explaining to me that there are in fact two Jerry Springers. There is "Jerry Springer", the almost cartoon-ish vulgarian who hosts the talk show and fails to intervene as the dregs of American society hurl abuse and heavy items of studio furniture at one another. And then there is the Jerry Springer with no quotation marks, the man who exists away from the TV show bear-pit, the quietly spoken, shrewd operator who uses the profile the programme gives him to further his liberal politics.

Today I'm meeting the latter version. A canny man, he is quick to acknowledge the duality. "The public Jerry Springer is a persona which deserves to have the piss taken out of it," he says. "The show couldn't work without the persona we've created. I've always separated the private from the public. There is no tension and no fake ego. Away from the screen, I have this wonderful life, and yet I can go to the office and become this larger-than-life celebrity who gets into trouble. I never combine the two personas – because that would destroy them both."

It is the thoughtful Springer who also makes an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?, BBC1's genealogy programme, which goes out on Wednesday. He reveals an unexpectedly sensitive side and is reduced to tears as he explores what happened to his family during the Holocaust. His parents had to leave Germany in such haste, they were not able to take their mothers with them. So now he is attempting to find out what became of the grandmothers he never met.

He begins his emotional journey by coming to this country, where he was born in East Finchley Tube station during an air raid in 1944. His German-Jewish parents fled here on 1 August 1939, just a month before the border closed at the outbreak of the Second World War. (Later, in 1949, the Springer family emigrated to Queen's in New York.)

Springer then travels to what was then Landsberg in Germany (and is now Gorzow in Poland), where his father ran a shoe shop before the War. During the 1930s, Jews in that town were subject to increasingly hostile discrimination – they were banned from public transport, parks and libraries and were not allowed to own pets, telephones, cars or bicycles. In the local archive, Springer reads a newspaper from 1933 ordering people not to visit Jewish businesses, lawyers or doctors. "Bastards!" he says, the anger clear on his face.

Springer goes on to discover that in 1942 his maternal grandmother, Marie Kallman, was dispatched in a cattle train to Chelmno extermination camp, where she was among the first to be gassed to death. As Springer wanders around the trains wreathed in barbed wire that have been kept at a nearby station as a memorial to the victims, he sobs and says a prayer.

Meanwhile, he finds out that his paternal grandmother, Selma Springer, was deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto near Prague. The Nazis put out propaganda films claiming that the ghetto was like a holiday camp. In fact, it was squalid, hideously overcrowded and rife with disease. The starving Selma died there in 1943.

In the hush of the hotel drawing room, Springer tries to make sense of why the Holocaust was allowed to happen. "We are all born as empty vessels which can be shaped by moral values," he says. "You could dress up the Nazis and teach them how to speak and assume that they would take moral decisions. But the truth is that these people had no moral compass. What you saw in Germany then was a moral vacuum, where very few people had the courage to stand up and say to the Nazis, 'You want me to do that? Are you crazy?'"

Making the programme clearly had a deep effect on Springer. First of all, it gave him an insight into what his parents suffered. His father's shoe shop in Landsberg was regularly attacked. "Everyone talks, quite rightly, about the horror of the Holocaust," he says. "But think of the fear from 1933 onwards, the constant terror of knowing that tonight you might get a knock on the door and the Gestapo might take you away. I can't imagine that was anything other than horrific."

After the War, Springer's parents, Richard and Margot, lived permanently with the after-shock of the Holocaust. "One of the reasons I wanted to make Who Do You Think You Are? was to find out what happened to my family, because my parents didn't want to talk about it," he sighs. "They'd talk about the War in general terms, and then stop in mid-sentence. It was too painful for them. They wouldn't even watch The Sound of Music because of the Nazi uniforms in that film. You don't want to make your parents uncomfortable, but I wish now that I had sat them down and said, 'Tell me all about it.' But survivors always say, 'Once you open that door, you can never shut it again. If I let you into that room, you'll never leave'."

He carries on: "I can quite understand their reticence. It would be as if, at your age, someone came to your house, arrested your relatives and forced you to flee to Pakistan. You didn't speak the language or know a soul, but worst of all, you had no idea what had happened to any of your family. How would you lead a normal life after that? My parents were determined to live an independent life in America, but they only managed to appear normal by suppressing all that horror."

Having made Who Do You Think You Are?, Springer feels that his family is a paradigm for what has happened to Jewish people in Europe over the past couple of centuries. "You know when you read those historical novels and there's a fictional character placed in the middle of major events? He's a friend of Churchill's or he worked for Stalin. That was my family. Whatever happened to Europe in the last 200 years, my family was in the middle of it.

"In Neustettin during the 1880s, my great grandfather, Abraham, was the head of the first Jewish temple in Europe to be burnt down in 700 years – that was the start of all the recent anti-Semitism. The next generation had rocks thrown through their windows and were sent to the death camps. Then the next generation escaped to America. It's like my family has been in the middle of a historical novel."

Springer admits that the War has left a huge mark on him personally. For a start, it has bequeathed him a lasting affection for this country. "Britain saved my parents' life. They were real Anglophiles. I'm an American, but I have a phenomenal love for this country. I'm always looking for work here – not because I need a job, but because I'm looking for an excuse to come here. I'll always be grateful – Churchill is a human god, and I wouldn't be here talking to you if it wasn't for him."

Beyond that, the Holocaust has had other far-reaching consequences for Springer. "It made me profoundly liberal," observes the presenter, who in the 1960s worked as an aide to Robert Kennedy. He gives the fees from the South African broadcasts of his TV show to Aids charities, and has set up a scholarship for disadvantaged youths at the Keliman School in Chicago. "It was instinctive for me to be involved with civil liberties. You don't have to be lectured about tolerance when your family has been through the Holocaust."

****

Springer, who studied political science at Tulane University and then law at Northwestern University, broadens his argument out into a liberal defence of The Jerry Springer Show. "The Establishment say 'get rid of these people' and call them trash. And yet wealthy people live exactly the same lives – only they have more money and speak the Queen's English. We're all alike – it's just that some people dress better. Princess Diana talked about bulimia and cheating and suicide – all the things that are discussed on my show – and nobody called that lovely lady trash. Some people just like to assume that they're better than everyone else, so they dismiss the guests on my show. But we can't buy books and magazines fast enough to read about it when the rich and famous do exactly the same things.

"It's a stupid show and I've never said anything else. But there's something in me that enjoys defending it against the elite who get so bent out of shape about it. It's funny watching them huffing and puffing when, in reality, they behave in exactly the same way as the people on the show."

Springer gets equally indignant when critics accuse the show of being responsible for the Downfall of Western Civilisation As We Know It. "I'm amazed I'm that powerful," grins Springer, who also fronts the ludicrously successful America's Got Talent. "Western civilisation has been around for thousands of years, so I suppose it must be time to give another system a shot. It's obviously not fair that we're always number one! I must say, I thought that the Holocaust was a bit more of a threat to Western civilisation, but call me crazy.

"We're not out there touting the show as having redeeming social value. It's not as if I've found a cure for cancer. I know everyone likes to put this cultural importance on it, but from the start, I kept it tongue-in-cheek because when you take TV into real life, there are consequences. Everybody shakes hands at the end and tomorrow everything will be just fine. People don't wake up saying, 'The Jerry Springer Show! Oh my God, I'm going to have to jump out of the window!'"

Springer, who has been separated from his wife Micki since 1994 but remains very close to their daughter Katie, claims that his talk show has no negative consequences. "Absolutely not. If you want to see people having an effect, watch the news. A show in which people shout at each other about relationships pales in comparison to genocide, say, or the catastrophe of Aids in Africa. So many people in the world have really serious problems that I have difficulty getting concerned when critics start yelling about a TV show. Ultimately, it's like complaining about a meal in a restaurant – it's not going to change the world. Get over it!"

The show has certainly never inhibited Springer's political commitments. He has been very active in campaigning for the Democrats in this year's race for the White House. He was supporting Hillary Clinton, but has now thrown his weight behind Barack Obama.

"There has been a wall of criticism of the States in recent times – some of it justified – but it strikes me as amazing that just seven years after 9/11, someone called Barack Obama, an African-American with an Islamic name, could become President. To me, that indicates a very open society. No matter what the government does, people are cool. We Americans can be boisterous, but instinctively we come out on the right side. Good for America. I feel proud of that."

He thinks Obama will win the election in November, "By a landslide. The issue goes beyond Obama – there is just a tidal wave of people saying "enough" to Bush and moving in a different direction. [John] McCain may simply be on the wrong train. History tends to move like a pendulum, and it's swung towards liberalism now."

Springer believes that Obama can help repair America's tattered global image. "I think it will be a great benefit. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but even though it's currently popular to say bad things about America, I think deep down most of the world doesn't hate my country. Are people around the world angry with America? Absolutely and quite legitimately. But do they go to bed at night thinking America is going to attack them? No. Everywhere is safe." He adds with a smile: "Except perhaps for France!"

Politics – which Springer describes as like "a religion" to him – really fires him up. He is still livid, for instance, about the war in Iraq. "That never made sense to me, even if Bush was telling the truth about Weapons of Mass Destruction – in fact, particularly if he was telling the truth about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Why the hell would you bomb a country that could fire back? That would be insane! Bush did real damage to America's reputation around the world."

He is equally incensed by the British government's decision to lock up terrorist suspects for 42 days without charging them. "You can't have the government determining how long people are imprisoned for," Springer fumes. "That's the job of the courts. Habeas corpus is a right that goes back to the Magna Carta, and governments can't infringe upon that."

Does this burning political passion mean that he is likely to seek election again? Springer has in the past talked openly about standing for the Senate. "It's possible," he concedes, "but it's not absolutely necessary. I feel I get more of a voice talking to people like you. My current profile gives me a phenomenal platform. People encourage me all the time to enter formal politics – they know I'm liberal and outspoken – but I think I get on TV more now talking about these issues than I would if I were a Senator. That's the advantage of celebrity."

The other advantage is being able to explore your family's roots on a documentary as moving as Who Do You Think You Are?. "Of course," Springer sighs, "I'd have preferred not to have provided the material for this programme. But I hope that people watch it and that it provokes discussion.

"Above all, I hope people remember that the Holocaust happened in our lifetime and was carried out by people who looked just like us. It's so easy to pass it off as a tribal thing that happened 800 years ago. Wrong! It happened in the most civilised society in Europe, a culture that had great music and literature."

He underlines that this story must never stop being recounted. As The Diary of Anne Frank – the biggest- selling book in the world after The Bible – has proved, the tale of one person's suffering can have more impact than an account of the slaughter of millions. "The story has more effect when it's about an individual," Springer says. "When you say six million people were killed, it loses its force, because people can't get their heads around that number. But when you personalise it, it has a far greater impact. You can immediately imagine your own grandmother in that situation."

Springer likes to sign off each episode of his talk show with a summary of what we've learnt. So what might we take away from Who Do You Think You Are? He pauses. "I hope the programme makes you think about one thing," he replies. "How can we stop this happening again?"

-

'Who Do You Think You Are?' is on BBC1 at 9pm this Wednesday [BLS: 2008-08-27...]

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©independent.co.uk

Kuwait - Transsexuals meet with MPs over new law... [2008-08-22 Kuwait Times]

http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=NjU5MTM5MTM5

FRIDAY TIMES

Transsexuals meet with MPs over new law

August 22, 2008

KUWAIT: A number of local transsexuals met on Wednesday with several MPs, handing the parliamentarians a petition asking them to support cross-dressers because they suffer from an illness, reported Al Watan. The letter complained that recently-introduced legislation did not take transsexuals' psychological and physical circumstances into consideration.

In their letter they said, "We are citizens who fate made different, and this difference made us criminals in a crime that may be stupid, but was not created by us. The letter continued, saying that they were "writing this complaint not to ask for pity, but to speak to your minds in the names of those who have been treated unjustly due to the result of this oppressive law".

The letter continued: "Every law is built around well thought-out foundations, but the laws that are built on unknown and unstudied foundations or on social and religious foundations deprive a large group of people who may not be related to the law, such as we who are concerned with this complaint...we hope that you look into this letter with your hearts and consciences, and not only with your minds.

The letter included a number of suggestions to deal with transsexualism, "based on medical reports, which state that the psychological condition of the [transsexual] is based on a sexual identity complex, on which no doctor will differ with another as professor from Kuwait and abroad had testified. As they said, this illness has only one solution, which is a total sex change. We suggest that you take those reports into consideration because they comes from a specialized authority in this field (offering Quranic verses as support), and this report gives legal immunity to the individual suffering from an illness.

They added that these views are based on the expert opinions of many religious scholars in Kuwait and abroad who agreed that transsexualism is a case of sexual alteration related to a confusion over sexual orientation, as well as the testimonies of several religious dignitaries and scientists, who unanimously agreed that transsexualism is not related to homosexuality and sodomy which are forbidden by Almighty Allah and His Messenger (PBUH).

The letter went on, "At the suggestion of many legal specialists and lawyers who insist that this law is unconstitutional, we suggest that you reconsider the text of this law, particularly its definition of acting like the other text, and the cases that fall under this category, so that these issues do not get muddled and confused".

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© Kuwait Times Newspaper 2006.

Jamaica - Upper-class M2F gender variant Jamaican Lady Colin Campbell is an example of the dilemma caused by the well-thought-through design of our Creator... [2008-08-24 Jamaica-Gleaner]

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20080824/focus/focus5.html

Gendered fender benders

Sunday August 24, 2008

Glenda Simms
Contributor

In an effort to guarantee the human rights of all citizens of the modern world, governments of all political stripes ratify a whole range of international conventions and treaties and make commitments to honour the human rights of all their citizens. In particular, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is broadly accepted as a commitment to the intrinsic human rights of children.

In this overall vision of non-discrimination on any basis, the majority of governments, including the Jamaican government, also ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).


Human rights

Articles 1 and 2 of this most important Women's Human Rights Treaty call upon nation states to define discrimination against women to mean "any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field".

In order to achieve these lofty goals within a traditional patriarchal framework, CEDAW challenges state parties to "embody the principle of the equality of men and women in their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation".

In essence, the ratification of this landmark women's human rights treaty is a commitment for all the signatories to ensure that no woman is discriminated against on any grounds.


Positive change

While there is an observable and measurable positive change in the status of women and girls in general in all regions of the world, there are still specific groups of women whose human rights are violated because of the social, religious and political ideologies of their societies.

In this confusion around those who deserve to be discriminated against, some societies have clearly declared that men and women who define their sexuality outside of what is defined as the 'norm' run the risk of experiencing state-sanctioned discrimination.

While the jury is out on the genesis of all forms of sexual orientation outside of the heterosexual, there is a group of human beings whose sexual identity implicated the hands of the many gods who purportedly created the ingredients that make us women or men, boys or girls.

In a recent presentation to a sub-committee of CEDAW, a non-governmental group representing transsexual women in Germany argued that the state discriminates against women who were designed to be girls at birth but who entered the world with ambiguous genitalia.

In some societies, these human beings are call hermaphrodites but in general terms "there are studies in fields of neuroscience, human genetics and other disciplines that prove that transsexuality is something one is born with", and by extension, such human beings ought not to be discriminated against, on any basis.


Intrinsic knowledge

Individuals who advocate for this group of persons argue that the "brain is the most important sexual organ" and any person born with this variation on the human theme has a right to define his or her identity based on his or her intrinsic knowledge of his or her "God-given" being.

From the concerns raised on behalf of transsexual women, CEDAW experts learnt that in Germany there are between 80,000 to 120,000 citizens who identify themselves as intersexual individuals. In other words, these persons were born either without an observable penis or vagina, or with both of these body parts which are the external markers that define us as either boy or girl.

Today, human rights activists are challenging the German government to control the power of the medical fraternity, which has historically decided the sexual identity of intersexual children at birth.

In my capacity as an expert on the CEDAW, I am constantly being challenged to contemplate how some of the non-mainstream gendered issues, such as intersexuality are dealt with or hidden in the socio-cultural fabric of the Jamaican society.

Rural Jamaican folk of my vintage were birthed in the privacy of the family home, where our mothers were attended by the local 'midwife' who had no medical training, but whose reputation for safe delivery predates the contemporary middle-class 'home birthing movement'.


Whispers

From time to time, among the rural peasantry, there were whispers about a girl baby who was born with both a penis and a vagina. These whispers were generally never confirmed because the two people (mother and midwife) who knew the truth behind the rumours kept their mouths shut.In sharp contrast, according to an entry in Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia.

Lady Colin Campbell is described as a woman who was born in Jamaica in 1949 to a prominent family, who are descendants of Maronite Catholic brothers who migrated to Jamaica from Lebanon in the early 1900s.

Lady Colin Campbell reportedly was born "with an unspecified form of intersex and was brought up as a boy named George William until her late teens".

When she was 13 she realised that there was something wrong with her gendered definition and secretly sought the help of a gynaecologist. Of course, her parents objected and "authorised brutal treatment with other physicians who forcibly gave her male hormones".


Gender reassignment

Because of her connections to money and the power class, this woman was able to eventually get 'gender reassignment surgery' at 18 in New York City, where she worked as a model.

In 1974 she married into the British aristocracy and adopted Russian-born sons. After her divorce from Lord Colin Ivar Campbell she has been linked to a string of both powerful and infamous men.

Obviously, this upper-class Jamaican transgendered woman is an example of the dilemma caused by the well-thought-through design of our Creator.

Perhaps these gendered variations should be brought into the broader discussion around the essential human rights that must be afforded every citizen in our nation state.

It is both unchristian and inhumane to discriminate and victimise human beings who did not have the opportunity to dictate their sexual identity with their maker.

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Glenda Simms is a gender expert.

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© Copyright 1997-2008 Gleaner Company Ltd.