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Showing posts with label Barbara Walters. Show all posts

Monday, March 8, 2010

The Blind Side - Oscar acceptance speech of Sandra Bullock - Hot Indie News

Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down? I would like to thank the Academy for allowing me in the last month to have the most incredible ride with rooms full of artists that I see tonight and that I’ve worked with before and I hope to work with in the future, who inspire me and blaze trails for us. Four of them that I’ve fallen deeply in love with I share this night with and I share this award with. Photo

Gabby, I love you so much. You are exquisite. You are beyond words to me. Carey, your grace and your elegance and your beauty and your talent makes me sick. Helen, I feel like we are family through family and I don’t have the words to express just what I think of you. And Meryl, you know what I think of you and you are such a good kisser.

I have so many people to thank for my good fortune in this lifetime and this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I know. To the family that allowed me to play them, the Tuohy family, I know they’re in here and you’ll probably hear her in a minute. Maybe not. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to… the family that made this film that gave me the opportunity to do something different. John Lee Hancock, Gil Netter, Alcon, Warner Bros., the actors, everyone who’s shown me kindness when it wasn’t fashionable, I thank you. To everyone who was mean to me when it wasn’t… George Clooney threw me in a pool years ago. I’m still holding a grudge. But there’s so many people to thank. Photo

Not enough time, so I would like to thank what this film is about for me which are the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from. Those moms and parents never get thanked. I, in particular, failed to thank one. So… if I can take this moment to thank Helga B. for not letting me ride in cars with boys until I was 18 because she was right. I would’ve done what she said I was gonna do. For making me practice every day when I got home. Piano, ballet, whatever it is I wanted to be. She said to be an artist, you had to practice every day, and for reminding her daughters that there’s no race, no religion, no class system, no color, nothing, no sexual orientation that makes us better than anyone else. We are all deserving of love. So, to that trailblazer, who allowed me to have that. And this. And this. I thank you so much for this opportunity that I share with these extraordinary women and my lover Meryl Streep. Thank you.

Watch video - Hot Indie News

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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Kelli Busey has invited you to the event 'Texas Wide 4 Transgender Day of Remembrances Planned' on Dallas Transgender Advocates and Allies!

Dallas Transgender Advocates and Allies - A Place For Everyone. No Exceptions

Please attend a TDOR near you!

Time: November 20, 2009 all day

Location: Dallas, Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Houston Texas

Organized By: Kelli Busey

Event Description: Four Texas TDOR's

Dallas

November 20th.

7:00pm and should last approximately one hour. S.M.U. Campus at the Flag Pole

https://oedfw.groupsite.com/main/summary

Fort Worth TDOR

Location: Robert Carr Chapel at TCU

Street: Address: 2855 S. University Drive, Fort Worth, Texas 76129

Date: Friday, November 20, 2009

Start: 7:30

Press Release

Facebook Page

San Antonio TDOR

Date: Thursday, November 19, 2009

Time: 6:00am - 9:00am

Location: 611 E Myrtle, San Antonio, TX

San Antonio Gender Association SAGA.org will host and a press release can be found on Facebook Face Book

Houston TDOR

Event: Transgender Day of Remembrance

What: Ceremony

Start Time: Saturday, November 21 at 6:30pm

End Time: Saturday, November 21 at 10:00pm

Where: Houston Holocaust Museum

Hosted by: Transgender Foundation of America

Houston TDOR Face Book page

See more details and RSVP on Dallas Transgender Advocates and Allies:

http://dallastaa.ning.com/events/event/show?id=2352402%3AEvent%3A8093&xgi=1O0yUnYGNfEUay

The luxury of diversity – Malta Today on sunday

Sunday, 01 November 2009

Actress, campaigner and politician VLADIMIR LUXURIA is in Malta for an international conference on gay rights. She talks to Raphael Vassallo about her struggle against prejudice, both in and outside politics.

There is a certain commotion at the San Gorg Corinthia Hotel in St Julian’s as I arrive for my appointment with Italian transgender celebrity Vladimir Luxuria – currently in Malta for the 31st annual International Lesbian and Gay Association conference, and the first event of its kind to be held locally.  The hotel lobby is bustling with activity, what with conference guests arriving by the coach-load, and Malta Gay Rights Movement officials scurrying about to iron out the inevitable organisational hiccups here and there. ILGA members are immediately distinguishable from other guests by means of their plastic name-tags, and even more so by the bright purple sashes to which these are attached.  

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, a few are immediately identifiable even without such external paraphernalia. Curiously, however, Vladimir Luxuria herself does not quite fit into that category. For someone best known as an outspoken gay activits and a winner of 2008’s L’Isola Dei Famosi – Italy’s raunchy answer to the Survivor reality show – she is surprisingly inconspicuous in real life. (Note: though Luxuria is physically and legally a man, I have chosen to refer to her in female terms for two reasons: one, out of respect for her own wishes; and two, because gender is invariably more complex an issue than the reproductive organs with which one is born).

 “Politics is a cynical and cruel world,” she later tells me, as we finally settle down for an interview overlooking St George’s Bay. I have just asked her about the rather blatant prejudice with which she was received during her brief career as a representative in Montecitorio: a prejudice perhaps best encapsulated by Alessandra Mussolini’s notorious jibe, “Meglio Fascista che frocio” (“Better a Fascist than a faggot”).

 “If I were the sort of parliamentarian who would be absent more often than present, or who didn’t take my job seriously, then they would perhaps have found other things to criticise me about. But I wasn’t that sort of representative, so they picked on me for the only two things they could – that I’m transgender, and on the Left.”

 Vladimir Luxuria can claim the honour of being Europe’s first openly transgender member of parliament, and the second in the world after New Zealand’s George Beyer. Naturally, however, not everyone considers this to be a compliment, and attempts to discredit her as a politician have occasionally bordered on the downright ridiculous.

At one point, the Italian parliament even had to pause to discuss her choice of bathroom, after a female Forza Italia MP complained about finding Luxuria in the Ladies (as opposed to the Gents, which – let’s face it – would have caused as much of a stir, if not more). So how does she cope with being attacked on such a trivial level?

 “Oh, but it’s not trivial,” Luxuria counters. “It is just one more way to try and deprive someone of their identity as a human being...”

 Identity issues in fact lie at the heart of Luxuria’s struggle against homophobia.

 “In Italy there was general agreement in parliament over a law against homophobia,” she points out, “but while politicians on both the Left and Right agreed to include the words ‘sexual orientation’ in an anti-discrimination law, there was no agreement on the words ‘gender identity’. The Right simply refused to accept that there are different ways of identifying oneself with the sex of one’s birth. It is a concept that frightens certain people. To them, you are condemned to the gender in which you are born – regardless of whether your soul is male or female.” 

Implicit in these assertions is the existence of a causal link between violence against gays, and recent legislation aimed at ‘normalising’ homosexuality – in Malta as much as elsewhere. For though Vladimir Luxuria concedes that the landscape has significantly changed since the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s – “We are no longer seen as extra-terrestrials, coming from another planet to destroy the sexual order of the Cosmos,” she quips – transgender persons remain particularly vulnerable to discrimination and above all hate crimes, which Luxuria argues have increased in both number and severity in recent years. “The fact that there is more acceptance of gay issues globally, also means that the people who hate us, who fear us, are now feeling more threatened than before, and therefore have become more radical.” 

Another aspect of the shifting landscape concerns a general hardening of the Catholic Church’s stand on homosexuality, ushered in under Pope Benedict XVI... Read complete article – Malta Today on sunday

RVASSALLO@MEDIATODAY.COM.MT

Monday, September 14, 2009

Born With the Wrong Body - Transgender 10-Year-Old Girl and Her Family Talk to Barbara Walters – April 25, 2007 - ABC News

Barbara Walters - ABC News 20/20

By ALAN B. GOLDBERG - April 25, 2007

This past Christmas [2006], Riley Grant received a present that can be described as bittersweet -- a video game that allowed her to morph a digital body into anything she wanted. Almost immediately, Riley, a 10-year-old transgender girl who is biologically a boy, adopted a virtual female persona. If only life were so easy, that she could punch a button and turn into a girl.

"She has a birth defect, and we call it that. I can't think of a worse birth defect, as a woman to have, than to have a penis," Riley's mother, Stephanie, told Barbara Walters. "She talks about the day she'll have a baby. That's not in her future. But she sees herself as growing up to be a woman."

… From the beginning, the Grants knew that the twins were different. While Allie was outgoing and friendly, Richard was clingy, quiet and passive. His mother knew that he wouldn't become a macho little boy.

'I'm A Girl'

Richard refused to swim topless, always wearing a shirt in the pool. By age two, he became clearly jealous of his sister's "girl" things -- her toys, her pink drinking cups, and especially her clothing.

"We were getting dressed, and he wanted to wear a dress. He wanted to be pretty like his sister," said Stephanie. "He was saying, 'I want a dress. I'm a girl, Mommy, I'm a girl.' And I'd say, 'No, honey, you're a boy. You have a penis, you're a boy. Allie's a girl.'"

Then, when the twins were only two and a half, an incident after a bath convinced the Grants just how seriously confused their son was about his gender identity. Stephanie found Richard holding a nail clipper against his penis, saying that "it doesn't go there."

Richard's pediatrician told the Grants that they needed to teach their son how to be a boy. So the Grants encouraged Richard to play with boy's toys and do boy's activities, but to no avail. Richard even refused to attend his own birthday parties knowing he would only get boy presents. The worst time was Christmas.

"It got more exasperating for him when he looked over and saw his sister's things, the things that he wanted," said Neil Grant.

'We Knew We Had to Hide It'

Finally, when Richard was just three years old, Stephanie made the drastic decision to let her son start dressing as a girl. They called it "girl time." Richard could dress up in his sister's clothes but only when his father Neil was out of sight. The secret between mother and son went on for months.

"I took him shopping by himself and we bought his own skirt and his own little tank top because…that little girl trapped inside was so happy when this would happen. But we knew we had to hide it, and we hid them in the back of the closet," she said...