Category: News

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #101, Spring 2003.

With great sadness, I must relate to you the death of Helen Garfinkle on November 7th after a long illness. Helen was a tireless worker bee and longtime organizer of the Washington DC Transgender Community. She was best known as the President and Vice-President of the Washington-Baltimore Alliance, the oldest continuous transgender support group in the area. She was a volunteer for many, many national transgender conferences, including Fantasia Fair, Southern Comfort, the IFGE and True Spirit Conferences. She also was a staunch member of It?s Time, Maryland!, lobbying openly as a crossdresser from 1995 to 1998 for four different pro-transgender bills introduced in the Maryland General Assembly.

International Foundation for Gender Education, Inc.

I would like to address the condition of the International Foundation for Gender Education with you, our readers and supporters. I feel it necessary for you to have firsthand knowledge of where we are and where we are going.

IFGE offers a variety of programs. The most visible is our quarterly journal, Transgender Tapestry. While we maintain this journal as a separate program, it is in reality fully integrated with the rest of the organization.

Many people feel that in this day of the Internet Transgender Tapestry is the primary reason for IFGE?s existence. I would ask that you read not only about the magazine, but about our other projects and services, and what we are doing about IFGE as an organization.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #096, Winter 2001.

Violence Continues

A Tennessee man was shot to death in Nashville because his assailant assumed he was gay. According to a 3 August article in Bay Windows, Willie Houston was holding a purse and assisting a blind friend to the men?s room at Opry Mills, a country music showboat, where his assailant shouted anti-gay epithets and then followed him into the parking lot and shot him in the chest as Horton tried to reason with him. Nedra Jones, Horton?s fiance, had asked him to hold her purse just before his friend asked for assistance in going to the restroom. The gunman was identified as 25-year-old Lewis Maynard Davidson, III, who had not been apprehended at the time the article was written. Amazingly, Nashville police have not classified the incident as a hate crime, claiming insufficient evidence.