The Pentagon and the Air Force have confirmed to Metro Weekly’s Chris Geidner that one servicemember has been discharged since the military announced more lenient guidelines for enforcing the ban against homosexual conduct. The new rules — announced in March and October of 2010 — introduced various changes from raising the level of the officer who is authorized to start a fact-finding inquiry or order a separation proceeding to requiring the service branch secretary to approve the separation.

From Geidner’s report:

An Air Force spokesman confirmed today that the secretary of the Air Force approved a discharge under the military’s ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on April 29 of this year. The discharge, according to a Pentagon spokeswoman, is the only such discharge since the Pentagon on Oct. 21, 2010, directed that DADT discharges would require the approval of the service branch secretary. [...]

Air Force Major Joel Harper, an Air Force spokesman, clarified the specifics of the discharge to Metro Weekly, writing, ”On April 29th, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force approved the discharge of an Airman under the provisions of 10 USC 654, after coordination with the DoD General Counsel [Jeh Johnson] and the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness [Stanley].”
Harper continued, ”Each of these officials evaluated the case carefully, and concluded that separation was appropriate. The Airman in the case asked to be separated expeditiously.”

President Obama signed repeal of the ban on open service in December, but the policy will remain in place until 60 days after the president, defense secretary, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that repeal will not undermine military readiness and effectiveness. Just yesterday, the White House revealed a new website touting its accomplishment of repealing DADT.

Vandy Beth Glenn lost her job with the Georgia General Assembly for being transgender.

Think you know about LGBT employment protections? Take this quiz and see how much you know. A new poll from the Center for American Progress shows that 9 out of 10 voters think there is a federal law protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination. They’re wrong. The poll found that 73 percent of voters do support such protections, including strong support from Catholics (74 percent), senior citizens (61 percent), and even people with unfavorable attitudes toward gay people (50 percent). Unfortunately, in most states the protections don’t exist, and levels of discrimination and harassment are high.

As many as 43 percent of LGB people and a staggering 90 percent of transgender people have experienced workplace mistreatment. Another column from CAP shares some of the personal stories of individuals who had these negative experiences and the consequences that come with, such as the fact that gay men earn 10-32 percent less than their heterosexual peers (PDF). Meanwhile, transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to be living in poverty (PDF).

If support for protections is so strong and people think they already exist, it’s peculiar that employment protection bills face such challenges in getting passed. The federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been introduced for decades now without passing. Just last week, non-discrimination protections in Connecticut got a very transphobic pushback. Equality opponents raise alarm over these bills, focusing on nuanced details and promoting untrue fears. This new polling suggests that the number of people actually concerned about offering these protections is near-negligible. Legislators need to begin listening to the stories of those truthfully affected by discrimination instead of the absurd cries of a small pocket of extremists.

LGBT blogs and news outlets (including this one yesterday morning) have offered coverage of the case of Nikki Araguz of Texas. She is the widow of a deceased firefighter whose ex-wife sued after his passing, demanding that Araguz not receive any death benefits because she was born male. The ex-wife successfully convinced a judge that the marriage was thus a same-sex marriage, prohibited under Texas law. However, Araguz has now shared on her blog that she was actually born intersex and she is not transgender as has been reported:

While I appreciate all of the support, I am setting the record straight: I am a heterosexual woman, who happened to have born intersex, and yes, I did have a transsexual medical condition, yet that has been treated and corrected. I urgently ask the gay and transgender communities to stop inaccurately identifying me as “transgender” because this falsehood is continuing to make my battle even more difficult. The media has picked up on this mislabeling, and it may lead to the assassination of transsexual and intersex marriage and rights in Texas. The clueless appropriating of my situation is dishonest and hurtful. My birth defect is a medical condition, and has nothing to do with “gender and lifestyles”.

Araguz is referring to a disorder of sex development (DSD), which presumably means that at birth, she did not present as typically XX-female or XY-male and was misclassified as male. The Intersex Society of North America estimates that about 1 in 1500 are classified as intersex at birth, but because of the different ways intersexuality presents at different points in life, the number of people who are intersex is likely much higher.

While the identities of intersex and transgender face a lot of similar challenges in society, they are not the same. Intersexuality refers to an ambiguity of biological sex, whereas people who are transgender are struggling with a gender identity that does not match their sex. It is easy to confuse the two because individuals with either identity may pursue surgical options — as Araguz did — to achieve identity cohesion.

The judge’s decision to void her marriage because of her identity reveals the way the law’s oversimplification of identity hurts individuals. The construction of “one man, one woman” marriage that equality opponents champion makes no room for people like Nikki Araguz who have unique sex and gender identities. Essentially, the judge ruled that she is male only because a doctor checked that box on a form when she was born. No one should be able to dictate who Nikki Araguz is except Nikki Araguz, and no one should ever have to.

Via Andy Towle, Fox News’ Sean Hannity hosted a panel discussion about “Primetime Propaganda,” Ben Shapiro’s book about “how television has been used over the past sixty years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image.” During the segment, Shapiro and former Ohio Attorney General Ken Blackwell specifically attacked Sesame Street and children’s television, suggesting that producers somehow indoctrinated children with liberal values — like tolerance for gay people — that are causing them to become gay or support gay causes:

SHAPIRO: By the way, if you go on the Sesame Street web site, it talks about when bringing up child, make sure that you use gender neutral language. Make sure that you give your boys dolls and make sure that you give your girls fire trucks.

BLACKWELL: That is setting up a problem. Just this year, a high school in Virginia named a guy who was openly gay as prom queen and so sometimes fiction does inform reality. And as we layout in our book, there’s a direct assault on this country’s moral foundation. That’s a problem…What really concerns me is that if you look at any big government regime, any totalitarian regime, they attack two basic intermediary institutions, the family and the church. That’s what is happening in our culture right now and it sets up an appetite for governmental largesse, government becomes the family.

Watch it:

Gay people are more prevalent in Hollywood, and schools are now increasingly focusing on policies that protect gay students from taunting and bullying. All of this is part of a larger evolution towards a more tolerant society — one that is increasingly accepting of differences whether they be sexual, religious, or cultural. People like Shapiro and Blackwell, meanwhile, are trying to preserve an America that, due to the civil rights movements of the past decades, no longer exists and seem surprised when those changes are reflected on television.