I recently violated one of the golden rules of the internet, and read the comments under a news article.

The piece itself was a follow up on the assault on Chrissy Polis, a 22-year-old post-operative transsexual who was assaulted in a Rosedale, Md. McDonalds for using the women’s restroom. The older of the two women who beat Polis, Teonna Monae Brown, was offered a plea agreement. In exchange for Brown pleading guilty to assault and committing a hate crime, prosecutors will seek a five-year prison term at the sentencing hearing next month.

In a suburb of what is now Prague, some five thousand years before today, a body was buried. Funeral rites were a very big deal at the time, with a great deal of symbolism attached to exactly how a body was buried, and what items would be interred with them.

If one was male, the body was buried lying on their right side, with the head facing west. You’d also be buried with various tools and weapons, as well as a few portions of food to tide you over as you headed to whatever passed for the afterlife then.

Newsweek magazine, in its June 12 issue, ran a profile on Brazilian model Lea T. Good in places and bad in others, the piece tells of Lea’s early years growing up with a Brazilian soccer star for a father, her early years as a model, and onto her current life as she prepares for male to female genital reassignment surgery. It’s not that uncommon of a dialogue given the scores of transsexual narratives that have graced the printed page as far back as at least 1931, when Lili Elbe’s transition
store, Man Into Woman, was published.

Color-coding infants and the family that chose to opt out

In this era of instant information overload, even the smallest of fads becomes big news. From vajazzling to planking, we live in a time when even the most inane trends are inescapable.

Chrissy Lee Polis, a 22-year-old, post-operative transsexual, was at a Baltimore County McDonald’s recently. While there, she opted to use the bathroom. Two other women—18-year-old Teonna Monae Brown and a 14-year-old whose name has not been released—were also there. A now-former employee of the fast food restaurant recorded what followed.

An unnamed transgender woman went to the San Antonio, TX police station in 2010. Some time before she visited the station, a police officer, Craig Nash, has picked her up for prostitution. It would seem, according to investigators, that Officer Nash did not take her directly to the lockup. Instead, after cuffing her, he told her to lie down in the back seat and drove her to a remote location. Once there, Nash forced her to commit sexual actions on him. He then dropped her off near a school back in town.

When I sat down to write about 2010, I wanted to tell you how horrible the year has been. Indeed, I could not help but look at the personal situations of my friends and myself, and conclude that the year was one of increasingly bad times.