For a state that prides itself on being a beacon of progress in American politics, California seems intent on proving it can be just as backwards as everyone else, at least when it comes to gay rights. A California appeals court ruled this week that California Lutheran High School didn’t violate the law when it expelled two students it suspected of being lesbians, determining that the state’s civil rights laws don’t apply to private religious schools. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The ruling is the first to consider a religious school’s status under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination by businesses and was amended in 2005 to include discrimination based on sexual orientation. State education law also forbids anti-gay bias, but that law applies only to public schools.

The court determined that California Lutheran didn’t qualify as a business and therefore wasn’t bound by the act. The school’s lawyer applauded the ruling, telling the Chronicle that the court rightly recognized their right to exercise freedom of religion. But Kirk Hanson, an attorney for the expelled girls, told the L.A. Times that the “very troubling” decision essentially gave private schools carte blanche to discriminate against students for any reason, as long as they could defend their actions on religious grounds. The Times reports that the girls plan to take their case to the California Supreme Court.

The transgender narrative is well known, thanks to films like Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica. But the problem, as Extra! reports in an analysis of transgender coverage over the past few years, is the idea that a single “transgender narrative” exists.

The narrative is by now quite familiar: A somewhat prominent white, middle-to-upper-class man comes out as a transgender woman, her long history of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” is detailed, and her struggles and surgeries are documented, as are the struggles of those around her to understand and embrace her change.

The Extra! report also seizes upon another shortcoming of media attention: that many reporters and television reporters obsess over a person’s “genital status,” reducing their transgender guests to sideshow surgical curiosities. Larry King is a notable perpetrator of such invasive questions—because, he explained to one guest, “we’re all fascinated with what happens.” 

People may be curious, Extra! acknowledges, but “there are very few instances in which someone’s genital status or sex life would actually be pertinent to a news story, and the simple fact of being transgender is not one of them.” Thankfully, some news outlets are beginning to understand that. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times style guides now dictate that reporters should refer to transgender subjects using a person’s preferred name and pronoun, rather than relying on anatomical or biological status.

An excellent ColorLines piece, "Becoming a Black Man," points the way toward better coverage by profiling transgender people within power matrices of gender, race, and class, moving beyond the traditional focus of the the male/female binary.

—Lisa Gulya

On October 30, Soy Seng, head monk for the Cambodian Buddhist Society of Wisconsin, left his small Khmer community for Cambodia to raise funds for a new school, never suspecting that American Airlines would make a stink about his trip. As Bill Lueders reports in the Madison, Wisconsin, alt-weekly, Isthmus, before Seng’s connection could leave for Los Angeles, an American Airlines employee asked him to return to the terminal. The reason? Seng says he was told that a passenger complained about his unpleasant odor.

The airline put up Seng for the night in a hotel, gave him $15 to cover two meals, and allowed him to fly out the next day. By then, Seng had missed his connection to Cambodia and had to spend the night in the Los Angeles airport. Leuder writes that American Airlines did not respond to repeated requests for information.

—Jason Ericson