Nice work if you can get it (and they did)

Transgendered News - a repeat-news site that repeats news from "Topix", which is a repeat news site (getting dizzy, yet?) is featured in T-Central's "Trans-related news sites". (To be honest - I can't find any difference between the "news" sites and the regular sites T-Central lists. I simply consider it to be part of the regular listing, and someone simply wanted a "featured transsexual's sites" list, but didn't want to call it that. So they gave it a misleading name. If there is a news site on that T-Central list, it arrived there by accident, I'm sure.)

Anyway, "Transgendered News" has a piece that reads:

Transgendered Carlsbad women adjusting to new lives - Editor's note: This story about Erin Preciado and Jessica Lighthall is not meant to praise nor condemn their personal choice as transgenders.

(My emphasis)

So some folk have decided to live as "transgenders", huh? Since when was "transgender" a proper noun? It's not even a frickin' noun fer fuck's sake! It's an adjective. Specifically, it's a prefix and a noun. The prefix alters the noun and it becomes a description - not a name.

No chooses to live as a "transgender". Someone might be transgendered; they might not be. Another person is transsexual - that might seem to be the same as transgendered, but while related - it isn't the same. A transsexual lass, for instance, isn't transgendered. She might go through a period of her life where she is transgendered, but that's not a definition (you can apply) for the rest of her life!

Personally, if I had anything to do with T-Central - a Topix derived website wouldn't be given the time of day. I don't, and it is. (I'd also not call that part of the site "News", either. There's no news in those blogs - they are trans-whatever related blogs, not "news"; if anything some of them are like this blog: pure opinion.)

In a nutshell, T-Central, a volunteer effort, provides Topix - a commercial company - a place to tout their wares, which consists of one-sentence descriptions of actual news stories that they link to. The only losers in this scenario are T-Central's volunteers.

I urge the admins of T-Central to kick that blog to the curb. And rename the news section to what it really is: "we like these blogs in particular", or "Popular Blogs". Anything but "news" - because aside of the advert-oriented Topix site, that list isn't news. It's normal blogging.

Carolyn Ann