Three stories being compressed into one post here. Please bear with me. I’m sticking this behind a cut as it is getting long.

A big news item over the past day or so has been that Sonny & Cher’s child is undergoing gender reassignment. I’ve seen the story tweeted by several people, but I also saw someone I follow asking why it was news. For Chaz Bono, and his friends and family, it would probably be better if it was not. Doubtless the usual hate mob has been active around the Internet, and no one likes being exposed to that. And yet Chaz chose to make a public statement, and it has been welcomed by trans activists. Here’s why.

Celebrities, like it or not, are different from ordinary people. One of the odder manifestations of celebrity culture is that thousands of people who may never meet their favorite celebrities will regard the targets of their affections as people they know, and indeed are friends with. Social networking systems such as Facebook that allow you to become “friends” with famous people feed off this effect.

Chaz himself is not a major celebrity, except amongst the LGBT community where he’s apparently been doing good work for years. His parents, on the other hand, are very well known (though Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident several years ago). This means that for a whole lot of people “someone they know” has a trans person in their family.

That means a lot. Mostly when trans people get in the news it is for bad reasons: scandals, court cases, and most often for being murdered. It is easy for them to be dismissed as “weirdos and freaks” because they are not really “people”, just objects that are pilloried by newspapers. Chaz Bono, on the other hand, is part of the great world-wide family of celebrity-dom. In many ways, despite being the son of celebrities, he is more of an “ordinary person” than most trans people. From that point of view his story is very important to the trans community, and it is very much news.

Moving on, the whole “connection with ordinary people” concept can be enormously powerful. I have been particularly pleased with how well the whole KRXQ story turned out. Sure it was good that a whole lot of companies expressed their displeasure at the original hate speech broadcast, but it was much better that the story ended on a positive note rather than with firings and programs being taken off air.

Here’s the Sacramento Bee‘s take on yesterday’s broadcast. I think that GLAAD and their allies have done a wonderful job here. Thanks in particular are due to Autumn Sandeen and Kim Pearson for having the courage to be the public face of the trans community. And finally thanks to Rob Williams and Arnie States for being prepared to listen. This story has produced some remarkable results.

But, of course, there’s always some bad news. Here in the UK the government’s e-petition system has produced a response to complaints about the Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust. Oxfordshire is one of many regional health care bodies that has sought to save money and gain popularity by denying treatment to transgender people, despite the fact that it is illegal for them to do so. The government’s response, however, is even more worrying, because it demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge as to appropriate methods of treatment. Christine Burns explains.

If that’s a little too technical for you, just ask yourself how you would feel if, in order to qualify for treatment for a medical condition, you first had to demonstrate that you could survive for 18 months without treatment.