Comment Assignment if You Lack an Idea for Your Own Blog

Comment on one of  these ethical dilemmas

You are interviewing

·       *  The longest surviving heart transplant patient in the U.S. When talking about the disability pay he receives, he mentions he does a little bookkeeping on the side the income from which he does not report.

·        * A beloved radio weatherman who is about to retire and who mentions in passing he has a

Down’s Syndrome child and immediately says, “Don’t print that.”

·        * The family of a teenager who has just died after a long battle cancer whose mother says sorrowfully, “Noah died a virgin, and it made him so sad.”

·      *   A sex researcher who has done an extremely popular book on various sexual matters who says – when you jokingly ask her who should appear in the movie version – that it should be you.

·       *  A  family living at a restaurant/motel in the middle of the Nevada desert, the eight-year-old daughter of which tells you when her parents aren’t around that on weekends dad likes to get drunk and blow up the wrecked cars out in back of  their isolated business.

·       *  An interracial couple – she is Filipino and he is African-American – who are having a June wedding. At the wedding reception, his father tells you he is disappointed his son is marrying “outside the race.”

·       *  A rather famous movie star who has just written a rather New Ageish book in which she writes that whatever happens to people is their own fault. You consider asking her about the six million Jews lost in the Holocaust.

·        * A nun as part of a story about a neighborhood that is undergoing a rash of burglaries. One of the buildings in the neighborhood is a convent for nuns who work in the community as teachers and social workers. After talking about precautions any sensible homeowner should take, she pauses and then explains that she was raped some years ago and makes some suggestions about how women might avoid situations in which that might occur.

·      *   Construction workers on a downtown highrise who explain in some detail how they like to “party hearty,” with considerable detail about how much alcohol this requires many nights after work.

What do you do?

Reflecting

Re-writing my journalism assignment on a talk given by Dr. Joy Ladin, I found myself very intrigued by the intersection of gender, sexuality and religion. For my final paper I am going to be taking a very different approach to looking at the same intersection. Rather than transgender identity and Judaism I will be looking at youth college student identity and Catholic school, USF.

It is so cool how all of my classes seem to be overlapping this semester and I am really looking forward to the body of work that it is going to produce for me as a reflection on my last semester as a college student.

Here is the assignment I have written and submitted about Dr. Joy Ladin:

She’s the Man

 “My kids call me daddy”, Dr. Joy Ladin said, talking about her young children since she made the transition from man to woman in 2007. After feeling trapped in the wrong body for decades, Ladin changed everything. “I was a good man”, she said. Though, to her, that meant being a bad person. On October Second, Ladin, English Professor at Yeshiva University and author of seven books, spoke to USF students about her relationship with herself, her God, and the world, reading excerpts from her autobiography and creating a dialogue with the audience, as well.

Growing up as a Reformed Jew, Ladin said she was drawn to Orthodox Judaism and felt a special relationship with her version of God and the Jewish scriptures of the Torah. She is the first openly transgender person to be employed by an Orthodox Jewish institution. To many, her transgendered-ness and Judaism are mutually exclusive, yet Ladin read and continues to read the Torah, her way. While the Talmud, Torah and Judaism itself, alienated her, it also comforted her a great deal. She said that a lot of trans children feel a closeness to God because God has no physical body, so the sense of being created in the image of God really resonated with her. Also, she believes that since God made her, she is therefore accepted for who she is and especially who she is not.

            Ladin said: “after being a persona, I wanted to become a person”. She understands her transition in terms of learning and becoming fluent in a new language. That language is gender, the way people understand who they are in relationship to themselves and the world. She quoted the Talmud, saying: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?” This helped her realize that she could never actually be in a state of being until she was for herself and truly became the woman she always knew herself to be.

The transition that she eventually made after marrying and fathering two children, was far from resolving the “problem” of finding a self-identity. “I had to remake myself in the eyes of others”, she said, explaining how difficult this can be. Gender is indeed, a performance with many parts. For instance, becoming the woman she always knew herself to be, meant changing the clothing that she wore everyday, shaving her facial hair and speaking with a different tone of voice.

When a student asked her if she had changed her genitals to fully become a woman. Ladin responded: “It’s important for me to not answer”. She acknowledged that it was a good question and a typical one, but not natural or fair. She explained that when she made her transition, she felt as though it was a trade for her right to having a private self.

            It has not exactly been easy for her family, either. Ladin’s nine year-old does not want ‘daddy’ to come to her school because she does not want to have to explain why daddy identifies and dresses like a woman, to her friends. Ladin does not regret or wish that she were born a woman in the first place. “If it had been any other way, they wouldn’t exist”, she said of her children.

Her autobiography, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, explains that if identity is a combination of being and becoming. While others spend a lot of time being and very little, becoming, she said she is “always going to be a process of becoming with a little bit of being mixed in”.

Here's a link to my Belva Davis Storify

Vicky Nguyen: A Storify Portrait

How cool and interesting! UNICEF is helping to start and support a Children's News Service that will help children understand the basics of journalism while also providing the news information.

bdnews24.com, Unicef launching children journalism Thu, Sep 6th, 2012 7:30 pm BdST Dhaka, Sep 6 (bdnews24.com)—bdnews24.com and Unicef have joined forces to launch a Children's News Service to promote causes affecting 45 percent of Bangladesh's population. The two organisations agreed a partnership at the newspaper's Mohakhali office on Thursday for the service that will be launched later on. bdnews24.com will be making huge investments apart from editorial oversight in this venture with Unicef to introduce children journalism, Bangladesh's first Internet newspaper said in a media statement. Children from all echelons of society will be able to practice and learn journalism at the online newspaper's children website, http://kidz.bdnews24.com, it added. "This will give us a unique opportunity to take the children's stories from across Bangladesh to a huge number of audience," Toufique Imrose Khalidi, Editor-in-Chief of Bangladesh's first Internet newspaper, said in a statement on Wednesday. "Being part of our already-popular http://kidz.bdnews24.com, the Children's News Service will get some natural advantage," he believed. "We will train them, teach them the basics of journalism, create a manual for them to follow, hoping that many of them will become professional journalists in future." Khalidi said such training would be organised in at least 20 districts initially and that bdnews24.com correspondents would be sensitised to the children's issues through workshops so that they could work as effective coordinators in their respective districts. He added that bdnews24.com will continue the programme even after Unicef's partnership ends. Unicef is considering the initiative as an opportunity for children to contribute in making a child-friendly news industry and for strengthening their rights. "Around 45 percent of the population in Bangladesh are under 18. Unicef in partnership with bdnews24.com is keen to create a 'space' for children where they will be able to raise their concerns, share their aspirations for the future and contribute to decisions that affect their lives by suggesting solutions while playing an active role in mainstream media," said Unicef's Acting Representative for Bangladesh Michel Saint-Lot. "We are hopeful that through this unique initiative, we will be able to hear the unheard voices of this nation, enable children to make a contribution to the news agenda and accelerate the process of upholding child rights for children in Bangladesh," Saint-Lot added. The children will be responsible for the gathering of information, editing and publishing news under the supervision of bdnews24.com journalists. bdnews24.com/rn/bd/1721h

Here's a Nice-and-Easy Blogging Assignment

In the comment section, add a question or two you'd like next week's journalism panel to answer.