Marcy, 28, is local photographer, artist and writer. (Courtesy of Marcy)

Transgender individuals still face discrimination despite growing acceptance

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EL PASO— Jenna Talackova, a 32-year-old Canadian model and television personality, was one of Miss Universe Canada 2012’s finalists, but she was disqualified from the competition when it was discovered that the beautiful blonde was born a boy. The contest organizers said that contestants must be ‘naturally born females’ and since Talackova had undergone surgery to become a woman, she could not compete. This is an example of the problems that transgender individuals face throughout their lives. These individuals also endure discrimination and harassment at school and in the workplace. Marcy, a 28-year-old woman who says she just happened to be born into a male body, realized from a very young age that she did not relate to the male gender.

Female impersonator, Nathan Knight Jones, is better known on stage as Serena. (Erica Mendez/Borderzine.com)

Gender change is a form of self-expression for Serena

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EL PASO – Dripping in diamonds, teased hair, and false lashes, she looks like a beauty queen singing and dancing, but the performer onstage is a creation by female impersonator Nathan Knight Jones. “I’m very flirtatious when I perform. The music that I choose is usually music that is going to let me interact with whomever is in the audience,” said Jones. Known as Serena when in drag, Jones has been a female impersonator in El Paso for the past two years. Competing against nine other contestants, he won the 2010 Newcomer of the Year title awarded by The New Old Plantation, or The Op, one of the more popular gay clubs in the El Paso’s LGBT scene.

Bordering on Acceptance: Growing Up Gay on the Border

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EL PASO, Texas — To live in a border city is to live between contrasting jurisdictions and beliefs. It is to delicately walk the line that divides cultures – never falling to either side – balanced by an ability to sustain contradictions. For the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Bisexual community of El Paso, the city they call home is riddled both in tradition and progressive thought. The line the GLBT community walks is an interminable border that hovers between acceptance and condemnation. “People from both sides of the border … all we’re doing is just tolerating each other, coping with each other, instead of mastering our differences,” said Rosio De Leon, student at the University of Texas at El Paso.