A few years ago,
writer-director Jill Soloway
received a phone call from her father who told her that he was coming out as a
transgender woman. That experience
became the basis for her hit television show Transparent, which is all about the life and family of a man named
Mort, played by Jeffrey Tambor who transitions into a woman, later named
Maura. The show quickly won critics and
audiences over, and its Trans protagonist has been called a major breakthrough
in television. The shows second season
debuts on Amazon on December 4th and Jill joins me in studio to talk
all about the show and the fight for civil rights for all Transgender people.
We all remember hearing
the ominous threat from our childhoods, “This will go down on your permanent
record”. Well, that threat has taken on
a whole new meaning in today’s technologically driven world. For children today, permanent records are a
whole lot bigger than they used to be and they may, unlike those old manila
folders stored in some rusty file cabinet in the basement of your old high
school, actually be permanent. Last
year, the extent to which information about students was being tracked,
profiled and potentially shared came to light and caused a fair amount of
controversy when the $100 million student data collection project funded by the
Gates Foundation and operated by a specially created nonprofit organization
called inBloom was forced to shut down because of these concerns. However, this episode, which served as a warning
to parents about just how much information about their children is being
collected and shared without their knowledge did not stop the growing use by
schools, school districts and states of technology to collect mountains of
detailed information on students.
Joining me today to talk all about the issue of student data collection
is Leonie Haimson the co-chair of
the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy & Cheri Kiesecker a researcher for the organization which has been a
leading advocate against the inBloom project and recently wrote an article all about it for the Washington Post.
Listen to The Michelangelo Signorile Show weekdays live from 3-6 pm ET on SiriusXM Progress 127 and on the SiriusXM iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps. Not a subscriber? Not a problem! Listen online any time with a free thirty-day pass or, if you have an if you have an iPhone or Blackberry, go to the app store and download SiriusXM for free, for a 7-day trial, and listen on your phone.
|