Letters to the Editor

• My apologies

  [Read the article: Why the T in LGBT is here to stay]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  2 Salon articles and 500 letters later, things are getting a little muddled. Sorry, I shouldn't have titled my posting the way I did when I was trying to address more than one poster.

  Also, I want to emphasize that I am in no way bashing gay white males as a group, because in fact you will find that there are many, many gay white males who have been on the right side of this issue from the get-go. I just talked last night with a friend of mine who is a gay active duty Army colonel. Without hesitation and without knowing where I stood on the issue, he stated his strong support for a fully inclusive ENDA. So I think it's actually a small minority of gay white males who feel that their privilege (and perhaps their political connections, influence and/or money) entitle them to dictate to the rest of us who does and does not belong in the club.

  Guys, if you really are worried about the practical/political implications of making ENDA trans-inclusive, here's where I think you went wrong (and I would call this a massive political miscalculation on your part which calls into question your political judgment on a more general level): First, you made assumptions about the receptiveness of the American public to transgender rights based on your own discomfort with transgender people. Second, you took the word of people like Barney Frank as to what is and is not politically viable without doing your own research or demanding more specific facts and figures. 500 letters later, we are only *now* getting into the subject of vote counts. Don't get me wrong, Barney Frank is one of my all-time favorite politicians, but he is a politician, and all politicians have an agenda. They also all make miscalculations from time to time. Anyone who takes a politician at his or her word because he/she is a "friend" knows nothing--NOTHING--about how Washington works.

  Third, bloggers like Aravosis and others took this political assessment and--rather than blogging about the political assessment itself--launched into an exegesis about how transgender people have hijacked "your" movement, which was, as Ms. Stryker pointed out, not only historically inaccurate, but very hurtful. Sorry, but the snide remark about men chopping off penises is nothing if not hurtful. And every last one of you who have posted in support of what Aravosis wrote have implicitly agreed with the appropriateness of these hurtful barbs.

  What you *didn't* do, and what you should have done at the outset, was let the representatives of the trangender community into the room and give them a seat at the table, so we could have all talked out *together* what our concerns were about ENDA and then reached a consensus as to how to proceed. EVEN IF YOU AND BARNEY FRANK ARE RIGHT about ENDA (and you've still provided no proof), this would have been a far preferable way to proceed than to simply strip the bill of transgender protections and then attempt to present it as a fait accompli. The fact that you seem to understand so little about the need for coalition building, again, makes me question your overall political judgment.

  Interestingly, we are not having this problem at all within the GLBT military veterans' community as we discuss how we intend to go about repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I believe this is because GLB veterans have always interacted with the T veterans in a spirit of inclusiveness, and we have discussed *together* the potential pitfalls and risks of talking about gender identity within the context of the military (one of the main problems we face is that the military has yet to achieve gender equality--it has a tremendous stake in its semantical insistence that "women" do not serve in "direct" combat, which makes it difficult to try to incorporate individuals into the military who do not fit neatly into either gender). Transgender veteran activists have been involved with the efforts to repeal DADT for years, in full recognition of the fact that DADT is harming their community as much as it is GLB military servicemembers, and, with some noteworthy and very ugly exceptions (which again, always have an uncanny tendency to come from white gay men), the GLB veterans have emphasized their receptiveness towards learning about T issues and including T veterans fully within the movement. SLDN has featured T veterans and servicemembers in its published materials on the impact of DADT, as has HRC in efforts like The Documenting Courage Project.

  I'm not saying that, once it's really time to get serious about DADT, there won't be some serious discussions and possible hurt feelings when we get into the nitty-gritty of who testifies at the first Congressional hearings and what will be said about gender identity. But I suspect we're not going to see the big ugly blow-up that we've seen over ENDA that is now ripping our community in half, because the dialogue is based upon a premise of inclusiveness and respect, and a recognized need for transparency long-term coalition building.

  Something you supposedly expert political players might want to take a look at.

  Permalink Friday, October 12, 2007 07:55 AM