Letters to the Editor
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John Is Politically Correct
We are living in a country where a hateful appointed President won re-election bashing gays. Since then we have witnessed an unprecedented assault on the Constitution, including the abolition of habeus corpus. Those protections we rely on only exist under the rule of law, something that barely prevail any more.
For these reasons alone, enshrining civil rights for gay men and women is more important now than ever before.
I was the President of Gays and Lesbians of UBC, one of the largest universities in Canada, some 25 years ago. I grew up in an era when more than two gay men in a room together was grounds for arrrest. Raids on steam baths were common, and the only gay bar in Vancouver was the Record Listening Society, a private "membership" club where we gathered on Sunday afternoons to listen to grammaphone records. (I jest not.) Today these affairs are called tea dances.
I write this not to bore you with my antedeluvianism, but to state my credentials in this long-standing battle for gay rights. Our group helped organize the first gay rights march in Vancouver and we also helped organize the first safe sex outreach in Vancouver, with the onset of what we later learned was AIDS.
Today my partner and I are now legally married and living in Vancouver, after twenty years in NYC.
We weren't fighting for the right to marry some quarter of a century ago. Far from it. We just wanted them to stop beating us up - I almost died in a gay-bashing - and throwing us out of our homes and jobs.
What we were fighting for most was tolerance - to change people's hearts and minds. To humanize gay men and women, and create a safer space in which we could associate freely and express our culture. It worked.
As true allies of the gay movement, therefore, the transgendered should be glad to see a bit more civil space and a few more protections carved out for our team. And in turn, we should support the transgendered. But not at the expense of everything we have worked so hard for, and lost so many lives for. That would benefit no one.
Pass ENDA!
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What do you plan to tell those gays?
What exactly do you plan to tell those gays and lesbians if and when the bill is killed because you were wrong and Barney was right? Sorry?
Here's what I plan:
"Thank you. You could have ditched us for your own advantage and you didn't. I know it was close. We will continue to fight by your side."
And two years later?
"Congratulations. We did it."
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All wrong
There are so many things wrong with this piece. I appreciate that it is thoughtful and obviously comes from a sincere desire to get the best outcome, but it is so, so wrong.
1, Transgender people have always been part of our community. The history of the Stonewall and Compton's Cafeteria uprisings alone should make this point. Using Wikipedia as an authoritative source on the history of the community - as opposed to merely the acronym LGBT, which is obviously not the same thing (compare the history of the black community with the history of the phrase "people of color") - is revisionist and honestly, seemed disingenous to me.
2. Maybe it's true that a lot of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals do not know any transgender people, or understand transgenderism. (I find it hard to believe that John Aravozis doesn't, but his description of a transwoman as a "man who wants to cut off his penis and become a woman" - the most inflammatory, least accurate description, worthy of a conservative federal judge like Richard Posner, in fact - made me rethink that. If you do have trans friends, John, I hope they call you on that sentence.) But the appropriate response to that, the one that embodies the ideals of openness and equality that we as lesbians, gay men and bisexuals ourselves need the mainstream to adopt, is to recognize that people who are different from us in some way are still bonded to us by common oppression. Which we clearly face, whether everyone in the community feels that way or not.
3. Why is the oppression that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals face fundamentally the same as that faced by transgender people? Other letters have covered this, but again, it all comes down to the idea that lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people provoke the same fear in those who would discriminate against us. We are scary because we refuse to accept the idea that your identity and personal autonomy is limited by your sex. We don't follow any rule that says it is not okay for people to live authentically if that means crossing a gender line, whether in terms of who you fall in love with or how you present yourself to the world. We are women who take other women out on dates, men who let other men hold the door open for them. And we are also people born into a body and sex that is wrong for us, who have the courage to do something about it. John Aravozis accuses those of us who refuse to be Balkanized by this bill of being unrealistic, but cutting out "gender identity" in order to achieve a victory that will only be symbolic (in light of the inevitable veto - speaking of unrealistic) would be cutting off one of our own limbs. I'm sorry that the entire community doesn't see that yet, but just like the "marriage is for straights" contingent will be sorry and embarassed someday, so will we if we leave trans people behind now.
And finally, if any gay person really doesn't feel like they own trans people any consideration, they should hand back every hard-won right achieved in the area of family law by Shannon Minter, who is trans. And that's a lot of rights. Give back all those children who have been secured in your family by second-parent adoptions, for example.
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Dana responds to David Sugarman
David, you wrote: "Holly Capote, do you really think Dana Runs was being sarcastic? Didn't seem so to me - and neither to John Aravosis. i only met ONE lesbian whose most prominent emotion wasn't dislike of men."
Believe me, David, my post was intended to be positively dripping with irony. No way would I advocate a lesbian-only ENDA, even if such a thing were remotely possible.
And most of us don't hate men, David. We just don't want to sleep with you, and we're not terribly fond of the paternalistic society you've crafted. But virtually all of us have fathers and brothers and male friends whom we adore.
All of which distracts from the subject at hand, which is whether to dump from ENDA the most vulnerable for the benefit of the majority.