I've read through roughly half the comments so far, and no one has addressed several inaccuracies in Aravosis' piece. So I will.

1) The "T" may have just been added into ENDA in the past year—I'm not sure. But I AM sure that the argument over whether or not it belonged is decades long. I've been an LGBT activist for 25 years and I remember the same arguments from the beginning of the fight over ENDA. "We can't afford to include transgendered. Middle America can barely understand LGB, how can we expect them to understand or accept T?" "If we include T now, we'll all lose." “It’s too radical. Let’s move incrementally. We’ll get ours first, then come back for the transsexuals.” Aravosis, your arguments are not even remotely new to anyone with a memory.

2) Your lede is not only offensive in its clever evocation of nuclear war (and hence, the suggestion that trannies are responsible for ENDA’s imminent meltdown,) it is quite simply WRONG. The LGBT movement has never “welcomed” any sort of diversity. Ever. We’ve been arguing amongst ourselves over inclusion and labels from long before I first became involved in 1982. Back then the big dispute in the “liberal gay enclave of San Francisco” was whether or not lesbians should be devoting their hearts and souls—not to mention, organizing hours and physical presence—to a movement that was increasingly dominated by what was then a primarily a white, gay male disease, AIDS. Most of us agreed that we should, recognizing then—as now—that we’d either stand together or fall divided. Moreover, supporting our suffering gay brothers was the right thing to do for people who called themselves progressives.

3) Regarding “T” inclusion in LGBT. As other commenters have said, far from being a label “imposed” from above, trans folks—like me—have been putting our bodies and souls on the front lines from the very beginning. Yes, we were at Stonewall: that is an indisputable fact. As well, many of us are the nellie queens and butch dykes who are subjected to the brunt of homophobic violence day in and day out. A large number of FtMs and MtFs have, in effect, risen through the ranks of the LGB movement. I myself have the dubious distinction—and am not alone among my tranny brothers and sisters—of having been intimidated or threatened by homophobic thugs as a lesbian, a gay man, and a bisexual man.

Even were I now to identify as a straight man—which I don’t!—why would anyone expect me to just abandon and forget a struggle that has provided my focus and given me my friends for the past quarter century?! That advice is as crazy as what medical professionals used to tell transsexuals, ordering us to leave behind our families, friends and lovers and start over in a location where no one knew us. The people I’ve come across over the years who were unfortunate enough to have followed such advice have been as emotionally damaged by it as you would rightly expect.

If the elite of the political movement succeed in throwing trannies under the bus, if the likes of Aravosis prevail, I can expect that in my lifetime, outlawing discrimination in employment against transsexuals will remain too radical for America. Our long-term LGBT struggle will be set back decades.

As a gay writer who was recently "eviscerated" over a comical post about a bisexual dating show, I thank you for this incredibly thoughtful and informative article. I hear you and I feel your pain. Perhaps we should just call ourselves "up with people" and be done with it. Susan (proudly gay and female but not bi-phobic)

I'm a registered nurse, gay male, and have for years questioned the omni-inclusional addition of "Letters" to the LGB appelation. Psychiatric reasons for feeling your in the wrong body seem to me to be an entirely seperate concern to those of us who are certain of who we are and how we got here.

Perhaps you should study the area before commenting from authority, but no-one can keep up with every development in medicine. I recommend "The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality" as a good primer for a medical professional not specialising in the area.

But this "transgendered" stuff is nonsense. A man can be mutilated into looking like a woman and vice versa, but there's still that pesky xx/xy chromosome stuff to deal with. You've either got testes and a prostate, or you've got ovaries and a uterus. You can't change sexes like you can religion. Maybe medical science will one day figure out a way to make a human look like a giraffe. But that person will only *look* like a giraffe.

The "transgendered" are as clinically insane as somebody in the 21st century claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte.

A good friend of mine is 90% xx, 10% xy. But he's a guy. Another is a woman, she has 47xxy chromosomes, breasts, and more M than F genitalia. Some have ovotestes, a gland neither one or the other. Or one of each.

Your Ignorance is excusable though, not many people know this stuff. But blame Reality for being insane, not the people suffering from these congenital conditions. They just get persecuted and called insane by bigots and the ignorant. Some do develop insanity as the result of the constant persecution of course.

So what's really going on here? What nobody seems willing to come out and state is the underlying presumption that "the gays" will dump "the trannies" and go their separate way as soon as they get their version of ENDA passed. This is the real reason for the objection to Barney Frank's maneuver.

Why are the Ts so insecure about this? Surely it's not a rational concern..

Given the historical record, and the many comments on this forum about how GLBT should be GLB, the concern is all too rational. It's happened every other time, this is not new.

Now a disclaimer: I'm Australian, and won't be affected either way. I'm also technically Intersexed, one of the weird "serials", though I identify more as TS. That my transition was mostly from natural causes is just a minor detail.