Contemporary Sexuality - November 2008 - (Page 4) Transgender Rights continued from page 1 “[Withdrawing the bill from consideration would be] profoundly wrong in a moral sense. You protect people when you can. I also think that in politics the notion that you don’t do anything until you do everything is self-defeating.” — Barney Frank keep track of the colleges adding [similar policies]. What do you attribute this rapid change to? I attribute it to the decentralization of the movement. Nobody, including NCTE, has tried to centralize the movement. So there are tens of thousands of people all over the country doing the things they think are the important things to do. We have people trying to pass local ordinances in their towns, we have people trying to get their employers to have better policies, and we have people trying to get their schools to have better policies. Everybody is doing what makes sense to them, instead of waiting for someone to give them orders. What’s the reception you’re getting as you’re going around the country? In 2006, you were in Salt Lake City. You were recently in Colorado. You’re going to places that aren’t exactly hotbeds of liberalism and LGBT acceptance. First, let me put in a plug for Salt Lake City. It’s actually one of the most progressive cities in the country in some ways. While the rest of Utah remains politically and socially conservative, Salt Lake City is educating itself and is becoming a really amazing place for social justice. The mayor who left at the end of last year, Rocky Anderson, was probably the most progressive mayor in the country. When I was in Salt Lake City for a town hall meeting, it was held in the State Capitol legislative office building. There were four state legislators who came to the town hall meeting. And that’s Utah. You can imagine what’s it’s like in New York City. The most significant day of the year for trans people, and certainly for the trans movement, is November 20. This Day of Remembrance is the day when we memorialize the victims of hate violence. More and more you go to these days of remembrance — whether you are in Washington, D.C. or Idaho – and there tend to be city council members, state senate staffers and sometimes members of Congress. It’s really remarkable. But things haven’t always gone smoothly. There’s a famous Gandhi quote about how social justice works. He said, “First, they ignore us. Then they laugh at us. Then they fight us. Then we win.” That progression has borne out very much for trans people. They totally ignored us for a long time. We couldn’t even get meetings with state legislators 15, 20 years ago. They were just afraid of being seen with trans people. There’s certainly been a large share of laughing. And now they’re fighting us. Radical right hate groups like Focus on the Family, Alliance Defense Fund, Traditional Values Coalition and others — they’re fighting us now. It turns out as you go through that progression from being ignored, to being laughed at, to being fought, [things change]. A lot of people who ignored you become allies. A lot of people who laughed at you become allies. And inevitably, a lot of people who fight you, become allies. What would be an example of a group that was against you that is now on your side? The entire gay rights movement, while maybe not against trans people, was certainly dismissive and an obstacle. What a lot of us, including nontrans gay rights leaders, came to understand was that policy makers and the public conflate gay and trans people. Part of that is ignorance and part of it is also because so many trans people are gay and so many gay people are trans. Gay people, whether they liked it or not, were expected by policy makers to be speaking for trans people. And if they weren’t doing it responsibly … if they were saying things like, “Oh, my God, we don’t want to be associated with these people.” It meant that trans people weren’t allowed to speak. We’ve been able to break that down some. We’ve been able to change that from sort of a mediated access to more of a collaborative access. It’s been working wonderfully .… You see it more and more, you see LGBT programs that aren’t with the program yet and haven’t fully and respectively integrated trans people. They are more and more isolated because their position just doesn’t make sense anymore in a 21st century context. Are you referring to the Human Rights Campaign? I was not in particular, but that is an example. When the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in the House of Representatives, it originally included trans people. Barney Frank was the sponsor. At some point, he decided the bill wouldn’t pass if it included trans people, so he took it out. The Human Rights Campaign was OK with that. Barney Frank said one of the reasons he didn’t think it would pass was because trans people represented an ‘ick factor.’ How did you fight Frank? Let me address this idea of an ‘ick factor’ first. It is certainly true that trans people are not fully accepted or even understood by all members of Congress or society as whole. There’s still a lot of work to be done. We all know that. However, the same thing is also true about gay people. I found that very interesting. If there was no discrimination with gay people in Congress, there wouldn’t be so many closeted gay people in Congress. There’s a lot of work left for all of us to do. 4 Contemporary Sexuality www.aasect.org | November 2008 Vol. 42, No. 11 http://www.aasect.org
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