That provocative question is the topic of a column at Salon.com by John Aravosis, a longtime gay rights advocate and editor of Americablog.
I have a sense that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above, and thus it never stuck with a large number of gays who weren't running national organizations, weren't activists, or weren't living in liberal gay enclaves like San Francisco and New York. Sure, many of the rest of us accepted de facto that transgendered people were members of the community, but only because our leaders kept telling us it was so. A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins. It's a fair question, but one we know we dare not ask. It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I'm not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause, but I simply don't get how I am just as closely related to a transsexual (who is often not gay) as I am to a lesbian (who is). Is it wrong for me to simply ask why?
No, it's not wrong to ask the question. Actually, it's a very good one.
I support transgendered rights. But I'm not naive. If there are still lingering questions in the gay community about gender identity 10 years after our leaders embraced the T -- and there are -- then imagine how conflicted straight members of Congress are when asked to pass a civil rights bill for a woman who used to be a man. We're not talking right and wrong here, we're talking political reality. Our own community is still grappling with this issue. Yet we expect members of Congress, who took 30 years to embrace a gay ENDA, to welcome the T's into the bill in only five months.
That's why James Dobson, Tony Perkins and the men at the Concerned Women for America are so hell-bent on defeating ENDA. To the religious right, ENDA without gender identity isn't a weak, meaningless bill fraught with loopholes. Our enemies know that passage of any federal gay civil rights legislation is a legislative and cultural milestone that would make it that much easier for all of us -- gays and lesbians, bisexuals and eventually even the transgendered -- to realize all of our civil rights in our lifetime.
I agree with Aravosis about the political reality of ENDA (as I've previously written here), but there is another important question that he does not address--if transgender people can't partner up with gays and lesbians, then who WILL advocate for them? I fear the answer is no one, and, if left to fend for themselves, they wouldn't even register a blip on the political radar.
Now wouldn't that be a step BACK for civil rights?
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There are two things that straight gays must accept.
ReplyDeleteTrans were on the battlefront at Stonewall and all the early campaigns.
Gay people treated Trans people like shit until the AIDS epidemic brought everyone together through mutual suffering. In the 70s and early 80s you were safer dolled up in a rugby club than at a gay disco.
"So macho" equalled "so bigoted."
What do these sexual "white boys" want - SEGREGATION?
Two thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. It seems to me that both LGB and T people transgress the societal gender norm, which includes both the "males don't seek to relate socially as females" proposition and the "males don't desire sexual intimacy with males" proposition.
2. If LGB people won't embrace us, don't proclaim, "We are with you and for you," then who will?
The thought of being abandoned by the LGB community--even of being declared to be distinct from it--terrifies me as a transgendered person.