Tina and I have been together for ten years now, even though we didn’t start living together until 2002. We talked on the phone for hours everyday during the first year we were together.
It took time to develop trust and overcome our own fears as we had both been badly hurt in other relationships.
Now we are two old lesbians, living in suburbia. She is retired. I work McJobs.
Now some would think it selfish on my part to prioritize marriage equality above ENDA.
I read ENDA Blog and others that are currently filled with a lot of anger towards the Gay and Lesbian Communities for their failure to focus on the issues of the Transgender Communities.
Most of the angry rants from the transgender Community always seem to omit the fact they came late to the party. The modern Gay and Lesbian Movement is over 40 years old. The movement to graft a “T” on the end is at best 20.
I am apathetic at best regarding so much of the Transgender Movement and at times I am down right hostile towards it.
I’ll be honest. I despise the entire Virginia Prince based ideology of Transgender Inc and its hegemonic erasure of post-transsexual women and men. As a whole this movement seems manipulative and cultish.
I often feel that people I otherwise like are caught up in a cult like Scientology or Mormonism or something. Talking with them is weird and the mind games are even weirder.
But back to marriage. I think part of the disregard of the struggle for marriage equality is based in heterosexual privilege, as so many transgender people are either still in a marriage that was entered into as a heterosexual man and woman, or have used the birth certificate game. Either way this leads to a lack of empathy towards gay and lesbian folks and their desire for the rights one can only obtain through marriage.
Those who are heterosexual after SRS become really upset when those of us who are lesbian or gay after SRS expect quid pro quo when it comes to our supporting their marriages. That too is heterosexual privilege.
Sometimes this makes it seem as though much of the “Transgender Community” is made up of straight folks, which makes it feel sort of sketchy when Transgender Inc attacks Gays and Lesbians for acting in their own self interests.
The personal is political cuts both ways. Over the years I have seen little support of the Gay and Lesbian Movement on the part of those involved in Transgender Inc.
That is if you subtract those of us who are post-transsexual lesbians and gay men. And you really do have to subtract those of us who do not “identify as transgender” from the “Transgender Community”.
But back to those of us who have been part of the Gay and Lesbian world for the last 40 years.
We have watched our gay brothers die in large numbers and have seen their long time partners devastated when the families swoop in like vultures and rip apart households.
I’ve seen elderly gay and lesbian couples who have been together 40-50 years and more separated because to the state they are legal strangers, while straight couples in a show of heterosexual privilege get honored by announcements of their having been married for so many years.
Wanting marriage equality isn’t elitist.
Saying we can get those same protections via legal documents is the elitist position when the difference in price between numerous legal documents and a marriage license can be thousands of dollars.
But over and above that.
The expectations being place on ENDA seem divorced from the reality of the present day working world. We have a 17% real unemployment level. I saw a statistic the other day that implied the majority of the American Work Force is either unemployed, part-time or employed at a level far below their education and experience.
You can thank the disaster started by Nixon and worsened by every President since with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, who actually tried to get us on a saner path energy wise.
ENDA doesn’t have a chance on a national basis with the current House balance in the hands of the Republi-Nazis.
Neither does Marriage Equality but both these issues can be fought on a state by state basis and the struggle for Marriage Equality can also be fought in the courts.
At the same time it would probably aid the passage of a transgender inclusive ENDA were those in Transgender Inc to actually define in real language instead of post-modern psychobabble exactly who will be covered and the expectations on the part of both employers and potential employees.
01/29/2011 at 8:22 am
In my mind, unquestionably, both pieces of legislation should be passed. If we lived in an ethical representative republic, both would be law today. We’d also be signatories to the International Declaration of Human Rights, Kyoto and many other worthwhile international humanitarian accords which, to our collective shame, our government has worked hard to derail.
Apart from my general disgust of our imperialist war machine, I am most ashamed this morning of two horrific exports: exporting homophobia to places like Uganda and the efforts of our government to undermine the national health services of other nations to make our own for-profit medical cabal more profitable.
Unfortunately, it is not only our government’s intransigence on beneficial measures such as ENDA and marriage equality, but their propensity and willingness to promote and defend actual harm around the globe that makes me ashamed for them and hate that they do these things in my name.
01/29/2011 at 6:48 pm
Suzan, I understand your perspective, and I accept the analysis you offer. In fact, I come to your blog frequently for clarity on many of the concerns we share, especially recently.
I understand the possibly symbolic value of ENDA, particularly in a country that is still actually in recession, though I find it difficult to argue with the statistics regarding the employment rate of transsexual and transgender people.
It is, from my perspective in Canada, that symbolic value is of particular importance.
Our work with Canadians for Equal Marriage was something of a symbolic campaign in that by June, 2005, when the Civil Marriage Bill (we call gay marriage equal marriage in Canada, and the law the Civil Marriage Law) was passed, almost all of the territory of Canada was already covered by judicial rulings mandating equal marriage; the campaign in the Parliament of Canada was to establish the symbol of national legislation.
What happened after is still in dispute.
When the law was passed, the National Coordinator of Canadians for Equal Marriage declared that “All lesbian, gay, bi and trans people are first class members of society without caveat or exceptions.”
Ottawa Pride that August declared “All LGBT Canadians have human rights and its time to celebrate.”
After the Conservative Government, still in power, gave up trying to reopen the law in December, 2006, the then National Coordinator of Canadians for Equal Marriage declared it was time to move “beyond legislative reform.”
To this day, despite trying for clarification and correction, none of these statements have been corrected; there has been no equal profile statements that acknowledge equal rights for transsexual and transgender Canadians do not exist.
I was on placement in the Office of the Canadian Member of Parliament, Bill Siksay, sponsor of C-389, the bill to add gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code of Canada when it received Second Reading last spring–this was one quarter of the way through the lower house of the Canadian Parliament.
Simply put, the campaign for the equal rights of transsexual and transgender people not only still has to struggle as all marginalized people have to struggle, but we must also struggle against these inaccurate statements which remain uncorrected to this day–the struggle starts below zero.
Despite some tepid support from Egale Canada, the organization that created Canadians for Equal Marriage, and has some minor transsexual and transgender representation, the promise–a policy I helped draft and facilitated its adoption by the Egale Canada board of directors 2 months before passage of the Civil Marriage Law–was never even posted to its website, let alone be fulfilled.
Most of the activism, including by straight people who were active in the equal marriage struggle–and promised, I heard them, to work for transsexual and transgender with the same fervor–vanished.
Even to suggest there was a promise, that our help deserved their help, or simply to declare it was not right to say there is nothing left to be done–as Dan Savage, on his way to Ottawa to speak at Carleton University has recently declared for Canada–raises anger and denunciation.
This is the history in Canada when the formal agenda of gay and lesbian people, of cis and trans experience, has been accomplished.
I would never say things are perfect for gay and lesbian people, nor that substantive equality has yet been reached; but for the young people who will come to hear Savage make his excluding comments–violating the equity commitment of Carleton University–they have never known a time when sexual orientation as a ground in human rights law, constitutional equity law, criminal code, marriage wasn’t formally recognized. Nor is it absent from administrative law, concerning adoption, surrogate decision making, collective agreements, and partner and survivor rights, including pensions.
As I move further and further away from my surgery, still not long by comparison of you to yours, Suzan, I do begin to feel less and less a personal connection to this, EXCEPT. . . . .
IT IS WRONG.
How can a belief in equality rights allow for the exclusion of those whose rights have not yet been formally recognized?
How can those who professed their commitment to equality rights, theirs and mine, abandon their commitments when theirs were established?
In this arena it is a matter of symbolism almost more than actual law.
This was our argument at Canadians for Equal Marriage.
This is what I declared to the gay and lesbian people I helped organize for the equal marriage campaign–when I was forbidden to declare my status.
I was told the legal recognition of equal marriage, in addition to judicial rulings, would, incrementally, lead to the recognition of the equal rights of transsexual and transgender people.
They moved on.
This is wrong.
They lied.
Beware.
01/29/2011 at 9:52 pm
I am post-transsexual and lesbian. To me the “they” is the “transgender community” not the gay and lesbian communities..
The statistic of 53% unemployed, under employed or part time is for all working class people in America.
The common enemy is the Corporate Fascist New World Order and the oligarchs who pull the strings of the puppets like Obama, who is really no better than Bush.
Unemployed, under-employed, part time workers who are transgender even though they have degrees are no more special than my assigned female at birth girl friend with 200K in student loans a Ph.D. and no possibility of employment in her field and probably no career in academia.
I know it hits many people who had privilege in the past hard, this New World Order, but transsexual people and transgender people are not unique.
Hiring and firing is at the will of the corporation. Suck it up, it don’t mean anything. That dollar an hour less they will have to pay your replacement will make it up for the corporation.
The most hopeful thing I saw out of Canada last year was that transsexual and transgender people were involved in the anti-G20 Movement.
Sucking up to the oligarchy won’t get you a job.