Women Born Transsexual

Autumn Sandeen pointed out the following on Pam’s House Blend.

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/14246/thanksgiving-week-thankfulness-for-pam

As a left wing anarcha-feminist I tend to not spend much time in cultural feminist land as I really do not like hanging out where I am considered down by birth.  Feminism, even Lesbian as in LGBT/T Feminism offers me enough space where my very humanity is not held up to abuse or the very legitimacy of my existence questioned.

I have barred certain people of the HBS political identity from posting here as they are abusive of people with transgenderism.  Racists, homophobes, religious ideologues and right wingers are not welcome here.  So if you are a follower of A Room of Our Own and think you will be able to turn this post into a forum for your bigotry…  Think again..

My take on things may be a bit different than the sisters who run Questioning Transphobia as our experiences are different and so is our language. But, even if I put things differently from them or for that matter from Julia Serano, I’m fairly certain that we are seeing the same bigotry standing in opposition to it.

The piece of verbal diarrhea I am referring to may be found at:

http://aroomofourown.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/no-such-thing-as-a-transsexual/

It is by Margaret Jamison.

I have been out for over 40 years and an activist longer than that.  I have watched the history of the movements from within those movements. I have seen their rise and fall, the internal wars that often destroyed them.

The loudest and most vicious forms of anti-transsexual bigotry have often been reflective of what I see as the worst tendencies within the various movements.  Julia Serano titled her book “Whipping Girl” and put forth the proposition that transphobia is misogyny directed towards a convenient scapegoat.

Within the early feminist movement there was another tendency.  Women who worked the hardest and were among the most dedicated as well as talented were seen as trying to rise above the other women.  Some of us who were in the feminist/lesbian movements in those early days did what people with transsexualism have always done.  We threw ourselves into that movement whole heartedly, working harder than anyone else.  This was because we were raised thinking ourselves to be inferior and never good enough therefore we felt we had to prove our worth by working harder than anyone else.

Over compensation for poor self image.  No matter how it gets directed.  In one sister it might mean thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery, another constant schooling and the pursuit of the Ph.D.  Or being the best feminist one could possibly be.

There was a sister named Beth Elliott, in the Bay Area.  She was a member of Daughters of Bilitis.  She had the honor of being the first sister I know of who was publicly trashed first in “It Ain’t Me Babe” and later by Robin Morgan.

I didn’t understand it at first.  But over the years I learned how Cointelpro worked and sowed seeds of destruction within various progressive groups by attacking people who were dedicated hard workers.  Take down one and destroy her or him and you have not only destroyed an individual but any who share a common trait with the person destroyed.

Turn the attacking and defending of the individual into a factional split and the organization is destroyed.  It doesn’t matter if the individual was innocent of every charge, fictitious charges; lies told loudly enough in a practice called “bad jacketing” can tear an organization, indeed a movement apart.

I can’t say for sure that what happened to Beth was Cointelpro.  It doesn’t matter because even if it wasn’t, the result was the same.  One more element in the destruction of the first Lesbian Organization promoting lesbian liberation..

Oddly the charges leveled against Beth and outlined in her book Mirrors: Portrait of a Lesbian Transsexual became the script for every bit of filth that could be leveled at women of a transsexual history by self proclaimed radical feminists and lesbian feminists.

A few years later Sandy Stone, recording engineer for Olivia Records, a lesbian music collective was hit with similar if somewhat different charges setting off a back and forth war of words within the feminist and lesbian feminist press regarding the legitimacy of women of a transsexual history.

Then Janice Raymond dropped her bigoted polemic, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Previous attacks had often been directed at those sisters who were closest to the socially acceptable feminine stereotypes or who were in touch with their sexiness and embraced their sexy female side leaving those of us who were good feminists in our jeans and movement t-shirts feeling safe.  Raymond changed all that.

Now those of us who were good feminists, working doing leaflet layout and production, petition signature collecting and all the grunt work of the feminist movement were suddenly as bad as our sisters who were enjoying being sex positive heterosexual women during an era far less uptight than the present.

Things I wish we knew or thought about then that we know now.  Raymond was a former Catholic nun and her mentor Mary Daly was originally a professor of theology who became involved in some pretty weird cult like magical thinking regarding theories of hidden matriarchal cultures.

The reactionary cultural feminism that had first stirred with Jane Alpert’s “Mother Right” and was embraced by Robin Morgan, who coincidentally led the lynch mob attack on Beth Elliott.  (Morgan’s side of it can be found in Going too Far).  Alpert laid out a form of binary gender essentialism that posited the same sort of black and white binary innateness one found in the traditional patriarchal bullshit that ordained the role of women as inferior to men.

It was seriously reactionary at a time when so much of feminism was based on the overlapping abilities and traits of men and women.

Long before GID and the million post-modern word games transsexual and transgender people play now people with transsexualism and transgenderism used that overlapping of traits to argue that maleness and femaleness were a continuum rather than a binary and that we were simply more predominately at the end not indicated by our at birth sex assignment.

But back to Daly and Raymond.  Their Catholicism is the source of their ideology not feminism.  I may blend anarchism and Marxist class consciousness with my feminism but they had to do an even bigger trick, that is to say they had to build their feminism on a foundation of misogyny.

Raymond’s position reflects that form of Christo-fascism that I first saw at 14 when the priest my mother sent me to for counseling basically told me that I would have to live my life in total denial of what I was or face an eternity in hell.  That I couldn’t even think or fantasize about something so intrinsic to my being that I would discard family and risk a life of social ostracism to be.  I was born with transsexualism.  That was something I can not change.

Yet both the priests and the Ramondites would have me commit suicide either physically or by repression by denying me the legitimacy of my being.  This is a denial of my humanity, a form of abuse so severe as to be unacceptable when directed at groups based on race or ethnicity or for that matter when directed at gays or lesbians.

It becomes far more egregious when a lesbian or gay man or for that matter someone claiming to be feminist starts attacking transsexual or transgender people.  It is almost as though those doing the attacking are unaware of the real basis for those attacks and how it can be traced back to a chapter in the Bible that is filled with widely ignored rules.

I am speaking of Deuteronomy 22: 5 (King James Bible)

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.”

Now most gay and lesbian people as well as most feminists have questioned the manner in which these ancient books of mythology have been used as tools of oppression.  One does not have to look very hard to see the Bible as the source of both homophobia and misogyny.

However, the label of abomination is particularly harsh and is followed if memory serves me correctly with the part about how our blood should be upon us suggesting that any manner of violence including murder is justified.

When one listens to the vile and often contradictory slander that is laid upon transsexual and transgender people by bigots like the woman at AROOO one has to ask exactly what TS/TG folks are supposed to do?

We are attacked if we manage to get an education and develop a career.  We are attacked if our educational opportunities in childhood were destroyed and we only managed to do sex work.

We are attacked for getting breast implants even though they were not developed specifically for us and the majority of women getting them were assigned female at birth.  The excuse for not attacking natal females is that they get them due to having a flawed body image since male dominated media regularly shows ample breasted women as sexy and glamorous.

Ahh, but that is different. Actually it is not.  TS/TG people are immersed in the same cultural soup as normborns.

TS/TG people both T to F and T to M can be either straight or gay/lesbian.  Some are bisexual yet it often seems that the only form of sex that is acceptable to the bigots is asexuality and even that is probably reason for condemnation.  Even self pleasuring is suspect in spite of there being feminist run businesses merchandising sex toys for women including Smitten Kitten and Good Vibrations.

If we get SRS we are mutilated men (or women as the case may be).  If not we are men in dresses of which there is no T to M equivalent.

One of the nastiest rejoinders is the one that directs us to remain as we were assigned no matter how miserable we are and to fight sexism and the gender binary from our originally assigned sex.  Now I opposed the draft back in the 1960s and as an anarcha-feminist I find the very idea that someone else should be required to fight a war for someone else’s cause questionable at best.

At worst it is like demanding that gay and lesbian people have reparative therapy and live as straight working to end the tyranny of the patriarchal oppression of women in marriage by changing it in a way so that gays and lesbians will no longer have to be gay or lesbian to find relationships where they are equally respected partners.  Oh and BTW erase homosexuality.

We have progressed far beyond that, besides Audre Lorde gave us the tagline about how the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Anarchists do not demand others sacrifice their lives and pursuit of happiness to fight ill defined quixotic battles.  Existentially that form of behavior is ethically questionable.  It is more characteristic of hate groups than liberation movements.

I saw the purity purges on the left. In the 1970s I actually had someone tell me that in spite of her misogyny Phyllis Schlafly was her sister because of birth and in spite of my being a hard working feminist because of my birth I could never be.  That for the same reasons the homophobic Anita Bryant was her sister but no matter how hard I worked at The Lesbian Tide, I was not.

It has always escaped me how people who demand autonomy for themselves when it comes to intimate matters on issues like abortion access and birth control can not see the contradiction in denying TS/TG folks the same self determination and autonomy regarding decisions they might make regarding their own bodies.

Perhaps it is time for those resurrecting the anti-transsexual/anti-transgender rhetoric to engage in what we in Weather called criticism/self-criticism because their bigoted politics suck and are in contradiction with both feminism and gay/lesbian liberation.

Perhaps the people exercising this anti-TS/TG bigotry would be happier among the right wing racist and homophobic hate groups that share the same sorts of bigoted language that show class hatred towards entire classes of people based on fictitious stereotype, even when some in that group may actually exhibit that stereotype.

Smash Transphobia, Smash Bigotry

No gods, No masters

Kaki King “Playing with Pink Noise”

From Pink News UK

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2009/11/25/school-pupils-to-learn-about-transphobic-bullying/

By Jessica Geen • November 25, 2009 – 9:49

Children in UK schools will be taught about transphobic bullying and gender equality, it was announced yesterday.

As part of the revised personal, social and health education (PSHE) plans, the lessons will be taught from age five, although ministers stressed this would be age-appropriate.

Schools minister Vernon Coaker said: “The appropriateness of what you do with someone who is five years old is totally different in terms of content and how you will be taught to someone who is 15 or 16.

“You can teach [younger pupils] about not bullying people and how names can hurt people.”

The lessons, which also include teaching about gay relationships and HIV, will begin in 2011.

Professor Stephen Whittle, president of trans group Press For Change, told Metro: “We welcome wholeheartedly this move. When children are stifled through bullying they are more likely to feel gender reassignment is their only option later in life.”

The plans, launched by the Home Office and Department for Children, Schools and Families, will also combat violence in teenage relationships. An NSPCC study found that a quarter of girls had been subjected to violence by boyfriends and one third reported being forced into sexual activity.

Teachers will be given new guidelines on tackling sexist, sexual and transphobic bullying.

All schools, including faith schools, will be required to teach the new PSHE curriculum, although faith schools will be permitted to teach lessons in line with their beliefs.

Parents will retain the right to withdraw their children from the classes but only up to age 15, rather than the current age of 19.

[There is a confusing of transgenderism and transsexualism that tends to point out the need to inclusively refer to both conditions ratherr than rely on the political identity of transgender superseding all the differences between people who are transgender and those who are transsexual.]

Harvard Crimson (Harvard University), MA, USA

Clinic founder decries labeling transgenderism as a psychological issue

By Alice E. Underwood, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Published: Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Norman P. Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who works with transgendered youth, promoted the treatment of transgenderism as a medical condition, as opposed to a psychiatric disorder, during a talk hosted by the Harvard Transgender Task Force yesterday evening.

During the event, which was held to kick off Transgender Awareness Week, Spack said that looking at transgenderism from a medical perspective will change the public perception that it is a psychological problem.

Spack, the senior associate in the endocrine division at Boston Children’s Hospital, co-founded the Gender Management Services Program, a clinic that provides treatments to delay the onset of puberty in children questioning their gender.

“People ask me, how do people know at age eight or nine?” he said of children’s self-awareness of gender. “And I look at them and say, well how old were you when you knew?”

Spack said that stalling the start of puberty delays the development of physical characteristics that do not correspond to a person’s psychological self-perception.

According to Lily J. Durwood ’10, who works as one of Spack’s research assistants, the clinic is currently working with approximately 100 patients between the ages of 6 and 21.

“Dr. Spack’s help has made such a huge difference in the patients’ lives,” Durwood said. About 35 percent of the patients served by the clinic have physically harmed themselves or contemplated suicide prior to seeking medical attention, Spack said.

“Post-medication, the patients give testimonies of better interactions in school, a better environment at home, and functioning a whole lot better,” said Stanley R. Vance, a student at Harvard Medical School who also works in Spack’s clinic. “Dr. Spack is a trailblazer in an area of medicine that hasn’t gotten adequate attention.”

Transgenderism is currently classified as the psychiatric condition “Gender Identity Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

However, Spack said that he and other members of the medical community recognize transgenderism as a medical condition and are pushing to have it viewed the same way by psychiatrists, insurance companies, and the general public.

“These people aren’t crazy,” Spack said. “It’s a medical condition.”

Members of TTF said they were pleased to hear a different angle on transgender issues.

“I think this event is a great opportunity to see trans issues intersect with the medical sciences,” said TTF member Jia Hui Lee ’12. “Trans issues have always been looked at from a social and legal perspective but never medical, and we’re excited to explore this intersection with the event tonight.”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/24/medical-spack-clinic-transgenderism/

From Raw Story:  http://rawstory.com/2009/11/fbi-report-sharp-increase-antigay-racial-hate-crimes/

From Alternet and In These Times

http://www.alternet.org/story/144114/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_our_maniacal_optimism_is_ruining_the_world

By Anis Shivani, In These Times
Posted on November 23, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009

In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.

Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership.

This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders — assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers — made very bad decisions.

In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism.

Anis Shivani: Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance?

Barbara Ehrenreich: If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.”

It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.

AS: So this picks up more in the early ’80s and even more so in the ’90s when globalization really took off?

BE: I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the ’80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people.

AS: Couldn’t this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational?

BE: That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, “It’s got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line.” Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis.

But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is “leadership.” The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there’s no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on “vision quests” to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for.

AS: The same things are happening in foreign policy. We’ve abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire?

BE: In the ’80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God’s chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader — which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security.

AS: Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief?

BE: I haven’t sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I’d rather not hear about “hope,” I’d rather hear about “plans.” Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives.

AS: You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It’s amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students.

BE: That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country — courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn’t matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don’t think that’s what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.

AS: You have written a lot about Calvinism. Is it correct to say you have a deep problem with Calvinism?

BE: In exploring why America became the birthplace of positive thinking, I come up with an explanation that is quite sympathetic to the early positive thinkers. Positive thinking initially represented a revolt against the dominant Calvinist stream of Protestantism in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That kind of Calvinism was driving people crazy, literally. To think that you were a sinner, that your entire existence for all eternity would be one of torment in hell. It caused depression. It caused physical ailments. It was a nightmare. So you got some people in the early- and mid- 19th century that said, “Wait a minute, things aren’t so bad.” Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably be the best known example.

AS: Couldn’t you go back farther to the Enlightenment — the ultimate optimistic philosophy? Our founding fathers were very informed by that. Is that a kind of optimism that you endorse? And ultimately what’s different between the pursuit of happiness as a manifestation of optimism and the current optimism that you’re talking about?

BE: When the founding fathers undertook the Revolutionary War, they didn’t say, “We are going to win because we are visualizing victory.” They knew perfectly well that they could lose and be hanged as traitors. It took existential courage to say: “We are going to undertake this struggle without knowing whether we will win, but we’re just going to damn well die trying.”

AS: So, where does this shift come from?

BE: The shift had a lot to do with down-sizing, when corporations grabbed onto it as a means of soothing their disgruntled workforce. The alternative is realism. Let’s think about what’s actually going on: let’s get all the data we can; see what our options are; and figure out how to solve this problem. It sounds so trite and simple-minded, but that’s not how the thinking has been.

AS: Is the progressive movement infected by bright-sidedness?

BE: Progressives are not immune to this. I remember Mike Harrington [a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America] as a public speaker and he always, always ended on an upbeat note. No matter what was going on, he would end by saying there was a huge opening for the left. Today, I don’t know if we can do it. But we have no choice but to try.

AS: You mean we need to have optimism, but grounded in reality?

BE: I don’t call it optimism. I call it determination. One of the things I’ve devoted so much time to has had to do with poverty, class and inequality. Those things are not going to go away in my lifetime, but it won’t be for my lack of trying. And that’s a different kind of spirit than optimism.

AS: Some will say your approach is rational, incremental and just not exciting. How would you respond to that?

BE: I don’t think mine is an arid, overly intellectual approach. Consider what we’re up against on the economic and environmental front. Huge numbers of people are not getting by. There are the ecological threats to the human species. Let’s do something about it. What could be more irresponsible than to say, “If we just think it’s going to be alright, it’s going to be alright.”

Birthdays and anniversaries are easy as are rebirth days for those of us who had those.

There are dates that stand out, events like Stonewall and Nixon resigns, the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Intimate moments when monumental life changing decisions are made.  The moment you first realize.

Yesterday or today depending on where you are 46 years ago John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.  A moment that if you were alive and old enough to be aware…  You never forgot what you were doing and where you were when you heard.

And then three short years later another moment important for those of us growing up transsexual. $6 years ago JFK died and 43 years ago Johns Hopkins University Medical Center announced they had started doing sex reassignment surgery.

I was in college and already in the process of deliberately failing out.  The article in the New York Times was the existential aha moment that made the next steps inevitable.

In the months that followed Christine Jorgensen’s autobiography came out along with Dr Benjamin’s book and SRS became a real possibility and not a fantasy lived by only a few in far away places.

“When Fascism Comes to America, it will be Wrapped in the American Flag and Carrying a Cross.”

SInclair Lewis, Author, “It Can’t Happen Here.”

Nothing, but nothing astounds me about the lying Christo-Fascist scumbags that have destroyed America.

These power mad uber reich wingers have abused language in ways post-modernist followers of Derrida  would find inconceivable.

George Orwell, who fought against Fascism in Spain wrote a book most of you have read, “1984”.  1984 was during the Reagan Regime, a period that saw the rise of Fascism in America, which had toyed with it since the days prior to WW II.

After WW II the “War Department” became the Department of Defense, an early exercise in New Speak.  The last Republican President, who represented real American values and not those of crypto-fascism was Eisenhower.  Before leaving office he  warned of the dangers of of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex, an early alliance of corporations and state.

Since the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 we have seen the methodical rise to power of the right wing.  They are well funded, often tax exempt and passing themselves off as American, wrapping themselves in a flag and carrying a cross they have learned not to burn.

The have hegemonically colonized the language of the people who protest against their bigotry.

While LGBT/T people are in reality denied their constitutionally guaranteed equal rights as citizens by the actions of these Christo-Jihadists our protestations are stolen from us.

With a straight face (no pun intended)  The Family Research Council issued the following posting (first posted by Alvin McEwen On Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters)

November 19, 2009 – Thursday

A grave threat to your traditional values and religious freedom is resurfacing.

Deceptively, it’s called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Truthfully, it should be called the “Discrimination Against Christians in the Workplace Act.”

I know that sounds far-fetched, but this is what ENDA will do . . .

ENDA will redefine your faith as illegal workplace bigotry . . . make the government a full partner in the homosexual rights movement . . . and force churches, small businesses run by Christians, and faith-based charities to hire nonbelievers or face federal investigation.

This law would punish anyone in the workplace who dares oppose homosexual behavior, cross-dressing and other unhealthy behaviors. The liberals intentionally want to define “discrimination” very vaguely so that their allies in the courts and federal and state agencies will have broad latitude to silence traditional moral viewpoints about sexuality.

Pro-homosexual members of Congress–with the administration’s complete support–would like to pass ENDA before it becomes an issue in the 2010 elections.

And that’s why we must act immediately.

Please send a financial gift to Family Research Council right now so we can sound the alarm about the disastrous impact this law will have on Christians.

Here is what ENDA’s champions in Congress and the administration are saying:
Barney Frank, D-Mass., says passing ENDA is his “number-one” objective.
A top administration official says ENDA is the “keystone” to overturning the military’s ban on openly homosexual behavior and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
The appointed commissioner of the agency that would enforce ENDA promises she will use it to punish Christian “intolerance” in the workplace:
“I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

Family Research Council helped preserve Christians’ freedom of religion from ENDA when it looked like the liberal-controlled Congress was going to pass it in 2008.

And we can do it again . . . but we need your immediate help. Will you please follow this link to our secure website and make a donation now?

We must act NOW . . . because ENDA’s champions are already hard at work.

Thank you for standing with FRC in this crucial fight for your faith, family, and freedom. And thank you for praying for FRC and for our country.

When I was a little transkid, bullies would torment me calling me names and beating me up.  When I protested the meanness and asked to be left alone they taunted me with the grossest perversion of American ideals imaginable.  “Make us, it’s a free country and you cant stop us.”

One has to ask, “What form of religious ideal, what part of being an American requires the denying of equal rights to your fellow citizens simply because they are different?”  Not the America I grew up believing in.  Not the America where I fought for the equality of African Americans, Women’s Rights, Native American Rights, Farm Workers Rights.

No the ideals of every single Christo-Jihadist organization with “Family” seem more likely to be the family ideals of Adolf and Eva.

Today the Christ0Fascists issued the following:

The Manhattan Declaration, an absolutely chilling declaration of war upon America and especially upon the rights of women as well as LGBT/T people.

From Queerty I discovered that Public Eye had discovered a link between Rick Warren and the Christian Government of Uganda’s intituting a death penalty for gays and lesbian>  APDF of the full report may be found at:  http://www.publiceye.org/ark/africa-report/

Lastly also from Queerty:  The Ridiculous Catholic Manifesto Pledging to Ignore Gay Marriage + Abortion Laws

I don’t know about the lives of most of my readers and there are things many of you do not know about me such as my being Polish-American on my father’s side of the family.  His parent’s came to this country in the early part of the 20th Century.  We lost relatives when the Nazis invaded Poland.

My heroes have always fought fascism.

A clear and present danger to all progressive people is astir, it is especially dangerous for LGBT/T people.  There are right wing forces advocating a new civil war.  If there is and they win we will face the same fate as other scapegoats in other times.

Never Again!

The Day of Remembrance has become a day to put aside the differences that have consumed so much energy over the last ten years and to acknowledge that in the United States a person described with a trans prefixed word is murdered on the order of once a week or more.

Often in the same vicious manner that caused the outrage over Matthew Sheppard’s murder.

Often times the victims of these murders have the crimes against them treated less seriously not only because they are describe by a trans word but also because discrimination against them pushes them into the sex industry.  Or a history of abuse as a child has the same effect.

Hate crimes laws are only a start.  We have to offer an alternative to high risk sex work.  Counseling and assistance to lower the risks to the groups who are the most vunerable.  Especially true since the victims are not evenly distributed among all people, of all the socio-economic groups described by transword but mainly occur among the poorest, the most naive, the most desperate.

We need to think beyond remembering and move on to preventing.

From The Edge-Boston

by Renee Baker
EDGE Contributor
Wednesday Nov 18, 2009
Gwendolyn Smith founded the TDOR in San Francisco in Nov. 1999 as a way to “memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.”

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Ethan St. Pierre misses his aunt Deborah Forte everyday, but the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance remains a stark reminder of how Forte was brutally murdered in 1995 because of her gender identity and expression.

“I was called in to identify the body,” St. Pierre recalled to EDGE. “She was unrecognizable.”

November 20 marks the TDOR’s 11th anniversary. And St. Pierre remains passionate about honoring those murdered individuals who identified as transgender.

A man whom Forte met at a bar brought her back to her apartment and stabbed her numerous times. The suspect turned himself into local authorities two weeks after he killed Forte. A judge sentenced him to 15 years in jail, but he has yet to show remorse–and he is up for parole.

“Every bone in her neck was broken,” St. Pierre further recalled.

Gwendolyn Smith founded the TDOR in San Francisco in Nov. 1999 as a way to “memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” The vigils have grown in scope to over 200 internationally, and are held in November specifically to coincide with the anniversary of Rita Hester’s murder in her Boston apartment in Nov. 1998.

The exact statistics are not known, but the TDOR database that St. Pierre updates indicates there have been 120 trans murders since last year’s commemorations. St. Pierre added there is approximately one trans murder a month in the United States.

More than 300 domestic trans murders have been recorded since 1970 with 11 recorded so far this year.

California leads in total trans homicides at 57, followed by 36 in New York. Texas and Florida follow with 20 anti-trans murders in each state.

Saint Pierre said he believes the actual numbers of deaths are much higher due to under reporting or misreporting. He added he feels many reports do not include the victim’s gender identity or expression.

“Often times,” he says, “it can be risky to report the victim as transgender because the queer family can be ostracized.”

Saint Pierre further described anti-trans homicides as not just simple murders, but those with a horrid element meant “to obliterate us and make us go away.” He said most victims are tortured or burned before their assailant or assailants kill them. Some are dismembered and decapitated. And others are shot in the face or genitals.

“One woman,” he says, “was branded on her breasts with a hot iron while the aggressor told her that she was not real.”

Saint Pierre added he feels this hatred and rage against trans individuals stems from homophobia. He said some individuals find themselves attracted to trans or gender variant people, can’t accept it, and then want to erase the man or woman to whom they are drawn from existence.

“It is really hard to see the pictures of these beautiful people, so smiling and young,” St. Pierre said as he noted those murder victims to which the TDOR Web site pays tribute. “These are people that should not be forgotten.”

Day of Remembrance vigils will take place on Nov. 20-21 around the country. Below are a list of commemorations that will take place in cities EDGE specifically covers.

The Metropolitan Community Church of Las Vegas (1140 Almond Tree Lane) will hold a vigil on Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. Log onto www.mcclv.com for furthe information.

Two vigils will take place on Nov. 20-21 at 6:30 p.m. at the Chapel at MCC Sunshine Cathedral on 1480 SW Ninth St. in Fort Lauderdale. Log onto www.SunshineCathedral.org for further details.

Chicago’s Center on Halsted will hold a vigil on Nov. 21 at 5:30 p.m.

The city of West Hollywood, Calif., will hold a memorial service and march to Matthew Shepard Square on Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. Log onto www.WeHo.org for further information.

San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (290 Dolores St) will hold a vigil on Nov. 20 at 7:30 p.m. Log onto www.ShaarZahav.org for more information.

A vigil will take place at Baltimore City Hall on Nov. 20 at 6:30 p.m.

Saint Luke’s and St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church (5 St. Luke’s Road) in Allston, Mass., will host a vigil on Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. Log onto www.ForMinistry.com/usmaecusaslase for more information.

Also log onto www.TransgenderDOR.org for further details about additional vigils and other commemorations.

Dr. Renee Baker is a massage therapist, transgender consultant and board member of Youth First Texas. She may be reached on her website at www.renee-baker.com

While the conservative pseudo-scientists of Psychiatry insist that the prevalence of Transsexualism is incredibly rare those of us who are sisters and brother with a medical history of Sex Reassignment Surgery know different.

Studies by Lynn Conway and the late Femke Olyslager place our prevalence at some where between one in five hundred and one in a thousand. Not people with transgenderism but post-SRS folks.

The thing is that mosT of are not Kim Petras, or Kate Bornstein or for that matter Amanda Lapore. It may come as a surprise to the conservatives who like to label us as sick and portray us all as sex workers, man of us are in a wide range of careers that do not involve subjecting ourselves to the brutality of the sex indistry.

This is not to deny that there are many of us who are so far down on the socio-economic scale that we do sex work and measure status according to the form of sex work. We often come from background of severe child abuse including physical, emotional and sexual. We are often throwaway children and grow up to be substance abusers.

We are diverse population. My Facebook friends include professors and lawyers, writers and musicians both brothers and sisters.

I have been talking a lot about ENDA and Critical Mass favoring trans-inclusion for both people with transsexualism and people with transgenderism.

Today there were articles about post-SRS women in both the New York Times and in the Dallas Morning News. One a concert pianist the other a police officer. A picture of diversity one from the northeast and one from Texas. Both major metropolitan centers known for their diversity with many being surprised by the fact that Dallas has non-discrimination laws that protect transsexual and transgender people.

From the Dallas Morning News

17 years on the job, Officer Joe became Officer Debbie

08:52 AM CST on Sunday, November 15, 2009

By SHERRY JACOBSON / The Dallas Morning News
sjacobson@dallasnews.com

After 17 years with the Dallas Police Department, Officer Joseph Grabowski showed up at work one day sporting makeup, a feminine hairstyle and a new first name: Deborah.

Deborah Grabowski says she had a happy childhood growing up as Joseph Grabowski. In 2005, though, she decided she’d kept her feelings of being female secret long enough and started the process to change her gender.

The 44-year-old officer was scared and relieved that the secret was finally out.

“I have always felt like a woman and, suddenly, everybody knew I was going to have the surgery to make it real,” she said.

Because the city of Dallas does not offer health insurance coverage for sex-change operations, Grabowski paid for the costly procedure herself.

In recent years, a few cities – and a growing number of private employers – have decided to cover the cost of these surgeries, and the city of Fort Worth is considering whether to join them.

Continue Reading at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/tv/stories/DN-sexchanges_15met.ART.State.Edition2.4bb8770.html

From the New York Times

Anything He Can Do, She Can Do

IN September 1998, David Buechner, then 39, a prominent classical pianist, came out as a transgender woman, explaining that from then on, she would live and perform as Sara Davis Buechner. The pianist had been accustomed to rave reviews (at 24, David, in his New York City concert debut, was called “an extraordinary young artist” by a New York Times critic). But the debut as Sara, reported in a Times magazine article, was not so well received, even by loved ones.

Elizabeth and Anthony Buechner, the parents, as well as Matthew, the older brother, all expressed their opposition. In a recent interview, Matthew Buechner, a professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Kansas, said he had counseled David to remain a man publicly and cross-dress in private. “A lot of people live that kind of dichotomy,” Matthew said. “I saw the switch as something that would destroy a career. Classical audiences are very conservative.”

But Sara Buechner was determined to be. She said that from when she first took lessons at age 3, she knew she’d be a pianist, and not long after, realized she was meant to be a girl. (“On the playground, boys yelled ‘David’s a girl’ and I’d think, ‘You got that right.’ ”) She believed that bouts of heavy drinking and depression during her years as David stemmed from not being true to herself.

In the next years, Ms. Buechner largely disappeared from public view, though not by choice. David had done 50 concerts a year — performing with philharmonic orchestras in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and San Francisco — but as Sara, she couldn’t get bookings. “Apart from local gigs, from 1998 to 2003, I did three to five concerts a year,” she said. David taught as an adjunct professor at Manhattan School of Music and New York University, but as Sara, seeking a full-time professorship, “I applied 35 places and wouldn’t even get a response. Behind my back, I’d hear, ‘Is it safe to leave him in a room with undergrads?’ ”

She left Manhattan, where she got the wrong sort of attention (“In line at the bank, I hear, ‘You’re the guy living on the sixth floor having a sex change’ ”), and moved to the Bronx, where she was only Sara. She took a job teaching the piano to children at the Amadeus Conservatory in Chappaqua, N.Y. “A nice lady said, ‘Why teach here?’ I lied. I said, ‘I want to teach kids.’ I needed work.” She earned a third of what David had made 10 years earlier.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/fashion/15genb.html?_r=1&ref=style

When I came out over 40 years ago I could count the number of books either by or about people with transsexualism.  Now I cold easily fill a couple of IKEA 72″ Billy bookcases were I to even half try to keep up.

Yet for all our diversity we are mostly an invisible minority, although in the world of the internet and data banks probably far less invisible than many sisters who claim to be stealth think they are.

Yet many of us question why we shouldn’t treat having been born with transsexualism as just that, a fact of life neither a source of pride nor of shame.

I’ve come to realize I like some of my sister and some of my brothers while disliking others and it rarely has much of anything to do with their having been born either transsexual or transgender and a great deal more do do with them as people.

And yeah I am glad when people have the courage to tell their stories, especially when their live have more to them than just what they were born.

From TransEquality Blog, DC, USA

Friday, November 13, 2009

As we have noted, ENDA will finally see committee action in the House of Representative this next Tuesday, November 18. This action is called a markup. So what is that?

A markup is a session in which a Congressional committee does its work. It is called a markup because, basically, the committee takes a proposed piece of legislation and marks it up, thus amending it. (Marking up used to mean that they actually wrote the amendments on it—they don’t do that anymore.) Members of the particular Committee make statements, consider and vote on amendments and then refer the bill to the full House for debate and a final vote.

I’ll walk you through what that means, using ENDA and the House Education and Labor Committee as examples. Here is what to expect.

Next Tuesday at 10 AM in Room 2175 in the Rayburn House Office Building, The Ed & Labor Committee will mark up ENDA (HR3017). To watch a live webcast of the markup, go here <http://edworkforce.house.gov/>. I doubt it will be shown on C-SPAN <http://www.cspan.org/>, but we do not know.

Chairman George Miller (D-CA), who is a very strong LGBT supporter from the Northern East Bayin California, will chair the meeting. He will be joined by a shifting group of between 10 and 40 other members of Congress who sit on the Ed and Labor Committee. A list of Committee members is available here<http://edworkforce.house.gov/about/members/>.
I say “shifting” because, these days, members come and go during markups and hearings and meetings and probably lunches. Because they have Blackberrys, they can move between meetings, coming to markup when they must or can, but leaving for other business. Many of them will be there most of the time, but others will just fly in to vote and leave.

There will also be quite a few staffers who sit or stand behind the members. There will also be tables off to the side for staffers and sometimes a table for media.

The committee has 30 Democrats and 19 Republicans. It is actually a pretty good committee for equality legislation. Chairman Miller and most of the committee are very supportive of ENDA. In fact three Republicans on the committee (Reps. Judy Biggert (R-IL), Michael Castle (R-DE) and Todd Platts(R-PA)) are co-sponsors of ENDA, and all but three Democrats are
co-sponsors, except for Reps. Jason Altmire (D-PA), Marcia Fudge (D-OH) and Dina Titus (D-NV). Jared Polis (D-CO) is the only openly LGBT member of the committee, but there are many other really strong supporters including fourteen members of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus<http://lgbt.tammybaldwin.house.gov/membership.shtml>.
There is one Independent on the Committee, Delegate Gregorio Sablan from the Mariana Islands. He is a co-sponsor and supporter of ENDA and caucuses with the Democrats.

Here is an interesting sidenote: there are two delegates (representing non-states) on the Ed & Labor Committee. In addition to Mr. Sablan (I-MP), the Puerto Rican Delegate, Pedro Pierluisi (D-PR), sits on the Committee and is also a co-sponsor of ENDA. Though they Delegates from non-states do not have a vote in the full House, they are treated as pretty much full members of committees for speaking and voting in committee. Mr. Pierluisi is technically called, not a Delegate, but the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico. The rest of them are Delegates, though.

Another interesting sidenote is that five of the six delegates from non-states are ENDA co-sponsors. Only the Delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo (R-GU), is not (yet?). But we have DC, American Samoa, U.S Virgin Islands, Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico. These Delegates do not get to vote on the final passage of ENDA in the full House, but Sablan and Pieriluisi do
get to vote in the Ed and Labor Committee next Wednesday. To see a full list of 189 ENDA co-sponsors, go here<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:1:./temp/%7EbdwaSP:@@@P%7C/bss/111search.html%7C>
.

Once Mr. Miller convenes the markup, he will make an opening statement and then allow an opening statement from the ranking member (most senior Republican on the committee) John Kline (R-MN). Kline will talk about how ENDA is not necessary and it is vague and it violates religious organizations’ rights to discriminate against LGBT people. If you have read
ENDA, you will wonder if he has. He will likely use the phrase “chilling effect.” Other members will make short opening statements. In committee, statements, voting and even seating is all done by seniority and party.

All the Democrats will sit on one side of the room and the Republicans on the other. These days, though, there are so many more Democrats than Republicans (30-19) that some of the more junior Democrats need to sit on the Republican side.

The committee will consider amendments and there are likely to be quite a few. Some are likely to be useful and will make the bill better, either substantively or politically; others are likely to be bad ideas that are either offered in good faith or as a way to obstruct the process. For instance, opponents of ENDA are likely to propose quite a few amendments
that they say will make ENDA better and then admit that they won’t vote for ENDA even if the changes are made. There will also be typical opposition amendments designed only to make a political statement, such as unborn, undocumented transgender immigrant children are allowed to possess automatic weapons while they are drilling for oil in national parks as long as they don’t send text messages while voting.

Each amendment that is called is briefly debated and voted on. When a vote is called on an amendment, at first there will be a lot of absent members, but they will quickly show up, say how they vote and then leave for other business. I stay away from doors during votes. Sometimes they vote on amendments one by one, other times they debate in batches and then vote in batches. Each time there will be a voice vote (“All in favor say aye . . . ” ), and then each time equality opponents will insist on a rollcall vote in order to waste time and to say in a hypothetical later campaign that the ENDA supporter voted 17 trillion times to support LGBT people—except they won’t call us LGBT people.

It is possible that the committee will consider every offered amendment; it is also possible that opponents will offer so many obstructionist and redundant amendments that eventually the Committee will decide to stop hearing amendments.

I should note here that the markup in the House Judiciary Committee Hate Crime bill earlier this year was spread over two days because there were so many amendments. I’m not saying that will or even can happen with ENDA, but don’t be surprised.

Finally, a vote will be held on whether to send the bill with amendments to the full House of Representatives for a vote. We are very optimistic that there will be sufficient votes in the committee. Generally, on a bill like ENDA, committee chairs will not schedule markup until they are pretty certain the bill can at least pass out of committee.

NCTE staff will be attending the hearing and will be Twittering as @transequality <http://twitter.com/TransEquality> and as @marakeisling<http://twitter.com/marakeisling>.
If you do not twitter, you can follow our twitter posts on our main webpage at www.transequality.org <http://transequality.org/>.

I hope this was informative and interesting. If you really want to learn more, here <http://www.rules.house.gov/archives/98-188.pdf>is a Congressional Research Service document that describes the markup process in gripping detail.

Please keep up the contacts with your members of Congress. It’s ENDA time.

Posted by Mara Keisling at 4:09 PM

http://nctequality.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-is-committee-markup-its-next-for.html

November 5, 10:38 AMPittsburgh Grassroots ExaminerMike Boda

A man (sic) too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools.
-Spanish proverb

Most people can make the connections between globalized consumer capitalism and its role in shuttling various organisms around the planet, but with US workers increasingly forced into competition with their counterparts in developing countries for the sake of the shareholders, does such a requisite lowering of wages and loss of workplace benefits, such as access to health care and paid sick leave create the perfect conditions for the spread of infectious diseases, such as H1N1, better known as swine flu? In the US, 40% of private-sector workers, most of us in low-wage service (tourism) industry jobs that require contact with the public (or their food, drink, cas, and cards) have no sick days. Not that being granted paid sick time as a part of a benefits package is any guarantee that you will not be disciplined for using them, as I learned the hard way, ironically, while employed by a local health insurer. Although unpaid sick leave is mandated by federal law, calling off, for any reason is frowned upon by the service industry and small businesses, as State right-to-work and “at-will” employment laws give employers the last word.

As is the case with many social problems, being forced to work while sick has a disproportionate effect on women, who make up 22 million of the 57 million US workers who are unable to take a sick day. This translates into sick children being sent to child care providers and schools, as their parents or parent are unable to stay home to care for them, due to the loss of a day’s wages or the job (or jobs).

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends you stay home until at least 24 hours after your fever is gone, leaving the house only to get medical care. Schools and workplaces are encouraging this policy to avoid infecting other students and employees.

Worldwide, run-of-the-mill seasonal flu is responsible for between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths annualy, with some 36,000 of them in the US. In an increasingly part-time, temporary culture of employment where office equpment is more valued than office workers, the continued emphasis on profits over peoples’ lives continues to puts us all at risk.

Billy Bragg singing There is Power in a Union

From The Women’s Media Center

http://womensmediacenter.com/ex/111309.html

By Peggy Simpson

After the shocking setback in the House for abortion rights, women’s rights groups turned their attention to the Senate, which could begin debate on health care reform next week.

November 13, 2009

Whether the Senate blocks a House-passed amendment that would vastly expand federal bans on abortion depends partly on whether the women’s groups can persuade their progressive allies to stand up with them in opposition.

The jury’s out on that right now. But much organizing is underway against the amendment by Representatives Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joe Pitts (R-Pa), which was added to the House health care reform bill in a shocking move last Saturday.

Many progressive and left-of-center groups had focused their efforts on passing health care reform. They celebrated its narrow victory in the House, by a 220-215 margin, and gave short shrift to the Stupak amendment, representing the most significant expansion of the Hyde amendment’s ban on federal funding for abortion since 1976.

That didn’t sit well with some.

Amie Newman, managing editor of RH Reality Check, headlined her article: “Dear Progressive Allies in Health Care Reform: Where Were You on the Stupak Amendment?” She wrote that she got elated emails from MoveOn.org, her state Democratic Party, Americans for Democratic Action and SEIU about House action on health care. But “none of you mention the heinous hit women’s access to abortion care took when this House bill was passed.” The groups ignored the fight ahead for pro-choice legislators. “Not one of your emails touches on the ways in which abortion access is critical to a broader progressive agenda. …How can it be that somehow abortion access has been largely ignored by other progressive organizations working for health care reform?”

This is indeed a watershed moment, a wakeup call, for Democratic women.

Representative Diane DeGette (D-Co) gets credit for buying time for reproductive rights groups to overcome their shock, rally their own troops and start “educating” the progressive groups about the weight of abortion rights within the overall health care issue. By Sunday, fewer than 24 hours after the House vote, DeGette announced she had commitments from 41 House members to vote against any final health care bill that contained the Stupak amendment. That sobered political leaders, including in the White House, into realizing this was no simple “disagreement.”

The media took notice and editorials and critical cartoons began appearing. Joel Pett, a cartoonist from the Lexington Herald Leader, portrayed an angry Town Hall-type of protestor, waving his anti-abortion placard at an Uncle Sam figure, saying “I don’t need government making my health care decisions. … I need you making HERS,” pointing to a woman going into a clinic.”

Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards convened a Tuesday meeting with leaders of 80 progressive groups and summoned grass roots reproductive rights leaders to Washington for a day of lobbying November 18. By Thursday, MoveOn.org introduced a fundraising email by talking about the radical anti-abortion amendment attached to the House health care reform bill.

President Obama, meanwhile, had used a network interview to express his dismay. He said the bill without the Stupak amendment preserved the principle of Hyde that “federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.” He said he opposed moves to restrict “women’s insurance choices” in the new health care insurance exchange.

Months ago, this issue was addressed in both the House and Senate reform bills with a compromise shaped by Representative Lois Capps (D-CA), a nurse who had crafted many of the women’s health initiatives in the reform packages. The Capps compromise (which became the model for a similar provision in the Senate Finance Committee plan) would allow private insurers who participate in the health insurance exchange to include abortion coverage in their health care plans—as a majority of private plans now do, including, it turns out, the Cigna plan for the Republican National Committee. Capps would segregate federal funds from private funds in the health care exchange, including in plans for moderate to low-income people getting subsidies to buffer the costs of insurance. The portion of the premium paid privately by the insured person would pay for the abortion coverage.

With the floor vote about to be taken, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops pressed for a far more Draconian expansion of Hyde. With two dozen anti-abortion House Democrats, they forced a House vote on the Stupak amendment that for the first time would apply the Hyde amendment to the private sector. It would prohibit private insurers in the health care exchange from offering abortion coverage for the millions of people expected to get federal “affordability” subsidies to buy insurance plans. The amendment passed, with the votes of 64 Democrats and a near-unanimous array of Republicans.

Mainstream political commentators said the same thing would happen in the Senate—and the reproductive rights groups would just have to take their lumps.

The fury of pro-choice women began to have an impact within several days, however. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who personally opposes abortion, said he thought the language already in the Senate Finance Committee bill would suffice to wall off any federal financing of abortion. That was said also to be the view of another anti-abortion Democratic senator, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who had voted in committee against a Stupak-type provision a month earlier. A moderate Arkansas Democrat facing a tough reelection fight next year, Senator Blanche Lincoln, said the Senate Finance Committee had gone to great lengths to respect the Hyde amendment and “didn’t add to it or take away from it in any way.” That should be enough, she said.

An estimated 30 million people are expected to buy insurance in the new exchange, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Office—about nine million of them in plans bought by small businesses. Millions of others buying in would be individuals who have not been able to get coverage on their own in today’s marketplace. Many, but not all, could get federal subsidies to lower the insurance costs.

Meanwhile, the role of the Catholic Church and its own wealth of federal funds came under scrutiny. The bishops are experts in separating public and private dollars—as is called for by the Capps amendment in health care reform—because that’s what they do with the federal money going to Catholic Charities (which totaled $2.8 billion in 2008).

“The bishops never question their own ability to lawfully manage funds from separate sources to ensure that tax dollars don’t finance religious practices,” say Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, and Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. ”Yet they reject the idea that others could do the same. This is the very definition of hypocrisy.”

Eyal Press in The Nation said if Stupak and others were serious about assuring taxpayers they won’t be subsidizing abortion in any way, “why haven’t they drawn up an amendment abolishing tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance?”

In another op-ed, former NARAL president Kate Michaelman and Frances Kissling, former Catholics for Choice president, couldn’t resist saying “We told you so,” about the Democratic Party’s recruitment of anti-abortion Democrats. “When it comes to abortion, [Democrats] seem to think all positions are of equal value so long as the party maintains a majority. But the party will eventually reap what it has sown.”

In her own blog, Kissing said she sympathizes with the dilemma faced by her friends in House leadership. “These votes will trouble them for years to come.” But she added that “the Catholic in me says the next step is restitution. All is never lost. That restitution is their unswerving commitment and tireless work to overturn the Hyde Amendment.”