One of the things I see paid a lot of lip service to these past few years is the "GLBT" community. In reality, there's a "G" community, an "L" community and the rest of us get shoved to the side as quickly as possible.
Speaking as the "BT" portion of the show, I'm used to it. I'm far and away more accepted in the "straight" communities than I am in those communities that I actually have common cause with. However, every so often I see something that makes me Seethe.
According to an article you can find at http://www.newsvine.com/... , HR 2015, also known as "The Employment Non-Discrimination Act," has been changed. Here's a few quotes from the article...
Legislation banning workplace discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals — but not those who have had sex-change surgery or cross-dressers — has stalled in the House after an impassioned outcry against excluding people from the bill...
..."There is more resistance to protection for people who are transgender than for people who are gay, lesbian and bisexual," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said in a statement. "This is not a good fact, but ignoring bad facts is a bad way to get legislation passed."...
...However, once Democrats started counting votes and realized the measure would fail, they substituted a new version dropping transgender people from the bill, Frank said.
"It became very clear that while we would retain a significant majority of Democrats, we would lose enough so that a bill that included transgender protection would lose if not amended, and that an anti-transgender amendment would pass," Frank said....
This isn't the first time this bill has been weakened. Churches and the Military were already exempt from following the regulations proposed. Also, according to www.lambdalegal.com ,
Preliminary Analysis Summary:
As a point of clarity for the community: The recent version is not simply the old version with the transgender protections stripped out —but rather has modified the old version in several additional and troubling ways.
In addition to the missing vital protections for transgender people on the job, this new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who may not conform to their employer's idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit.
This version of ENDA states without qualification that refusal by employers to extend health insurance benefits to the domestic partners of their employees that are provided only to married couples cannot be considered sexual orientation discrimination. The old version at least provided that states and local governments could require that employees be provided domestic partner health insurance when such benefits are provided to spouses.
In the previous version of ENDA the religious exemptions had some limitations. The new version has a blanket exemption under which, for example, hospitals or universities run by faith-based groups can fire or refuse to hire people they think might be gay, lesbian or bisexual.
So, what do you suppose the members of congress who altered this bill were up to? The first point from Lambda Legal would seem to legalize forcing female employees to wear short skirts, for example, and it seems that a faith-based group that runs a hospital would be able to simply fire long-time gay employees simply because of their sexual orientation.
As for us transgender folks, well, once again we're left out in the cold.
Rep. Frank, an openly gay member of congress, would seem from an outsiders perspective to be a natural ally of the transgender community. There is a 'T' in 'GLBT,' after all, right? In fact, Frank's history shows us otherwise.
The following is from http://www.jenellerose.com/...
In 1999, five years after the disagreement between the HRC and the transgender community over inclusion in ENDA surfaced the controversy continued, one of the bill’s Congressional sponsors, openly gay Representative, Barney Frank, played the "Bathroom Card", saying that employers will not accept transgender people as employees since they won’t be able to convince their other employees to tolerate transgender people in the restrooms.
Oh! We can't POSSIBLY let the little black children go to school with the little white children! The parents won't stand for it! Way to roll back that clock, Barney...
From a heteronormative point of view, this must seem more than a little bizarre. After all, we're one community with a shared aim of equality under the law, right?
Sadly, no.
It can be argued that the beginning of the modern GLBT rights movement was the Stonewall Riots. It's a matter of historic record that transpeople were involved. Sylvia Rivera, Miss Stephen Whittaker and others were on the front lines. However, many "mainstream" G and L people refuse to admit that we were even there.
For instance, take a look at this text from http://www.indegayforum.org/...
"the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is probably exaggerated. Eyewitness accounts of what happened that night vary, as they usually do, and we have no videotape of the event and very few pictures...
"...these historical disputes have no bearing — either way — on whether "gender identity" ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation...even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what?
"If we learned the Stonewall police had busted up a meeting of gay white racists, instead of drag queens, we wouldn't say that should make us more attentive to the concerns of racists."
That's just the tip of the iceberg. We've been kicked off stage at rallys, prevented from marching at pride events, kept out of activist organizations, the list goes on and on and has done so for almost forty years.
I'm not shocked by Rep. Frank's transphobia, nor am I shocked by the large amount of 'G' and 'L' identified people who claim that weakening the bill was the right path to take. What does shock me, however, is that after all of this time, discrimination and nasty rhetoric, the 'G' and 'L' people still add 'BT' to the end of their acronym.
I mean, make up your minds, eh? Either accept us as allies or take our initial off of your acronym.
UPDATE: According to http://www.dailykos.com/... , transgender rights have apparently been put back in the bill. While this is good news, the fact that transgender people were removed at all highlights the very real divisions in the so-called GLBT community which continue to haunt us decades after Stonewall.
