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"TransPositive"
The Best Reason for Transgender Inclusion In ENDA
By Jessica Xavier
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Author's Note: This article is taken largely from my Trans Am column of February 6 in the Baltimore Gay Paper, so it was written for a mostly gay and lesbian audience. It was born in equal parts out of frustration, desperation (I am still without a full-time job, and I get paid 50 clams for these babies) and in response to the failure of our ethical and political arguments for inclusion in the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The ethical argument - that trans people have always been part of the gay community, and have paid more than our dues before, during and after Stonewall - has fallen on the deaf ears of queers more privileged than we. The political argument - that we bring more passion, power, voices and votes to the gay civil rights movement - has been countered by the infamous "Thirty Votes" argument (an informed estimate of what trans inclusion in ENDA would cost in the US Senate).
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He's reading me. I can tell by the look in his eyes, as he shifts uncomfortably in his chair. <<Sigh.>> It's hard enough for me to find my way in his world, let alone pay the rent. Yet here I am, interviewing for this job that I desperately need. I'm struggling to maintain eye contact, trying to show him I'm competent, stable, professional, straight....
Although of course, in my heart of heart's, I know the last is impossible. I'm hopelessly queer -- oh excuse me, in the Ellen Age, I'm a "gay woman". No wait, that's not right, either. I'm a lesbian, but then I guess that's pretty obvious. Like Daphne Scholinski , the last time I wore a dress was... But I sleep with women, so I'm still protected, right? Just because I look and act like a boy doesn't mean that I shouldn't be covered under ENDA, like those fucked-up transgender guys-who-think-they-are-girls, right...? I'm right, right? Right...?
One of the painful ironies of queer existence is that the divisiveness created by our own cultural and ideological differences has caused almost as much harm to us as a community as have our heterosexist oppressors. The traditional divisions with which we are most familiar (race, class, age, and sex) and their accompanying privileges have been the topics of many different writers for the past twenty years, but very little has been written about some of the more subtle forms of privilege, like passing and birth privilege. To address these issues seriously would require a paradigm shift about the ways we think about homosexuality, which would threaten both the queer intellectual status quo and the conventional wisdom that affords gay and lesbian people the various ideological niches where they stake their identities and live their lives.
One of the characteristics of possessing privilege is that it's possessor takes for granted, and thus most privileged people are usually ignorant of it. It is that ignorance, and the failure to address the underlying social constructs that produce privilege in the first place, that gives us the classist, racist, and heterosexist society we live in. In the queer world, those of us who possess passing privilege - passing as straight men and women - enjoy a choice about who knows and who doesn't. It's probably safe to surmise that most of us who are closeted have passing privilege, and thus our homosexuality, bisexuality or transgendered status would probably come as a surprise to our family and friends. However, I'll bet that many - if not most of us - who are out do not have passing privilege, since that choice was taken from us by nature. We just look and act too queer.
These more visible queers are gender variant. When someone refuses to follow this heterosexist society's rigid code of gender role behaviors, they are gender non-conforming, or gender variant. The most common form of gender variance is, of course, same gender sexual relations. But what you do in your bedroom is your private business and usually not public knowledge, if you're fortunate to have the aforementioned passing privilege. Yet there are probably just as many queer people who just aren't straight-acting or straight-appearing, since their gender variance goes much further than just taking a same gender partner. How?
Perhaps the most obvious form of gender variance is physical appearance, as governed by clothing and personal grooming. But it goes much farther than short hair and men's clothing for butch lesbians and bisexual women. There is even more gender variance in individual behavior, in one's manner, and in personal style. You see it even in traditional, stereotypical gender-based occupations - when a woman works a construction job, or when a man becomes a nurse. There are so many individualistic variations in gender behavior and roles that they are impossible to catalog here. But they can get you into big trouble real fast.
Which brings me to ENDA, the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the controversy over it's exclusion of transgendered people. ENDA will only protect people based on sexual orientation, not gender variance. As such, it is driven by identity, not behavior. But it was behavior, not identity, that cost lesbian attorney Robin Shahar her promotion and job in the office of Georgia Attorney General Bowers, who was the same cretin behind the Hardwicke case that confirmed sodomy as a crime in that state. If ENDA was law, her identity would be protected, but not her behavior, and thus she still would have lost. After a few more losses in cases similar to hers, the right will have all the behavioral legal arguments in place to defeat any discrimination case brought forward by a gay man, lesbian or bisexual under ordinary sexual orientation-only laws.
Yet the Human Rights Campaign, the flagship of gay assimulationists, continues to promote an ENDA designed to protect only those gay men and lesbians with passing privilege. By refusing to deal with the reality and extent of gender variance in the gay and lesbian community, HRC instead pushes a lowest common-denominator legislative strategy that, in effect, panders to the gender-based homophobia of straight congressmen. Their lobbyists go to the Hill, hat in hand, to plead for half a loaf, ready to sacrifice many of their own kind to guarantee the rights of the already privileged. Their so-called "improved climate" argument is full of holes, since it is based on the notion that actual protection based on sexual orientation will result in the wake of ENDA's passage. As the Shahar case proves, it simply won't.
As HRC skillfully defuses the arguments of the transgendered activists and plays divide and conquer within the transpolitical movement, it's ship sails on, in willful ignorance of the iceberg looming dead ahead. When ENDA is finally passed, it will prove to be little more than a legal Maginot line, benefiting the politicians who sponsored it more than the constituency it was designed to protect. Thus ENDA and any other plain-vanilla sexual orientation laws that lack language covering gender variant people will prove as useful as a defective condom in providing protection to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered and any other gender variant people who dare to color outside the straight world's gender lines.
The best reason for transgender inclusion in ENDA? Gender variance, which covers all of us. Write HRC and tell them. Don't do it for me - do it for your gender variant partner. Or better still - do it for yourself.
@ Jessica M. Xavier, the Baltimore Gay Paper, 2/6/98, reprinted with permission
You can email Jessica Xavier at:
TheXGrrrl@aol.com
The URL of It's Time, America!'s Webpage is:
http://www.GeoCities.com/WestHollywood/Heights/7979
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