When it comes to gay owned and/or operated brick and mortar businesses discriminating against transgender people, one just has to look at gay bars as having examples of the worst offenders.

Take Colorado’s Denver Wrangler. They are so brazen in their discrimination against transgender people that they’ve posted their discriminatory policy on their website:

- Gender matching I.D. required.
- I.D. must be state issued photo identification or driver license, military I.D., US passport or visa.
- I.D. must be current (not expired).

Which class of people do you imagine has identification cards where the sex marker doesn’t match the gender presentation? If you guessed transgender people — the same transgender people who are protected against public accommodation discrimination in Colorado’s new public accommodation anti-discrimination law — you guessed correctly.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the Wrangler’s policies were challenged by a complaint to the Denver Anti-Discrimination Office by even one potential transgender patron, the city’s ARTICLE IV (that covers public accommodation) indicates the bar is blatantly violating the law with an unlawful policy — I’m sure one potential transgender patron’s complaint would result in the city suing Wrangler’s. (And geez, that’s not even basing a complaint on the new state public accommodation law, of which Wrangler’s is also in violation of!)

Although…I guess I could ask my rocket scientist friend Zoe Brain to get a her opinion on whether or not unlawful discrimination is occurring. I’m not sure a rocket scientist’s opinion would add anything to the discussion, but I guess it couldn’t hurt to know what a rocket scientist thinks about this.

Wrapping this diary up, let me point out that Pam’s House Blend is going to Denver in late August for the Democratic National Convention. Whatever shall I do should the bar’s discriminatory policy be still in place when PHB makes the trip to the Mile High City? I’m sure my rocket scientist friend could provide y’all with some good guesses about some lawful behaviors I may engage in at the Denver Wrangler’s location.

~~~~~
Related:
* Q Of The Day: When Is It Okay For Gay Owned Businesses To Discriminate Against Transgender People?
* Pam’s House Blend tag for employment - housing - public accommodation
* I’m Going To Colorado In August With PHB; I’m Going To Make Use Of Public Accommodations
* If Dr. Dobson Were King, We’d All Be Wearing Depends
* When It Comes To Transgender People & Civil Rights, It Really Is Always About The Bathroom

A portent perhaps foreshadowing what’s likely to befall Republicans come November?

Whatever it may or may not be, I completely and unremorsefully agree with the blogger who said “I am not sad.” At least (I don’t think), he did not have the additional misfortune to be represented by Sen. Helms for over 25 years, as I was.

From the New York Times …

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

…

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”

For one thing, he said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.

Mr. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.

…

In campaigns and in the Senate, Mr. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

In his last year in the Senate, he decided to support AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common.

Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Mr. Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

In 1994, angered at President Clinton, Mr. Helms suggested in print that if Mr. Clinton was to visit North Carolina, “He’d better bring a bodyguard.” He later said the remark had been “a mistake.”

His bruising style and right-wing politics won him many friends in his home state and across the nation, but he also created a legion of enemies. Millions of dollars were raised outside North Carolina both from those who flocked to his ideological banner and from those who ached to see him defeated. He never won more than 55 percent of the vote in five campaigns for the Senate.

The rest of “Jesse Helms, Conservative Force in the Senate, Dies at 86″ may be read here.

Since we tend to focus on transgender-related issues here a bit, I’ll end with this brief excerpt from a 1994 San Francisco Human Rights Commission report authored by Jamison Green that popped out of the “wayback machine” …

Gender dysphoria was once classified as a
medical condition, and Federal funds were available for diagnosed people who did not
have insurance coverage, who may have been on the verge of suicide because they
could not function in the social role prescribed by their external genitalia. But the Nixon
administration removed this safety net, and that cleared the way for insurance
companies to decide that they didn’t have to pay for any treatment deemed cosmetic,
elective, or experimental in nature. And in 1992, Senator Jesse Helms was successful in
removing protection for transgendered people from the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Gender dysphoria is now classified as a psycho-sexual disorder. Thus, Federal funding
is no longer available for gender confirmation surgery, but it is still readily available for
electroshock and other barbaric treatments, if deemed psychiatrically necessary.

I would say it’s a safe bet to make that OneNewsNow avoids posting the term gay in the Associated Press articles they feed to their site by the use of an automatic search-and-replace program. It looks this way because of their embarrassing post of an article that changed the name of Beijing Olympics hopeful Tyson Gay to “Tyson Homosexual” (emphasis added).

Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999…

They fixed the auto-replace gaff for their AP article feed here, in the retitled article Gay eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.

My guess would be that they consciously use homosexual as a term to throwback to when homosexual was listed as a mental health condition in DSM-II. Activist conservative Christians often tend to believe that it’s a Myth That Psychiatry Has Proven That Homosexual Behavior Is Normal, and because they believe that homosexuality should be relisted as a mental disorder because they believe homosexuality is marked by deviant and sinful behavior that’s tied to an identity.

~~
H/t: The Slog

In the colloquial spirit of saying someone is a sandwich short of a picnic to mean someone isn’t reasoning quite clearly, WingNutDaily’s Janet Folger appears to be a toilet stall short of a public restroom in her piece Go ahead: Arrest me.

Before we get to what she states she soon plans on doing, we need to get a take on how she reads a section of Colorado’s recently signed-by-the-Colorado-governor public accommodation law (SB 200). From the actual text of the law:

SECTION 8. 24-34-701, Colorado Revised Statutes, is amended to read:

24-34-701. Publishing of discriminative matter forbidden. No person, being the owner, lessee, proprietor, manager, superintendent, agent, or employee of any place of public accommodation, resort, or amusement, directly or indirectly, by himself or herself or through another person shall publish, issue, circulate, send, distribute, give away, or display in any way, manner, or shape or by any means or method, except as provided in this section, any communication, paper, poster, folder, manuscript, book, pamphlet, writing, print, letter, notice, or advertisement of any kind, nature, or description which THAT is intended or calculated to discriminate or actually discriminates against any disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry or against any of the members thereof in the matter of furnishing or neglecting or refusing to furnish to them or any one of them any lodging, housing, schooling, or tuition or any accommodation, right, privilege, advantage, or convenience offered to or enjoyed by the general public or which states that any of the accommodations, rights, privileges, advantages, or conveniences of any such place of public accommodation, resort, or amusement shall or will be refused, withheld from, or denied to any person or class of persons on account of disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry or that the patronage, custom, presence, frequenting, dwelling, staying, or lodging at such place by any person or class of persons belonging to or purporting to be of any particular disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry is unwelcome or objectionable or not acceptable, desired, or solicited.

How Folger quoted this same section of the new law in her recent article:

Section 8. 24-34-701. Publishing of discriminative matter forbidden. No person, being the owner, lessee, proprietor, manager, superintendent, agent, or employee of any place of public accommodation … shall publish, issue, circulate, send, distribute, give away, or display in any way, manner, or shape or by any means or method, except as provided in this section, any communication, paper, poster, folder, manuscript, book, pamphlet, writing, print, letter, notice, or advertisement of any kind, nature, or description that is intended or calculated to discriminate or actually discriminates against … SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status … in the matter of furnishing or neglecting or refusing to furnish to them or any one of them any lodging, housing, schooling, or tuition or any accommodation, right [marriage], privilege [adoption] , advantage, or convenience … on account of … SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status … [which] is unwelcome or objectionable or not acceptable, desired, or solicited.

I’m not an attorney, but it looks to me that the intent of the section of the law in question is to make it clear that the owner, lessee, proprietor, manager, superintendent, agent, or employee of any place of public accommodation, resort, or amusement shouldn’t attempt to violate or circumvent the intent of Colorado Revised Statute 24-34-301 with some sort of written product. (Y’all attorneys out there in Blenderville correct me if I’ve got this totally wrong, okay?) Janet Folder seems to have edited the code section to imply SB 200 states that if any written product disagrees with the homosexual agenda and is found within the state boundaries of Colorado, that’s unlawful — and that any person who publishes or possesses such material is in violation of state law.

And, she pretty much states that this is her interpretation of the statute in this article excerpt:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I noticed about the An Examination of Discrimination Against Transgender Americans in the Workplace hearing is that minus the Alliance Defense Fund, there weren’t any conservative Christian organizations speaking at the hearing; minus the Traditional Values Coalition any conservative Christian organizations leaving press materials at the hearing; and minus the ranking minority member of the subcommittee (Rep. John Kline, R-MN) there were no Republicans there to ask questions of the witnesses at the hearing.

So what’s happening now there’s a conservative Christian community characterization of the hearing as if there was serious wave of opposition speaking to trans employment issues — but they didn’t actually have much presense there opposing any future gender idenity and expression inclusive legislation in person.

Some examples of online, conservative Christian commentary:

- PFOX: Congressional Hearing To Push Gender Confusion Upon All Americans

Democrat leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives have scheduled a hearing this Thursday on discrimination against “transgendered” individuals in the workplace.

“Homosexuals and their transgender activist allies hope to use this hearing as a way of forcing the imposition of gender confusion upon all Americans,” said Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) Executive Director Regina Griggs today. “Instead of treating transsexualism and cross-dressing behaviors as Gender Identity Disorders (GID) as defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Democrats seem determined to make these behaviors into federally-protected minorities.”

“Why should Congress force Americans to provide workplace accommodations for people who are confused about whether they’re male or female? How can Congress force us to make believe that a man is really a woman or a woman is really a man?”

“If Democrats were truly concerned about these gender confused individuals, they’d push for expanded mental health services for GID. A person can’t change his or her sex – and many of these individuals think they’re a woman one day and a man the next day. Why is Congress catering to such insanity?”

[OneNewsNow/American Family Association, Peter LaBarbera, Focus On The Family/CitizenLink, Concerned Women For America, and Traditional Values Coalition commentaries below the fold.]
Read the rest of this entry »

From the Los Angeles Times:

SAN DIEGO — Several employees of the county clerk’s office have been reassigned to other duties because they expressed “sincerely held religious objections” to gay marriage, County Clerk Gregory Smith said Friday.

No employee is being allowed to perform marriage duties involving only heterosexual couples, Smith said. Instead, employees are being shifted to other duties that do not include issuing marriage licenses, officiating at civil weddings or acting as witnesses.

…Smith cited Government Code Section 12940, which requires an employer to explore “any available reasonable alternative means of accommodating the religious belief or observance [of an employee], including the possibilities of excusing the person from those duties that conflict with his or her religious belief.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune added that fourteen county clerks inquired about religious exemptions to performing marriages:

[E]mployees were told they would have to perform the ceremonies without discrimination or seek a reassignment within the department or the county.

“The Department is still exploring possible ways to accommodate your religious concerns, but you should realize that it will be impossible for you to remain in your current assignment,” employees were told in the June 5 e-mail.

Given that answer, Smith said, several employees withdrew their objections, but a few chose reassignment. He would not give specific numbers. Smith also would not say whether the 14 employees whose e-mails were released were the only ones who objected.

Focus On The Family/CitizenLink got the facts wrong over the numbers…

At least 14 employees with the San Diego County Clerk’s office have been reassigned because they expressed religious objections to gay “marriage” and refused to perform the ceremonies.

Does that count as lying, or just sloppy journalism?

Focus On The Family/CitizenLink added:

Jenny Tyree, associate marriage analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said state workers’ moral and religious beliefs are in tension with the state. Voters will decide how this plays out when they vote on a state marriage amendment defining marriage as between one man and woman.

“Amending the state constitution in November would not only protect the definition of marriage,” Tyree said, “but also will protect the First Amendment rights of people who believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”

It’s easy to give easy digs on Focus On The Family/CitizenLink/Focus on the Family Action for their marriage is the union of a man and a woman language, other than I feel a need to join RadicalRuss in pointing out Sen. Obama recently started using the same language on marriage equality as conservative Christians are using — again.

[Below the fold: Where Sen. Obama recently used the “marriage is between a man and a woman” language]

Read the rest of this entry »

Transgender people were thrown out of the Gay Liberation Movement in part because newly out transwomen aren’t photogenic — transwomen are often perceived to photograph as “freaks” — Is the desire to appear mainstream becoming more key in the LGBT push for marriage equality than it already has been? Could the “mainstreaming” approach to LGBT issues again negatively impact basic civil rights and protections for transgender people?

When I look at myself in the mirror, I see that my only two piercings are centered in my two earlobes; my hair is dyed a dirty blond (close to my old, natural color) to cover my gray; I get manicures and pedicures that are finished with “work-friendly” nail polish shades; my clothing is usually age appropriate; and my written opinions at Pam’s House Blend are usually made with a soft touch…with my opinions being pretty much within the norms of progressive politics. My therapist reminded me last week, as she has frequently, that I appear to be pretty mainstream.

What isn’t mainstream about me? Maybe the one, large tattoo on my back isn’t that mainstream, but frankly tattoos have pretty much entered mainstream society. The only other thing is I’m a very out transsexual — who very much for political reasons identifies as transgender. But even with that, I’m not an angry transwoman who often whines about my fate, or frequently and militantly rails against perceived societal injustices towards transgender people. Apparently, I’m about as close to mainstream in appearance and attitude as an out transwoman can be — so I imagine it’s safe to identify me as mainstream transgender.

So if I’m so mainstream, why am so I chafing at the Los Angeles Times‘ story Gay couples are emphasizing low-key weddings? I’m concerned about the “unsolicited advice” to same sex couples is don’t be flamboyant even if you are flamboyant (emphasis added):

The gay and lesbian couples who packed a Hollywood auditorium last week had come seeking information about California’s new marriage policies. But they also got some unsolicited advice.

Be aware.

Images from gay weddings, said Lorri L. Jean, chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, could be used by opponents in a campaign designed to persuade California voters that gays and lesbians should not have the right to marry. Those getting married, she cautioned, should never lose sight of what they might be supplying to the other side.

Sitting close to his husband-to-be in the audience, hairstylist Kendall Hamilton nodded and said he knew just what she meant. No “guys showing up in gowns,” he said.

“It’s a weird subject,” added Hamilton, 39, who plans to wed his partner of five years, Ray Paolantonio. “We want everybody to be free, but the image does matter. . . . They are going to try to make us look like freaks.”

[After the fold, transgender inclusion in LGBT civil rights legislation tied to how transgender women are often less than photogenic.]

Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email from Equality California’s Geoff Kors yesterday, identifying a major contribution to the opposition protect marriage campaign. From the Equality California email on the major donation (Equality California being one of Equality For All’s coalition organizations):

“I … discovered the unhappy news that Focus on the Family just donated $250,000 to ban marriage for same-sex couples in California. After this morning’s celebration of love and commitment, this only makes me more determined to ensure that all couples continue have the opportunity to celebrate their marriages.”

If we want marriage equality in California to last past this November, we’re going to have to, as a broad community, work for it — and we’re going to have to donate for it. Are opponents are going to be very well funded.

Select the Equality For All logo below if you wish to donate to California’s marriage equality continuing past this November election.

~~~~~
Further reading:
* Los Angeles Times: Gay marriages begin with a day of hope and hoopla; Although protests are low-key, a constitutional battle is gathering behind the scenes

My transactivist friends and I have had some discussion about drag shows over the years, and a significant portion of these transgender folk consider drag shows as a kind of blackface. The reasoning behind that is that there is presumed to be a cissexual privilege*, and that people who have cissexual privilege aren’t fully aware of how cissexual people are often engaged in oppressing transsexual and intersexual people, much as those who experience white privilege aren’t fully aware of how white people in western society are often engaged in oppressing ethnic minorities.

I don’t personally buy into the idea that all drag shows are exercises in cissexual privilege. This is because I’m very aware that although sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are separate structural concepts, there is certain amount of spill over between the two concepts related to gender norms. There are gender norms that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people don’t conform to regarding sexual partners; there are gender norms that feminine/effeminate gay men, masculine/emasculate lesbian women, crossdressing men, genderqueer people, and transsexual people don’t conform to regarding movement, speech, and other behaviors.

And, on top of that is layered a belief among many transgender people and allies that gender is a continuum: male and female are on the end points of a spectrum of gender which includes people who understand themselves to be neither male or female, both male and female, or somewhere between male and female, as well as those who understand themselves to be male but were born female-bodied, those who understand themselves to be female but were born male bodied, and those who consider themselves to be male or female but were born with ambiguous genitalia, or were born with sex chromosomes or sex related genetics that don’t conform to the standard XX or XY dichotomy of sexes. Drag queens and drag kings often express on a personal level how LGBTQQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, ally) folk are all, to some extent, gender outlaws.

Again, I personally just don’t buy into the idea that within the LGBT community, drag performances are exercises in cissexual privilege — or excercises in a kind of transgender blackface — instead I believe our community’s diversity is often beautifully expressed in drag shows. I strongly believe in the embracing and owning of community expressions of gender variance.

So when would, in my opinion, a drag show become like a blackface show?

Well, I don’t know in every case; I can’t tell you exactly all of the elements of when drag performance crosses the line to become an exercise in cissexual privilege. I can; however, give you an example from this past week of a drag show which, in my opinion, was such an exercise.

On June 12, 2008 there was a drag show/benefit for seniors organized by Westchester County legislator Bernice Spreckman. It took place at the Polish Center in Yonkers. There, county legislators Ken Jenkins (in a bra, tutu and something looking like butterfly wings), Vito Pinto (in a blonde wig black bra with white fur, furry miniskirt), and Jose Alvarado (in a bra and a Roman Helmet) appeared to the laughter of an audience of seniors. Per the Lower Hudson Journal News:

Already under siege by gadflys who would abolish their jobs and a district attorney investigating alleged misspending among their staff, Westchester County legislators found another constituency to provoke yesterday: transgenders, who rallied outside county offices today to protest a drag show starring three male legislators the day before.

Dressed in boas, skirts, lace, falsies and twinkling lights, the legislators staged “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” from the Broadway legend “Gypsy” as part of a musical review before about 400 senior citizens at the Polish Community Center in Yonkers.

…Jenkins added that the performance was honest to “Gypsy” as it was written, which he said - incorrectly - featured “cross-dressing men” as female strippers in “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.”

The number traditionally includes only women.

In a quote from a New York Transgender Rights Organization [NYTRO] press release, spokesperson Joann Prinzivalli stated:

“The Westchester County legislature has failed for nearly eight years to amend the county human rights law to explicitly protect transgender people … It is shocking to see county legislators who have dragged their feet on this vital issue doing the equivalent of a KKK blackface show to mock my people.”

[Below the fold, some comparisons between how African-Americans were portrayed in relevant news media and popular entertainment in the Jim Crow south and transgender people are portrayed by conservative Christian news media — as well as in this recent drag show.]

Read the rest of this entry »

… o Pete. Yes, he is at it again, not that he knows anything about pandering, of course.

This is from OneNewsNow today (”Homosexuality takes Congress by storm“) on Mr. Leather’s latest comments, which seem just so ironically and sadly hilariously over-the-top on so many levels to this reader …

The two openly homosexual members of the U.S. House of Representatives have recruited 50 of their colleagues to officially join them in promoting the homosexual agenda in Congress.

Democrats Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin are the only open homosexuals serving in Congress. They have joined with Republicans Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and 50 other Democrats to create the House Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus. Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, says it is a sad day when Congress enshrines official promotion of sexual immorality.

“How interesting that we now have a homosexuality, transsexual caucus – I guess you could call it – at the congressional level. It’s just unbelievable that there are this many congressmen who are promoting homosexuality and transsexual perversion,” LaBarbera laments.

While LaBarbera criticized the two Republicans for lending the appearance of bipartisanship to the group, he reserved his primary wrath for the Democrats.

“I think what this shows is that the hard-core Democratic Left is extremely pro-homosexual,” he states. “Big city populations have many homosexual activists, and they’re disproportionately powerful compared to the rest of the people in the district. Do I think that the average person in the district knows that these members are promoting homosexuality in this way? No way! But there are probably powerful homosexual constituencies in each one of these districts,” LaBarbera explains.

Christians, according to LaBarbera, could learn something from the success of homosexual activists. With very small numbers, they have managed to create the perception of a much larger constituency and, thereby, have many of their political demands met.

“The gays are all about political power. They know how to vote. They’re very committed. They’re not apathetic like many Christians,” says the activist. “And they’ve ‘earned’ this extraordinary total: 52 congressmen coming right out and saying, ‘We are going to vote for homosexuality and transsexuality in Congress,” LaBarbera contends.

…

Homosexuality takes Congress by storm

Strength in small numbers … sounds like something Jesus might appreciate … not that Barney and the 53 apostles (sorry, we have a problem with inflation) are in that league, of course.

I feel like I’ve been talking about public restrooms way too much of late. Blame the news cycles; blame conservative Christians — LGBT civil rights and public accommodation issues seem to be boiling down to which public restrooms transpeople are going to be using. It’s of special concern, it seems, which public restrooms transwomen are going to use.

It’s the perpetrator thing. Frankly, many women look at men who are strangers to them as potential predators, and these same women (along with their male protectors) perceive visibly transgender women who use women’s public restrooms as potential male rapists. And if these same women (and their male protectors) have female children, they perceive visibly transgender women who use women’s public restrooms as potential pedophiles. There’s hasn’t been any studies that have substantiated or unsubstantiated this fear of crossdressed males abusing women and children in women’s public restrooms, but this fear of crossdressed, male, public restroom perpetrators is being used in an attempt to shape public policy on LGBT civil rights and public accommodation legislation — most recently in Montgomery County, Maryland and Colorado.

But, the predator argument doesn’t work very when we’re talking about male-to-female transgender fifth graders. A ten or eleven year old who knows her gender identity doesn’t match her* natal sex isn’t going through the process of a social transition for sexual reasons. And, whether or not adults accept the idea that a fifth grader is self aware enough to understand when her gender identity and natal sex may not match, most are aware that fifth graders aren’t public restroom predators. Shannon Garcia and Kim Pearson of TransYouth Family Allies have frequently reminded me that transyouth really are the future key to public understanding of how gender identity in transsexuals isn’t directly correlated to sexuality.

So, since the scream of predator won’t work for a fifth grander, Mike Heath (of the Christian Civic League (CCL) Of Maine) and his conservative Christian surrogates are now trying to employ a privacy related strategy. Paul Melanson, a grandfather to a student in the same class as the transyouth, has announced he’s filing a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC) — which is seen as a first step prior to filing a civil suit in U.S. District Court at Bangor. From the Bangor Daily News article on the lawsuit announcement press conference:

Jasmine Smith, 13, is concerned that next year the fifth-grader at Asa Adams Elementary School who identifies as a girl will be changing in the girls locker room.

At a press conference Monday night in front of the municipal building, the seventh-grader said that because she has seen the fifth-grader in the girls bathroom after school she assumes the student will be allowed to use the girls facilities at Orono Middle School.

“That would be an invasion of the girls’ privacy and of my privacy,” she said.

Smith acknowledged that no teachers or administrators have told students the fifth-grader would be changing in the girls locker room or using the girls bathrooms at the middle school.

Smith appeared at the press conference called by Paul Melanson of Orono, who formally has objected to the practice of allowing a boy to use the girls bathroom at the school. Melanson said he asked Smith to speak at the press conference to show that although school officials had told him the fifth-grader was using a teachers bathroom, he was using the girls bathroom.

The constitutional right to privacy is the basis right that found abortion legal in Roe v. Wade, so it’s an interesting choice of argument for conservative Christians to employ. But even past that it’s an interesting argument, the CCL choise to employ a privacy argument against this transyouth just doesn’t appear to resonate well with the public in the same way as a predator argument does with regards to older transgender people.

(Below the fold: Excerpts of comments left for the Bangor Daily News article Grandfather plans rights suit over boy using girls bathroom)

Read the rest of this entry »

As we enter the Pride month I for one hope the community takes a moment to reflect back on all the effort put forth by gay men and women in the past to secure the freedom and acceptance we currently enjoy today. Fighting during a period in time where it was hazardous to one’s physical health to be on the forefront. Stonewall was not simply an activist protest where they went home afterwards and partied. They were beaten and dragged away to jail by the police. It was a time when fag bashing was an accepted method of controlling homos and keeping them out of the neighborhood. There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were. Making a stand even though they fully knew the dangers of doing so. That’s true courage no different than that on a battlefield.
–Joseph DaBrow, Metroline (Late May, 2008)

Some of the “broad us” at Stonewall were drag queens; some of the “broad us” at Stonewall were transgender and/or transsexual people (even if those words weren’t terms used to describe gender variant people at the time); and some of the “broad us” at Stonewall didn’t publicly identify as gay women, but as lesbians. It’s been well documented that the “broad us” of Stonewall protestors included a broad swath of LGBT people.

Joseph DaBrow’s commentary on Pride Month is an objectionable to those of us who are proud that it wasn’t only gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were, but instead know it was LGBT people standing up for who they were and who we are. As a term, gay isn’t always seen as inclusive of us all, and in this case gay isn’t an adequate description of who was there at Stonewall.

So in this case, my peers and I are also making a stand: we will not stand by to be quietly homogenized away from the civil rights and social justice implications of Stonewall; we don’t accept being hidden behind a non-inclusive use of the term gay.

Frankly, it’s not in the best interest of those of us whose civil rights depend on the language of gender identity and expression being included in civil rights legislation to accept it when our members’ contributions to our broad community’s history are being in any way minimized or erased.

~~~~~
H/t: Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition