Becky’s Blog

Earlier today, the National Center for Transgender Equality released Executive Director Mara Kiesling’s latest update on where we in the battle for an inclusive ENDA. I include her entire statement here for reasons I’ll go into afterward:

“There hasn’t been much in the way of news to report.  We are beginning the sixth week of this ENDA situation or crisis or opportunity. A huge amount of education has been done.  Quite actually tens of thousands of people have been engaged. And we are basically where we were at the beginning-our best allies in Congress with strong support from HRC still seem determined to jam a civil rights bill through the House of Representatives that virtually every LGBT organization, including HRC, says they do not want.  Because of the Congressional calendar for this fall, we are one way or another coming to resolution.  At least for now. 

My best estimation is that sometime today (possibly even before you read this) or tomorrow a decision will be made by House leadership as to whether to run H.R. 3685 and whether to first allow the Baldwin Amendment to be debated and/or voted on.

Until then, we are encouraging all of our members to visit their local Congressperson today or tomorrow to express one last time the need to pass a unified ENDA. We must convey the need to stop the divisive HR 3685 and move a unified ENDA or nothing.  Mend it or end it.  Fix it or nix it.

At this point in the train wreck though, the truth is that no real victory is possible for anyone-not this round.  If they pass the divided and divisive bill, the vast majority of us in LGBT-land are disappointed. We are not and will not be divided because very few LGBT organizations are not on the United ENDA side in this.  Some fringe-we are almost the whole cloth of the community. More importantly, our collective federal, state, and local work is set back years. No ENDA, despite how hard the House leadership tries to push the divisive ENDA at us, is going to become law this year. There is no incremental gain possible. First, the bill will not be signed into law thus no gain, and second, the incremental gain would be most like the incremental gain promised when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was similarly shoved down the throats of a, to say the least, reluctant LGBT community. Mere weeks and months after that fiasco, it was clear to almost everyone what a harmful ill-conceived increment that was. About 15 years of work still hasn’t undone that damage.

We know that the unified and inclusive bill (H.R. 2015) is off the table for this year, so passing that is very much not an option at this point.  The Baldwin Amendment is apparently off the table. But even if the Amendment were still open for discussion, some LGBT supporters in Congress and our community have done such a thorough job of undermining the work that we all have been doing that it has become barely a long shot to pass it. [Still, as of now, it is unclear if the Baldwin Amendment would be allowed by House leadership.  One thought is that Ms. Baldwin may be permitted to introduce her Amendment and speak on its behalf, then withdraw it prior to a vote.  On the one hand, having Tammy Baldwin and other supporters speak about the need for gender identity protections would be helpful in concept; on the other hand, it would unlikely be sufficiently helpful to undo the damage caused by passing the divisive bill minutes later.]

If the bill is pulled for now so that we can work together on a unified bill, that too is hardly a victory.  Relationships have been strained tremendously, resources and political capital have been expended needlessly and we all go back to square one minus several. However, this is still the best option.  Our goal has to be moving the ball forward to pass a bill that will protect all of us and until the divisive bill has been pulled from consideration, we cannot begin again working together to pass such a unified bill 

Any victory by anyone at this point would be utterly pyrrhic.

The only victory to come from this crisis has been the advancement (albeit incremental) of the LGBT community message of solidarity and willingness to step up for social justice. Hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals have spoken strongly and clearly about the need for us to stick together to have the best chance of winning protections for all of us. That is a huge win. And I will be forever grateful for that.”

While I’ve often had differences of opinion with Mara on a variety of issues, I think she’s right on the money here. At this point, there’s no real victory to be had here by anyone, no matter what version of ENDA you personally support. No one will see any actual concrete benefit from this bill over the next couple of years, not even the Democratic candidates who were hoping to use its passage as way of appealing to LGBT Americans for votes and support.

The best we can hope for now is to call a “time out” in the form of seeing ENDA shelved until after the next President (read: Hillary) takes office. Given that ENDA will never survive Bush’s veto pen, no matter what the non-inclusive bill supporters might try to contend, I believe it would be foolish in the extreme for the Democrats to even a take a vote on this right now. Win or lose, pass or no pass, large numbers of LGBT people are going to be unhappy with the result and, as we’ve clearly seen over the last month or so, will not hesitate to take it out on them publicly on Democrats as they campaign for office. As we watch the Obama campaign go spiraling down from its former heights toward a fatal crash on the shores of irrelevance to LGBT voters, we can be sure that every other Democrat running for office is watching this spectacle closely and is no doubt seriously considering whether they even want to see any ENDA come up for a vote now, when they would have to put their positions on the public record.

I continue to believe that the best, safest path to equality for all LGBT Americans is the same as it is for the Democrats: Shelve the bill, let the issue and the advocates cool down over the next couple of years, and then come back to it when there’s a real chance of actually seeing this thing become law. With a strong Democratic majority and a Democratic President, an inclusive ENDA will likely pass with little problem or complaint from anyone but the right-wing extremists who’s influence in Washington will have left the federal political process right along with George and Dick. When you take the time to really think it through, you know that this is the only possible path Congressional Democrats can take that offers the possibility of a real win for everyone, or even anyone, who wants to see this bill become law.

Two years is a long time, more than enough for the task ahead of us. We who are gender-variant are no longer teaching America who we are and what we’re about, we’ve progressed to the next class in the curriculum, why it’s right, fair, and fully in keeping with American values that we be protected against discrimination in the workplace. Indeed, it’s fair to say that in this we’re now in the same relative place as conventionally-gendered gays and lesbians are and have been for some time now. As loathe as some may be to admit it, we’ve not only caught up, but we’ve done it in an unbelievably short amount of time as compared to the rest of the community.

For this, we need not thank Congress. The change we are seeing there is the result of our community’s own hard work and our ever-increasing presence in the media. I’ll go into this particular topic in more detail in a later post (thanks Bil for the suggestion), but the reality some still aren’t willing to acknowledge is that while straight-looking and acting gays and lesbians have most certainly blazed the trail at the cost of much pain and sacrifice on the personal, social, and political levels, transgender and gender-variant people have followed that path at lightning speed behind them, and in the minds of most Americans within and without our community, we are now moving forward together as one united community.

Those of us who are gender-variant must not forget this. Over the last couple of decades, gays and lesbians have been on the front lines of this battle, those who have tirelessly worked for rights at the state and local levels and those who have led the way at the federal. And yes, even though most of us detest the selfish political gamesmanship they are indulging in now and have in the past, the Human Rights Campaign deserves our thanks for their work in establishing the lines of communication between Congress and our community that we are now taking advantage of to effectively promote an agenda of true equality.

Yes, HRC are sellouts, they’re liars, they’re self-involved elitists who care little or nothing for the working class majority, but their work in the past has served us well in this effort. It’s because of what HRC, NGLTF, and other community orgs advocating at the federal level have done for years to get Congress to pay attention in the first place that when United ENDA spoke out Congress listened and is still listening now. For all their failings, their incompetence, and their recent rapid devolution into little more than a discredited, obsequious mouthpiece for the Democratic leadership, it’s highly doubtful that we’d be anywhere near where we are today if not for the work HRC and others have done in getting to Congress to listen and actually hear what any of us in this community have to say. Even a broken clock really is right twice a day.

So, where are now, really? Not at a place where we need to try a “Hail Mary” pass to gain a win by any means possible as some believe, but when the coaches need to call a “time out”, huddle up with the team, and come out fighting strong in the next quarter, when we’ll have a much better chance to put that ball over the goal line.

If latest reports are true, the Baldwin amendment may be DOA. House leadership is remaining quiet thus far, but if this is actually the case, the House Democratic leadership will have basically two options: They can proceed with the non-inclusive bill, knowing it’s not supported or endorsed by even a single LGBT community or allied civil rights organization, and actively opposed by over 350 of them, or they can just shelve the whole thing to introduce in couple of years when an inclusive bill may have a good chance to actually become law.

It seems likely to me that ENDA will not survive to be voted on during this session of Congress, and if by some chance it is, it will not pass. The reality which even those as arrogant as Barney Frank can no longer ignore is that passing a non-inclusive ENDA not only won’t help Democrats in the next election, but rather will actually serve the opposition, to rally the progressive left against the Democratic Party leadership’s elitism and willful mistreatment of persecuted minority groups to try to pander to wealthy elitists. The last thing Frank and Pelosi want is for Democrats running for reelection is to have to keep explaining to LGBT Americans and our friends and families is why they chose to vote to exclude the poorest and most discriminated against among us from protection under the law, especially when our community banded together millions strong and told them in no uncertain terms that we didn’t want them to do it.

For the Dems, it’s now a lose-lose situation. Should the non-inclusive ENDA be voted on and pass the House, the vast majority of the LGBT community, a constituency the Party is looking to court for votes, campaign participation and endorsements, and financial support, will be furious and will hold it against them. While they may or may not take a major hit in votes, it’s almost certain that when Democrats go looking for support and endorsements from these organizations, their memberships, and their friends and families, those who vote to exclude gender-variant American citizens from employment protections through this bill will not find that support forthcoming, except perhaps from their spineless lapdog, HRC.

In addition, supporting this bill will send a clear message from Congress to the working-class American LGBT community that they really don’t care about what we want or need, that the Democratic leadership will do only what they believe will help to maintain their own power and privilege, that when the chips are down and the legislation is on the line, they will continue to pander exclusively to the uber-wealthy and connected, just as they’ve always done. All that “Vote for change!” rhetoric will fall worse than flat in such a political climate, and the Dems surely know it.

Therefore, in my opinion, the only logical option for the Democrats right now, the one that hurts them the least going into an election season, the one that makes this issue go away for a couple of years, is to withdraw the bill and try again after the election.

If this does prove to be the case,  it may make all the difference  as far as equality for gender-variant Americans goes. If this bill goes down, it’ll be blamed on the trannies, but in reality it won’t be as much transpeople ourselves who killed it as it will be the courage and dearly-held values of the greater LGBT community and those Members of Congress who really believe that the ideals upon which this country was founded are more than just pretty words who really did the deed. It will make the statement, once and for all, that while the perception may not have made it completely into the mainstream as yet, for the LGBT community, discriminating against gender-variant people is no less offensive or worthy of being fought against than discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, or biological gender.

Of course, this would be bad for the Democrats and they know it. After all, if they really want to appeal to LGBT voters, it won’t do to support anything non-inclusive lest it be perceived, much as this legislation is, not as a bill to provide gay, lesbian, and bisexual people with rights, but rather as the exercise in bigotry and political opportunism it actually is, providing advantage to the wealthiest, most politically potent groups by denying those very same advantages to the poor and disenfranchised, just like the Republicans have done for the last six and a half years.

Combined with the other bad message this bill would send about willingness of elected officials to respond to the intensive lobbying efforts of their constituents and the unquestionable will of the vast majority of the politically-conscious LGBT community, I doubt they’d dare to try introducing a crippled, exclusionary ENDA with the strong Democratic majority and Democratic President we expect to find in office in ‘09. When you really think about it, it’s the only way that makes Congress seem even somewhat credible when they say they support us and our equality under the law at election time.

By now, it’s common knowledge that ENDA will not become law by ‘09 at the very soonest, and that any attempt to pass this already-doomed bill now is really nothing more than a shameless attempt at pandering to LGBT voters before the election season really begins (i.e. when the Reps and Senators actually start campaigning for their own seats). If the Democrats are so arrogant as to try to pass this incomplete, unwanted piece of crap anyway knowing all this, not only isn’t it going to help them in the more conservative areas, but it will also hurt badly them in the more liberal areas where they’re hoping to see their strongest LGBT community support.

The upshot: Transgender people don’t need more Americans to rally behind us or to do more education in order to simply be considered worthy of being protected under the laws of this country by most of its citizens. We’re past that now. The numbers in our own community are unquestionably on our side, every poll taken indicates that the American public supports protecting transpeople from workplace discrimination far more strongly than they support same-sex marriage or any other gay-only issue. Those old saws just aren’t credible anymore, and now, everyone knows it. That’s not to say we don’t need to continue doing exactly what we’ve been doing, but we’re lobbying not from the perspective of trying to explain ourselves and our needs to the utterly clueless anymore, we’re going into Congressional offices as a valid American minority interest and saying, with the backing of millions behind us, that we demand the same level of representation and support from our elected officials as any American minority group has the right to expect. When you think about it, you know it has to make all the difference in the world, for us, and for those who will be seeking our support and votes, and of those who love and support us.

The only thing Democrats can accomplish now by insisting on proceeding with civil rights legislation that intentionally excludes any minority group from its protections as this bill does is to clearly demonstrate to the American public that they’re willing to help further their own interests by facilitating discrimination against transgender and other gender-variant American citizens through passing a law that would effectively declare open season on us by bigoted employers in defining for them exactly who is protected from workplace discrimination under federal law and who they can continue to freely discriminate against with impunity.

A fork in the road, yes, but a fork with only one path leading to a potentially sunny shore for Democrats looking for LGBT community support, the path of liberty and justice for all. It’ll be interesting to see exactly who and what this Congress really holds dear.

The spin continues…on both sides.

Today, Barney Frank issued a press release saying that he supports Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin’s proposed amendment that would restore gender identity and expression protections to the “rights for straight-looking and acting gays and lesbians only” version of ENDA that passed out of committee yesterday, and which heads to a vote by the full House sometime next week (I’ve heard Tuesday and Wednesday suggested as likely possibilities). In his statement, Frank said he is urging his colleagues to support the Baldwin Amendment, and also that he will take to the House floor to reiterate his previous comments in favor of gender identity and expression protections (made when he was for transgender inclusion in ENDA before he was against it).

It’s interesting to me how for a man who says he’s concerned that some Members of Congress will be less likely to vote for a transgender-inclusive bill later if one fails now for fear of being labeled “flip-floppers”, Frank himself seems to switch sides on the issue every few days or so, still trying to play both ends against the middle to get his symbolic, unwanted, and severely flawed bill passed. In addition, Frank consistently fails to address the other side of the coin, the concern about how many Members would be hesitant to vote for an inclusive ENDA later should a non-inclusive version pass the House now, or how many Members could be realistically expected to support a GENDA introduced in Congress after a non-inclusive ENDA has already become law.

Frank has never, to my knowledge, publicly addressed this reality, which most in this community clearly understand from previous experience, that if gender identity and expression protections are not included when ENDA initially passes into law, it’s highly unlikely that a GENDA bill would even make it to a vote in Congress, much less actually pass into law, for at least the next fifteen to twenty years.  It’s one thing to ask a violently persecuted minority group to wait just a little longer and work just a little harder to see their rights enshrined into law, but quite another to ask that minority group to give up any hope of being protected under the law from discrimination for a generation or more so that others can be protected sooner.

When you cut out all the politics and posturing, that’s really what Frank, Pelosi, and HRC are doing here. They’re not asking transpeople to simply wait a little longer for our rights, but rather to give up any reasonable chance of getting those rights for probably at least the better part of the next two decades. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that so many in this community have decided that it’s just too high a price to ask any group of American citizens to pay in order to help ensure those selfsame rights for others, or even for themselves.

Mara Keisling got it right when she called the non-inclusive ENDA a “vanity bill” for the Human Rights Campaign, but she didn’t go far enough. It’s also a vanity bill for the Democratic Congressional leadership, a trophy to show off to gay and lesbian voters while stumping for votes in the upcoming election. ENDA, inclusive or not, isn’t going to pass the Senate anytime soon, nor will it make it past a virtually certain Presidential veto even if it does, this much we know. What’s more, the bloom is already off the rose, even before this thing goes to a vote in the full House. After all this, there’s just no way that the passage of a crippled, flawed ENDA in just one house of Congress is going to positively impress most LGBT voters now. It hasn’t been PC in our community to talk trash about or exclude transpeople for a long time now, and that’s exactly what Frank, Pelosi, and HRC are seen as doing by many. If there’s any one commonality which the vast majority of LGBT people share, it’s the sense that we’re all in this together, for the good of all of us. The political gameplaying going on here with gender-variant American lives and our ability to provide food and shelter for ourselves and our loved ones strikes right at the heart of those values which so many of us hold dear.

While the highly unlikely passage into law of a non-inclusive ENDA before next year’s election might indeed help some people, I think Barney Frank’s contention that most GLB people would be celebrating it regardless leads me to believe that it’s he, not the almost two million inclusively-minded LGBT people who are insisting on real equality under the law for everyone, who’s really living in Oz. Even if Frank, Pelosi, and HRC do eventually get their trophy, they’ll have gotten it by crushing the hopes and dreams of the poorest and most vulnerable in our community under their heels in order to get it, and knowing that, it’s just not going to have the kind of luster for this community which they obviously want it to.

Both Frank and Matt Foreman did interviews with LOGO’s Jason Bellini on the topic over the last couple of days laying out their positions. While no new information or insights were really offered by either, in my opinion Foreman came off far better than Frank on the personal level, with Frank offering little more than the same tired, condescending sound bites we’ve been seeing and reading for a week now, while Foreman laid out the moral and common sense arguments of United ENDA in an effective and compelling way which shows why he’s the guy we want making our case in the media. Frank, HRC President Joe Solmonese, and National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director Mara Keisling also appear in another disappointingly short LOGO report on the ENDA battle in Congress.

Personally, while I think it’s great that LOGO sent Jason Bellini to DC to do these interviews, it also seems pretty ridiculous to get the guy down there, secure interviews with Frank and Foreman, set it all up, and then offer us a mere five minutes of each. C’mon LOGO, this is politics. There’s just no way to give your viewers the whole story in that short of a time frame. If you’re going to do it, and you should, then at least do it right and really interview these people fully. If you’re not going to do that even for the single biggest LGBT community political story of the year thus far, then it’s hard for me to understand why I or anyone in this community should be watching your reports when we can learn far more about the story by visiting just a few of the better blogs and newspaper websites. By now, you guys know you’ve already seriously embarrassed yourselves once this year by trying to pass off Melissa Etheridge as a journalist at the HRC/LOGO “debate” (not to mention aligning yourselves with HRC in the first place), at least try to do this story justice, huh?

Mara Keisling is asking that we give one final push before the House vote next week and contact our Congresspeople to ask them to support the Baldwin Amendment. Please do…the Congressional switchboard can be reached at 202-224-3121. She also suggests that if your Member of Congress is appearing at an event locally this weekend that you try to talk to them there. Please also don’t forget to report the results of your contact so that United ENDA can keep an accurate track of exactly where we are…thanks.

Keep it up, we’re just getting to the good part…next week, we finally get to find out exactly who really is on our side and who isn’t, and then, the real fun begins.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Whether you’ve been a part of this community for fifty years or five minutes, understand that we’re in the midst of a moment in our collective history as a community significant enough that it will eventually end up being discussed and debated in Queer History classes twenty years from now. This is the time when our true community, the lower-class, middle-class, working-class, everyday, rank-and-file, Average Joe and Jane American Queers, finally stand up as one and say “Enough!”. It’s been a long time coming, too.

When you get right down to it, in essence what’s really happening here is that those who have set themselves up as leaders of our community have spun themselves so enthusiastically in one direction and one direction only that what they’ve actually accomplished is effectively removing all trace of spin from the public perception of what’s been really going on and where all the players really are in regards to ENDA.

Just consider the revelations we’ve witnessed over the last several days:

Congressman Barney Frank going to the floor of the House and the media to advocate passing a federal employment civil rights bill that would exclude the most violently oppressed groups of American citizens from its protections, calling those speaking out for an inclusive bill “idealists”, “unrealistic”, and “living in Oz”.

The Human Rights Campaign finally revealing its true priorities and agenda once and for all, turning its back on the will of the community with Frank and Pelosi, and using everything, up to and including misdirection and even outright lies, to do its very best to try to sell a non-inclusive bill to an LGBT activist community firmly united behind inclusion which just isn’t buying.

Tammy Baldwin, Rush Holt, Jerry Nadler, and other members of Congress standing out by standing firm against the naysayers and leading the charge for an inclusive ENDA in Congress.

Congress, paying attention…to us!

Every movement, no matter what its goals, has moments, flashpoints along its history line, that help to define, alter, and shape its course. Just as it’s by now considered indisputable fact by most Americans that George Bush is a failure as a President and led us into a failed foreign policy in the Middle East, so too has it now become equally unquestionable by most paying attention in this community that it’s Barney Frank, HRC, and those who think like they do about the equal rights and treatment under the law of transgender Americans who are the real villains of this drama, not the gender-variant citizens they seek to throw under the wheels of the ENDA bus to smooth the road toward their own exclusive civil rights agenda.

Suddenly, they get it…they all get it. Everyone’s a transgender activist, everyone wants to know more. While some might reasonably complain that it should have happened a long time ago, it has, in fact, finally happened, it’s no less a great thing, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Let’s see what kind of questions Hillary Clinton has to answer the next time the debate topic turns to LGBT civil rights.

The best thing about all this is that unlike 2004, when we were shouting the truth and no one was listening, this time we’re shouting, everyone’s listening, and what’s more the LGBT community, almost as a whole, has banded together and drawn the proverbial line in the sand. We’ve said together, with one clear, resonant voice, “We are HERE, and we are not moving. If you are willing to sacrifice any part of our family for the sake of political convenience, we will NOT stand with you.”.

Yes, boys, girls, and everyone else, this is how history is made.

If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have told you I didn’t believe a public reaction of this scale over transgender rights was even conceivable, much less possible. Then again, despite my many misgivings about Barney Frank as an advocate on trans issues, I’d have also never believed I’d actually witness him take to the floor of the US House of Representatives to trash us and our efforts at inclusion in ENDA. Honestly, while I never for a moment doubted that Frank really didn’t care about trans rights, I also never expected him to become quite so blatantly open with his biases.

I’d also have told you that never in a million years would I have expected to see HRC eventually just pretty much drop all pretense of even pretending to advocate equitably on behalf of the transgender community and just start spewing lie after lie after misrepresentation, hemorrhaging credibility like a sieve, hoping at least some people might still take them seriously. Regardless of the outcome of this and future political battles for this community, I believe that one of the most significant and lasting changes as a result of this particular skirmish will be that the leadership lines in our activism community are being redrawn as we speak. As more of Congress chooses to look toward the will of the majority of a constituency the Democrats are looking to capture, they’re looking toward Tammy Baldwin, Rush Holt, Jerry Nadler, and around 300 different national, state, and local civil rights organizations demanding an inclusive ENDA. At the same time, they’re also looking away from Barney Frank and HRC.

For a long time now, I’ve said I believe that our community, the greater American LGBT community, has moved past the kind of ivory tower political advocacy practiced by HRC, and now, the bulk of our community has proven that to be the case by refusing to be a part of a strategy that offers protection against employment discrimination to some while denying it to those most desperately in need of it. HRC had been putting on a pretty good show of trying to appear trans-inclusive for a while there, but over the last several months had begun displaying more and more open arrogance when publicly promoting their own agenda.

I believe that this is the core of the what has really happened here. HRC, Barney Frank, and Nancy Pelosi probably figured they’d feed the community a line of spin about why the trannys were kicked off the bus, there would be a brief hubbub which would die down quickly, and then they’d just go ahead with the non-inclusive bill they’d planned on passing all along anyway. I seriously doubt that they ever imagined, for even a moment, that when they came to dish out the platitudes and say “Get the votes and we’ll introduce it.” that we’d take them seriously and actually have a real impact. I’m also quite certain they never considered that all of a sudden two million American Queers would stand up and say “No!”. Clearly, the American LGBT activist community has fractured, exactly along what lines and how complete of a break remains to be seen, but there’s now most definitely a new Sheriff in town, and it sure as hell ain’t the HRC.

Our interaction with and level of access to Congress is clearly redefining itself to some extent as well. Lucky for us, politicians aren’t stupid. It’s their job to know which way the wind is blowing on any given issue, and to represent the will of the people who put them in office. Best of all, it’s all going on right in front of them. For the very first time in the history of our country, transgender issues are not only on the front burner in Congress, but on any burner at all, really. The bluster of Barney Frank is no longer the last word on the topic, either. The House Education and Labor Committee will hold a special meeting today to discuss strategy on ENDA, with a vote scheduled for Thursday. While I can only speculate, of course, with both Dennis Kucinich and Rush Holt (my Congressman) on the Committee I doubt they’d be holding a special meeting to discuss strategy if they’d decided to go along quietly with Frank and Pelosi.

No matter what happens here, though, things will be different now. The deference formerly given to HRC and Barney Frank by members of Congress on LGBT issues as a matter of course will no longer be automatic in many quarters. More than anything else, the reality that there is now more than one clear line of thinking on LGBT rights advocacy, that the vast majority of this community are of one mind and just a tiny elite self-involved minority are of another. Right now, the implications this has for HRC as an organization remain to be seen, but they’ve botched this one so badly that I have to believe that their credibility both within the LGBT activist community and in Congress is now virtually nonexistent.

When the smoke clears here, the leaders of our activist community need to get together, gather up all the pieces, and recreate the LGBT civil rights advocacy movement in a way that reflects the will of the community, and with the power and support of the nearly two million who make up their collective memberships. The power void must be filled quickly, and by people we can trust. If we act quickly and decisively, we can force a change for the better in terms of the political philosophy leading this movement.

HRC itself must be shunned by the greater community for what it has done here. There must be long-term follow-through consequences for their betrayal to send the message to the politicians that if they vote against us now, we will remember later. Now that Congress understands that Barney Frank and HRC are not the last word on our issues, we have to teach them that we, the majority, will not take “No.” for an answer, that we have chosen our leaders and our representatives for ourselves, and most importantly, that it is we, and not the Human Rights Campaign, who represent the will and the interests of the American LGBT community.

Three hundred to one. That’s a powerful figure. It’s a ratio that sends a message that tells the truth about who we are as a community, and most importantly, who we’re not. It also speaks volumes about who has the right to represent our interests and who doesn’t. Personally, I think it makes the most sense for the Task Force to assume the lead role here. Not only have they proven themselves to transpeople as staunch friends and allies, but they also have the willingness, the toughness, to do the kind of real down-and-dirty street-level activism this community needs more of. They can lead the way in doing the job we as a community want done, advocating for a better future for all LGBT people together, with no one left behind.

While no one organization can match HRC in terms of sheer cash-on-hand, the combined financial might of 300 organizations and their memberships would certainly match and probably even exceed HRC in both size and donation dollars. HRC, of course, will now no longer be able to credibly claim that it represents the interests of the American LGBT community to Congress in any case, since every member of Congress who’s paying even the slightest attention to this battle knows full well that that just isn’t true anymore.

This is our moment, our chance to reclaim this movement from the wealthy dilettantes and make it truly, irrevocably ours. Let’s seize it.

Feel the breeze? They’re spinning faster than Lance Armstrong’s bicycle tires on the last leg of the Tour D’France.

First, Joe Solmonese issues a press release I can only describe as “willful misdirection” on his part. It seems like this press release is worded in a way that seems to imply that Solmonese himself chose the political path HRC is taking during this latest ENDA crisis. He talks about his “decision-making” on ENDA, but Joe Solmonese isn’t President of the Human Rights Campaign in the same way as George Bush is President of the United States. He doesn’t get to make agenda-setting decisions. He’s a hired gun, HRC’s chief spokesperson and lobbyist, and he serves in that position at the pleasure of the HRC Executive Board. If they decide they don’t like the way he’s doing his job, they can fire him, just as they did with his predecessor, Cheryl Jacques. Joe Solomonese’s job is not to run or direct the efforts and agenda of HRC, it’s to be the chief spokesperson for those who actually do.

Yet, in this press release Solmonese seems to try to claim the role of true decision-maker, and direct the community outrage at HRC’s refusal to oppose a “rights for straight-appearing and acting gays and lesbians only” version of the bill toward himself. Perhaps seen by some as a noble effort to defend his employers from the righteous anger of the vast majority of the politically-active LGBT community, in reality Solmonese is simply trying to set himself and HRC in the position of (as a certain elitist gay male blogger might put it) human shields, to protect members of Congress from having to decide if they really believe federal employment protections should be offered to every American citizen, instead of only the most politically popular minority groups.

At least we finally get a chance to see what Congressman Barney Frank really thinks of us. He takes to the House floor and in a press conference a day later, not to declare his support and advocacy for transgender people and our inclusion in ENDA, but to validate Members’ fears over a trans-inclusive bill, and to offer them moral approval in agreeing to throw transgender people over the side in order to secure employment protections for straight-looking and acting gays and lesbians exclusively. Like the Human Rights Campaign, Frank plays both ends against the middle, asking Members of Congress to ignore their consciences and the impassioned words of the constituents now lobbying their offices daily, to vote for a bill that he knows perfectly well will most likely leave most Transgender-Americans unprotected from workplace discrimination for the balance of our lifetimes.

Can we trust them to fight for us once gay and lesbian rights are won?  The short, obvious answer, is no…not anytime soon. We’ve seen it play out in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Maryland, and other places. Once the monied gay elite win their own employment rights, their support in that effort, as well as that of the politicians who seek their votes, will quickly dry up as they move on to focus their efforts on marriage. Sure, there are a few exceptions, such as New Jersey, where this year we did finally win an addition to the Law Against Discrimination protecting gender identity and expression after protections for gays and lesbians were passed into law, but it took 18 years, the threatened public embarrassment of a major Democratic Party official, a strongly-supportive legislature and voter base, and a leading state gay rights organization as staunchly supportive of transgender rights as Garden State Equality in order to make it happen.  Not only isn’t the track record on coming back later to protect transgender people good, it downright stinks to high heaven, and Frank, Pelosi, and HRC surely know it.

Joe Solomonese opened his remarks at the 11th Annual HRC National Dinner wanting to address the “elephant in the room”, meaning the transgender activists and allies protesting outside the event, but none of these people seem to want to address the root of the problem rather than just the superficialities. The real issue here, the one the vast majority of LGBT activists and organizations understand but these people refuse to acknowledge, is that there really is only one way to proactively support transgender equality: By insisting that gender identity protections be included in ENDA now, before it becomes law, because history teaches us that it will be decades at minimum, if ever, before the politicians are willing to even consider adding those protections on their own. Barney Frank knows it, Nancy Pelosi knows it, the Human Rights Campaign knows it, and most importantly, we who make up the vast majority of this community and its voting numbers, we who have formed a coalition of over 300 organizations representing almost 2 million members virtually overnight to speak out on this issue, we who understand that, for transgender Americans, the realistic choice is now or never, we know it too. Nothing said by Frank or Pelosi, nor anything not said by the Human Rights Campaign, can ever change that. The community has spoken, loudly and clearly, and what we have said is “We’re all in this together, and for the long haul.”.

Frank calls us idealists. Ok, fair enough…I’ll own that, probably a lot of you will as well. I’d bet Barney Frank would admit to being one himself, because if he isn’t he’s certainly in the wrong business. The question really comes in not in determining what you want, but how figuring out how hard you’re willing to fight for your ideals and what you’re willing to do in order to see them become reality. This, as I think a lot of politically-conscious LGBT people are coming to understand, is really where the rubber meets the road in politics.

Barney Frank and the Human Rights Campaign have their own threshold on transgender rights, and it’s not the same as most of the rest of the community. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, in a statement yesterday, said:“I am under no illusions about the challenges of achieving our goal.  But, the quest for advancement of civil rights in our nation has never been easy.  It is precisely because of the discrimination these groups experience that this legislation is needed. 

As is the case with all legislation, there is no guarantee of success.  Everyone pressing for this legislation knows that.  We know that opponents of workplace protections may offer any number of amendments designed to derail the bill, including, perhaps, an effort to remove protections based upon gender identity.  I believe we must boldly face these challenges.

Perhaps some of these hostile efforts will be successful.  That should not deter our work.  We must bring the strongest possible bill to the floor of the House for a vote.  If our adversaries wish to erode protections in the bill, we must be prepared to face that challenge and make our case. 

However, I believe it is a mistake to concede defeat on any issue, before our opponents even raise it.”

Damn it, we should give this woman a medal. I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that there’s at least one Member of Congress leading the ENDA effort who really, truly, gets it. It’s Tammy Baldwin who is our real hero in Congress, and our community should not forget that, now or when this battle is over, no matter what the eventual outcome.

Yes, Barney, HRC, we want you to fight for us! We want you to stand up on those bully pulpits of yours and show us that you actually understand that it’s not really civil rights unless all civilians are protected. We want you to show us that you actually get it, that you’ve received the message that we transfolks and the vast majority of the rest of the socially and politically-active GLBT community have been trying to send you for years now: You can’t ignore us anymore…we’re a legitimate American minority group, we demand our place at the table, and we have as much of a right to expect one as any other group of like-minded American citizens.

To truly understand where we are now, we need to understand where we were just a few short years ago. In 2004, the last time ENDA was a real issue, we were nowhere politically. We had John Kerry, the Democratic Party Presidential nominee, come out in opposition to treating transgender workers fairly in the workplace and in favor of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in his home state of Massachusetts. We had a Democratic Party that refused to do more than simply acknowledge our existence and offer us token representation when they did. We were excluded from the 2004 Democratic Party Platform, and to my knowledge not a single Presidential candidate had ever said the “T-word” publicly.  Worst of all, there weren’t a whole lot of non-transpeople in the greater LGBT community who seemed to notice.

To say things are different now would be among the vastest of understatements. We’re all over the Internet and the media, a truly transgender-inclusive American LGBT community and agenda and our acceptance and equality within it is becoming a grassroots movement in and of itself, despite all the naysayers, including those ostensibly on our side. The American LGBT and allied activist community, and perhaps even entire parts of America as a whole, are literally evolving right before our eyes. Pay attention, the last time something like this happened on a major scale in this country, the Beatles were still around.

ENDA is, without question, the top current news story and political cause in our community right now, and that’s of course as it should be. The kind of civil rights progress that’s being fought for here happens once every generation or two, if we’re lucky. We know it’s not going to happen now, this year. We know it’s not going to happen next year. But we also know that if gender identity isn’t in the bill when it finally does pass, it’s far more likely than not that we’ll all be collecting Social Security before a stand-alone transgender employment rights bill ever sees the light of day in Congress, much less passes into law. That’s not idealism, Congressman Frank, that’s realism. We know this is “do or die” time for transgender employment rights, and we know that you know it, too.

The fact that Barney Frank felt compelled to go speak in Congress and hold a press conference on the issue tells you something as well: The effort, our version of “the surge”, if you will, is working…maybe not to the extent we need as yet, but it’s having enough of an effect that Frank feels he needs to get his position on the public record. If you think about it, the very fact that we’re hearing as much from Congress on this issue as we are should reassure us that our efforts are indeed having an impact. If Congressional supporters of the bill weren’t seriously considering what they have been seeing and hearing from our lobbying efforts, I strongly doubt Barney Frank would be discussing it this publicly.

Most interesting in all of this, to me at least, is the split between Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin over this. Seemingly joined at the hip with Frank on just about any LGBT-positive legislation until now, Baldwin has refused to take the defeatist attitude on a trans-inclusive ENDA espoused by her Massachusetts colleague. More than simply her principled insistence on a fully inclusive ENDA, her refusal to go along with Frank in offering moral succor to those who would deny workplace rights to those who look and act differently than straight people defines her as a leader who not only stands her moral ground but also defends it, someone who really believes that full participation in American life is the birthright of all American citizens. Forget Hillary…Tammy Baldwin is the kind of woman I want in the White House.

The truth of the matter is that going forward now with a transgender-inclusive version of an employment rights bill that will never pass into law this session of Congress in any case costs no one anything, and quite possibly could mean the difference between all LGBT Americans waiting a couple of more years for all of us to get our basic civil rights in this country, and transgender people having to wait another generation for that level of equal treatment under the law. Given that, isn’t it worth a little bit of extra effort to try to get it done?

Tammy Baldwin certainly thinks so, as does pretty much every major civil rights organization in the country…hell, even HRC is with us on this part of it. Why go on the national stage and speak not in support of passing the broadest possible civil rights law, but instead, offer excuses for not doing so? Frank’s speech was clearly not intended to promote an inclusive ENDA, but rather to deflate whatever support such an effort might have already built up in Congress and direct it behind a non-inclusive version. You’d think that even if Barney Frank doesn’t agree with what we’re trying to do, he’d at least have the class not to try to publicly demean and sabotage our efforts.

Tammy Baldwin is right: advancement of civil rights is never easy. Passing ENDA won’t be easy either, no matter how eagerly and enthusiastically Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi try to make it so. There are times when we just have to bite the bullet and keep working until we get it right. This one of those times.

One thing that will make it a whole lot easier is if those who represent the (more) conservative minority viewpoint would stop acting like they represent the rest of us. Idealists we may be, but we’re almost two million strong. We represent the majority viewpoint of this community, and we will NOT be divided!

They call ‘em “Representatives” for a reason, y’know.

What a non-inclusive ENDA and HRC really mean.

Get it here.

Cant believe I forgot to post this:

No show tonight…Mike Scott is taking care of some personal stuff, but expect us very soon. Date when I have it, but I can tell you that we’ll be back on in our old Thursday night 7-9om eastern time slot, and there’s plenty of cool stuff ahead…stay tuned!

Ok, so have we finally had enough NOW?

Once again, the Human Rights Campaign has sunk to the community’s lowest expectations, and turned a willful blind eye to anti-transgender discrimination. Thing is, this is exactly what they promised us they wouldn’t do when they voted in 2004 to only support trans-inclusive legislation. As recently as just a couple of weeks ago at the annual Southern Comfort Conference, HRC President Joe Solmonese promised the transgender community that the organization would oppose a non-inclusive version of the bill. Yet, rather than honor the spirit as well as the letter of their pledge in 2004, HRC has chosen to remain neutral on an exclusive “rights for gays who look and act like straights” ENDA, rather than opposing it as Solmonese promised they would.

Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. HRC has been becoming even less supportive of transgender and working class LGBT Americans and issues over the last few months, and doing so in a way that’s so overt and so arrogant that anyone who hasn’t gotten the message really just hasn’t been paying attention. Here are just a few of the lowlights of HRC’s transgender “advocacy”:

In August 2004, after protests by the transgender activists and increasing community media coverage, HRC’s Executive Board votes not to support or endorse civil rights legislation that does not include gender identity and expression protections. Despite that promise, HRC refuses to sign onto a letter in support of including transgender people as a protected category in the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

In 2006, HRC pledges not to support or endorse state or local legislation that doesn’t include gender identity and expression protection. While this would likely have been lauded as positive progress by the LGBT  community, HRC chose not to publicize this vote outside of its own leadership. This organization, which seems to issue a press release every time a gay or lesbian person stubs their toe, apparently doesn’t feel this decision to be important enough to let the community know about it. Interestingly, while I originally found this information on Donna Rose’s website in 2006, while writing this post I was unable to find even a single citation for this decision anywhere online.

And 2007…Goddess, where do I start?

In May, HRC had it’s Presidential Forum event on LOGO. Originally to be conducted entirely by rock star Melissa Etheridge and HRC President Joe Solmonese, HRC responded to the community outcry over the lack of actual journalists on the panel by choosing to include CNN financial reporter Margaret Carlson and Washington Post reporter Jonathan Capehart, the author of a 2002 op-ed opposing transgender inclusion in ENDA (as well as another recent anti-transgender screed).

While the selection of Capehart to participate in the forum was certainly a blatant slap in the face to the transgender community, HRC didn’t stop there. HRC compounded the insult by promising at least one transgender-relevant question per candidate, but then reneged on this pledge, only asking John Edwards if he’d fire a transitioning employee. This was especially instructive, as it was Solmonese asking not if Edwards would proactively support the rights of transgender citizens, but rather if he’d refrain for firing someone simply because of their transgender status. In this way, Solmonese defined the discussion of transgender Americans as one of whether or not we should be fired from our jobs simply as a matter of course just for being who we are, rather than a question of whether or not we should be proactively protected under the law against such discrimination, the way the issue of same-sex marriage was presented to each of the candidates.

It’s also worth noting that HRC asked for and collected over 3000 questions from LGBT Americans, saying they’d select some to ask each of the candidates, but these questions were also all but completely ignored in favor of almost incessant badgering of the candidates about their personal positions on the issue of legalizing same-sex marriage. Since marriage laws are enacted at the state level, not the federal, the opinion of a US President on the issue is essentially irrelevant, just as even George Bush’s strong public advocacy for a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage did not result in such an amendment being passed by a Republican-controlled Congress. Given all of the evidence, it’s fair to say that the HRC/LOGO Presidential Forum was really nothing more than a disingenuous ninety minute commercial for same-sex marriage at the expense of the interests of the rest of the American LGBT community.

If you’ve been following the outrageous farce that has been HRC’s “advocacy” of an inclusive ENDA in recent weeks, you already know the rest. If you need to catch up, I recommend starting at the Bilerico Project, where you’ll find many good posts on the topic. When this history of lies and deceit is taken as a whole, HRC’s real advocacy goals in regard to ENDA and their Executive Board’s true attitude toward gender-variant and working class Americans reveals itself quite clearly.

The Human Rights Campaign has now conclusively proven that they are an organization so completely obsessed with their own selfish goals that they will happily sell out the interests of anyone and everyone who they believe might impede them in even the smallest way. They’ve now demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that when it really matters they are ready, willing, and even eager to trade away the equal rights and treatment of the gender-variant and the working class members of our community in order to further the interests of the ultra-wealthy white gay male elitists who make up the majority of their Executive Board membership.

Proven liars, proven sellouts, proven panderers to the unreasonable fears of cowardly politicians, the Human Rights Campaign can no longer be credibly considered community leaders by anyone in our community who truly believes that we are, in fact, one community, and that this community defines political success as succeeding together, leaving no one behind.

Have we finally had enough? I don’t know about you, but I certainly have. If you feel as I do, it’s time to take action. Pledging never to be responsible for HRC seeing another dime of your money ever again is only part of the equation. Refusing to financially support this money-bloated organization must be coupled with active support of truly inclusive national LGBT advocacy organizations like the Task Force  and Pride At Work. In addition, we must contact our Congressional representatives and let them know, in no uncertain terms, that HRC doesn’t speak for us, these other organizations do. The key here is not only to hurt HRC, but to make sure Congress clearly understands that the interests of the vast majority of LGBT voters do not coincide with those of the Human Rights Campaign and that we, who make up the bulk of its numbers and voting power, do not consider this organization to be a credible advocate on our behalf.

The only way we are going to succeed as a community here is if we work together, as a community, to dethrone and disempower HRC. We must make sure the politicians and the rest of the country understand that in reality HRC is actually nothing more than a special interest group serving the interests of a tiny cabal of ultra-wealthy gays and does not represent the voice or the interests of the vast majority of the American LGBT community.

At the same time, we must wholeheartedly throw our support behind the Task Force and like-minded national LGBT organizations, funding and supporting their efforts to the point where they are able to show a level of financing and membership that will force the politicians to stop and take notice. Those politicians who continue to work with HRC as if they represent all of us must be publicly protested and held responsible at the ballot box until they get the message. It’s not enough to simply stop giving HRC money, we must also make them political pariahs, to the point where no elected official with half a brain will even talk to them for fear of the inevitable backlash their own careers will suffer as a result. In short, it is we ourselves who must become the gatekeepers, even if we must rip the key to that gate out of HRC’s hands by force. It’s the only way the true LGBT community agenda will ever become a reality in our lifetimes, and we must not shy away from the long, hard road ahead we will have to travel in order to make it happen.

It’s not all bad news, though. Despite the setbacks we may suffer with ENDA now, our community, the true American LGBT community, has come together in support and solidarity over this issue with an intensity and a passion that I expect is absolutely unprecedented in our collective history. We must capitalize on this and go forward together as one community, raising our voices together in love, support, unity as we reject the politics of divisiveness and disloyalty espoused by Human Rights Campaign and those who support them.

We’ve tried to play nice with these people, we’ve given them every opportunity prove themselves. Even so, for all of our trust and faith that they’d come around and were finally ready to work with the rest of the community for the good of all of us, when it really mattered most, when we most needed HRC to stand up for all of us and honor their promises, they spit in our faces and turned their backs on us. We can no longer hide behind hopeful platitudes and misplaced faith. After all this, there just can’t be any other reasonable conclusion anymore: The Human Rights Campaign is not only not a friend or supporter of gender-variant and working class LGBT Americans, but they are, in fact, the enemy, representing and exemplifying exactly that which we have united to fight against.

The time to act is now.

We know what we must do.

Let’s take it to ‘em.