In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

New Hampshire! [is not as great as I thought. See update below.]

Jill

Live free or die, baby.

Notably, conservatives were right: This is the kind of havoc that breaks loose when you put the ladies in charge:

First, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to raise the state’s gasoline tax by 15 cents over three years. Then the House approved a bill allowing the use of medical marijuana, by a vote of 234-138. Next, it voted to repeal the state’s capital punishment statute. The House wrapped up March with a vote to legalize same-sex marriage, and the Senate followed suit yesterday.
…
Not to put too fine a point on it, the state’s new Republican Party chairman, former governor John H. Sununu, called his state’s legislative output “a San Francisco agenda.”

Now, before anyone gets too excited thinking that New Hampshire is morphing into Vermont, let’s remember that the four bills still need final approval, and that Governor John Lynch, a moderate Democrat, has said he opposes all of them.

Still, there’s something in the air in New Hampshire. Until recently it was the only state in the country that did not provide free public kindergarten – and defiantly so. Now the state offers grants and other incentives to its local school districts to provide kindergarten classes, and only a tiny handful are still resisting. There’s even a mandatory seat-belt law under serious consideration, in a state where the God-given right to bash one’s own skull in has been long revered.

What could be causing this unprecedented turn in Granite State politics? Here’s one idea: women.

Since January, the New Hampshire Senate has been making history as the first majority female legislative body in the country: Thirteen of its 24 members are women. Overall, the New Hampshire Legislature is 37.7 percent female, just a fraction behind Vermont (37.8 percent) and Colorado (38 percent). But New Hampshire also has women in leadership: a woman House speaker, a woman Senate president, and a woman majority whip. The congressional delegation is 50 percent female, including one of only 17 women in the US Senate. It’s as if there was a bloodless coup of the state’s political establishment in November, and women were the avatars of change.

EDIT: Wow, nevermind, NH is not as progressive as I thought:

The New Hampshire Senate today unanimously rejected a bill that would have extended anti-discrimination laws to transgendered people.

House Bill 415 would have protected those with sexual identity issues in areas of housing and employment, much the way the state’s laws protects others from discrimination on the basis of color, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Those who fought the bill said it would open women’s bathrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms to sexual predators who could raise a defense in court that they were sexually confused

Bullshit.

Thanks, Holly, for bringing this to everyone’s attention.

44 thoughts on New Hampshire! [is not as great as I thought. See update below.]

  2. Nicole– Granted, there’s an element to privilege to what I’m about to say. But if the biggest disappointment we can point to in a state legislature is that they didn’t pass an anti-discrimination bill protecting trans people, that’s the equivalent of winning a football game 28-3. We’ll get ’em next time, and it’s a lot harder to roll back this stuff than it is to get it passed in the first place.

  4. Lance, you’re right, that was privileged remark. Get ’em next time? Well, considering that LGB has historically done SFA to assist trans people when there’s no implicit LGB benefit, I’ll believe that when I see it.

    Oh, and before we start patting ourselves for all the sister love, remember that the deciding vote to kill the trans bill came from a cis woman, and a Democrat.

  5. Aleisha– Yes, it sucks that the bill got killed. Yes, it sucks that the Democrats played a part in killing it. But a legislative solution to marriage equality was unthinkable just ten years ago, and Bowers v. Hardwick is less than 25 years old. New Hampshire is, by any measure, a story of rapid but still-in-progress improvement. If what New Hampshire has done was the law everywhere and we had to fight for the rest, that would be a victory although, of course, an incomplete one.

  6. I thought the vote to kill trans protections was unanimous in the NH Senate’s judiciary committtee, 5-0. Unanimously against the bill, unanimously FOR allowing businesses and landlords to fire or throw trans people out on the street for being trans.

    And that’s 28-3, huh? Because allowing people to get married is worth more than NINE TIMES as much as preventing that kind of discrimination? I’m sorry, I disagree. There are other fights besides marriage, even if that’s where all the attention and money has been going. Meanwhile, the right wing is spending time and money vilifying trans people, that’s why this bill got killed: it was the “what about the children, what about bathrooms” screed they’ve been using to justify discrimination for years.

    Seriously, Lance? Your privilege is showing in a big way. 28-3, marriage vs. housing and employment discrimination. Really? There is nobody left who would even remotely believe the “we’ll get ’em next time” line. You may not be aware of this, but it’s been used way too often in the last 40 years, and far too few have come back to “get ’em next time.”

  8. Oh wait, it’s worse than I thought.

    The ENTIRE New Hampshire Senate voted unanimously to allow employers and landlords to discriminate against trans people. 24-0 vote. With the usual misleading, practically false claim about people already being protected, and a whole lot of noise about bathroom panic on top of that. I mean, good for them on gay marriage, it’s another watershed and clearly that issue has been pushed hard enough into the center of discourse for something like this to happen.

    But this is also a HUGELY transphobic moment in the history of New Hampshire. That these things can happen on the SAME DAY should tell us something about the state of LGBT politics. And I really don’t want to keep hearing the same old tired excuses that got thrown at Sylvia Rivera back in the early 70s.

    Jill, can you add this to the original post please?

  11. To be the voice of moderation, cut the legislature a little slack. When voting, one can only vote for or against something, not to amend or change it. I am in favor of transgender rights, but that doesn’t mean that this specific bill might not have been written badly.

    Imagine a bill that required wearing seatbelts in all motor vehicles. That sounds good until you not that motorcycles don’t have seat belts. So the bill, while good in theory needed rewording before it would actually work as a law.

    I haven’t read the exact wording of the law for transgender rights, but until I do, I don’t want to criticize them for making what may be a very good point.

    Then again, I say that women have no right to keep men out of their restrooms. Brown vs. Board of Education says that Seperate but Equal facilities are illegal, aren’t they?

    I have no issue with transgender rights, I do have issue with them being in a bill whose wording would legalize things it did not intend to.

  12. I am in favor of transgender rights, but that doesn’t mean that this specific bill might not have been written badly.

    Yeah, obviously that’s the most logical explanation.

    Sigh.

  13. But… but… Lucas is the voice of moderation! Of course his explanation is the most logical. Catch up, Cara, and quit with the hysterics. (Sighing is a tried-and-true hysterical lady-reaction).

  14. Lucas, why don’t you do even a little bit of research. The links are above and the information is on those pages, in the articles and in comments from people in NH that have been following the story.

    I don’t think the New Hampshire state senate is all composed of people who WANT to see more discrimination against trans people. But the bill also didn’t fail because it was poorly written. It failed, at least in the opinion of the SPONSORS of the Bill, who also voted against it, because the attack campaign mounted against it by right-wing opponents was so successful, in their take, that there wasn’t a bat’s chance in hell.

    So it was a glorious moment for transphobia. A well-meaning state senator or two tried to get some more people protected from bigoted and unjust discrimination, their bill got hit with transphobic smears, and they gave up. Meanwhile, apparently enough hard (and perfectly valid) campaigning was going on to get the gay marriage bill passed. This is a pretty stark portrait of priorities — gay marriage made it through, and conservatives tarred and feathered trans people some more while everyone was looking over that way. Some people are even theorizing it was a tit-for-tat trade, but I don’t even think that’s a necessary explanation.

  15. “It’s a lot harder to roll back this stuff than it is to get it passed in the first place.”
    Don’t be too sure about that. CA did it.

    “I say that women have no right to keep men out of their restrooms.”
    Extending anti-discrimination laws to transgendered people doesn’t have anything to do with women keeping men out of their restrooms. It’s about recognizing that persons who are m-t-f are female and f-t-m are male. Thus letting a person who is m-t-f into a woman’s bathroom is letting a FEMALE into the female bathroom, not the other way around.

    Lance and Lucas: I understand you want to take a moment to say congratulations to New Hampshire on legalizing gay marriage. But expecting trans people to wait patiently for their shot at equality as they are getting killed is out of line.

    As a P.S. I’m a little new to this, so please forgive and correct me if I got the termonology wrong.

  16. The right to employment is leaps and bounds more important than the right to get married. If I’m married, and have therefore the right to extend my health benefits to my spouse, but we can’t afford it because no one will hire him, how much is my right to marriage helping me? If I can visit him in the hospital, but he can’t go because we can’t afford to put him on my health insurance because he can’t get hired, is that a 28-3 win?

    Comparing the wholesale sign-off on privileging unfounded fears over people’s actual lives to a football game is demeaning and belittling.

  17. Lance, you’re damned right that you are making a privileged statement, and both you and lucas can go screw.

    you don’t know what it’s like to be a trans person. you don’t know what it’s like to live in fear of losing your housing, of getting fired or never hired, of being unable to get medical care because of being trans. your privilege protects you from ever experiencing the effects of transphobia and trans misogyny. so don’t *you* lecture *us* on what the score is. don’t you tell me that it’s 28-3 and yay ssm and i should be jumping up and down from joy when i am the one unable to get a job, i am the one unable to get credit, i am the one who gets substandard medical care, i am the one who cannot travel by air, i am the one who has to fear getting raped by a police officer who doesn’t like my female name and appearance and male gender marker on my license. and it is my sisters and brothers being murdered in cold blood at the rate of two a month.

    it’s very easy for you to advocate playing football with our lives. why don’t you put your precious marriage on hold until trans* folk can get jobs and homes and medical care?

    i’ll be blunt: your attitudes are killing us. we are dying at your hands. so fuck you, fuck your privilege, and fuck the horses you rode in on.

  18. Butch,
    I disagree wholeheartedly. First, I often think many on this blog are economicacally illiterate, so take this as softly as you can. I know of no “right” to employment. This presupposes someone must give you money for services that may not be valued.
    Secondly, I feel strongly one’s appearance/ orintation shouldn’t be a reason to discriminate. It’s not forcing a rentor to do any thing other than treat individuals the same.
    But the NH legislators placed their re election worries ahead of their citizens’ rights.

  19. First, I often think many on this blog are economicacally illiterate, so take this as softly as you can.

    And I often think that many on this blog are incredibly condescending and intentionally obtuse. If they keep it up, they get banned. Take that as softly as you can.

  20. Jill @19: actually i *like* corwin’s use of the word “economicacally”. i’m glad that he invented it, because it contains the word “caca”, which is exactly what his statements are – caca. or alternatively, mierda.

  21. How incredibly erasing of a group’s experience is turning it into a hypothetical discussion? If we can’t deal with the real reasons the bill didn’t pass, let’s theorize and not even bother to do the tiniest bit of research. The bill adds the term “gender identify or expression” to state anti-discrimination and hate crimes law. So the law is working fine for a lot of people. But that’s a great point you make about seatbelts, asshole.

    No number of words can adequetly describe the eyerolls the idiots inspire.

    Also: I am glad that I live in a community where trans women are telling people to fuck off, too. This shit is killing us.

    Holly, thank you for that BeyondMarriage link. I am so over one-issue parties. For me being a trans activist means being a social justice activist first, and that means caring about things that don’t benefit me directly.

  23. When has New Hampshire EVER been “progressive”? It’s in New England but it’s pretty libertarian at… best… (never thought I’d refer to libertarianism as best…)

  25. Pingback: New Hampshire « Questioning Transphobia

  26. @corwin #18: Perhaps that begs for an examination of how one of the ways that capitalism maintains itself is by hooking onto other oppressions to keep entire groups of people permanently unemployed/underemployed. Food, housing, clothing, medical care are human rights, and anti-discrimination in employment laws are an attempt to give everyone a shot at getting their basic human rights met. Which is pretty busted to begin with, but as Butch Fatale points out, marriage is absolutely meaningless if you don’t have healthcare to share, a home to pass on to a partner, etc. Getting laws against people being discriminated in employment would be a part of confronting capitalism, in addition to working on the oppressions of individual groups. Of course, trans people don’t fare a lot better in places where there are already laws, because they’re not enforced and it takes a tremendous amount of resources to make an effective complaint.

    And it’s privileged attitudes like Lucas and Lance expressed that are why I don’t care at all when ssm becomes legal somewhere. The cis LGB community doesn’t come back for us — how long has Massachusetts had ssm? Sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws? and no trans protections — and the current focus on marriage primarily benefits middle class, white, assimilationist queers. The amount of energy the cLGB community has poured into marriage has distracted from so many struggles that would dramatically affect the lives of so many more queers than marriage would – immigrants’ rights, universal health care, having an actual social safety net, confronting US imperialism, etc. The LGBT liberation movement grew out of anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 60s, and the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall riots had super heavy involvement of TWOC, but you could hardly tell from the large organization’s focus on marriage and consumerist consumption.

    This is precisely why the NH senate can pass a ssm bill, but not a trans anti-discrimination bill, and why the ssm gets reported first, and the trans anti-discrimination bill has to get first mentioned in the comments, because the big organizations work for the goals of cLGB people with money and political capital to burn.
    Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!

  27. Ah, right. If the cis folk don’t have the right to discriminate based on looks, the world will end and there will be people standing to pee in the women’s bathroom staring at you!

    And it is looks-based, let’s not kid around. Ask a trans woman who blends well about her public bathroom experiences, and compare it to the experiences of a trans woman who doesn’t blend in. I will bet every dollar in my nearly-complete surgery fund that even when the former is out as trans, she gets more acceptance and support.

    It’s not, and never has been, about bathrooms or even trans people. It’s about looks, and more specifically cis people’s comfort levels with masculinity. Identifiably-trans women (or cis women suspected of being trans) with masculine qualities represent a rejection of the sacred male gender. Petite, feminine trans women who blend in well are no threat to masculinity in the eyes of their cis overlords, and are therefore allowed through pity to be not-quite-completely-but-almost accepted as women.

  28. P.S. But, looking at these as separate issues, yay for the LGB folk who can now get married. I’ll give the NH legislature that much, they made the right call on marriage.

  30. Jill,
    DO you want me to pretend that ideas that I think are inane are sensible?Do you actually believs there is a ‘right’ to employment?At what level;at what salary.?I have no way of renouncing my intellect-and wouldn’t if I could.SInce you’re making banned noises,be my guest.
    You seem to want an echo chamber .Mindlessly re iterating mantra’s is no way to go through life.TJ Watson famously had a “Think” sign installed in IBM offices.Get one
    Corwin

    Now-to really fit in,I should scatter a few “Fucks” around.

  32. I was thinking about doing a whole reasonable and rational post on the difference between a “right to employment” and a “right to be free of discrimination” but I think it would be lost on Corwin and the rest of us already. Then I thought about doing a nice post on the economics of discrimination and how discrimination is really economically inefficient on a micro and macro level. But I figured that would bore the hell out of everyone and Corwin still wouldn’t care…so instead…I’m going with:

    Corwin:

    Go read up on economics and more generally Pffttttthhhhhpppttt.

  34. “the rest of us already know.” Clearly the insomnia is starting to fuck up my brain.

  35. “Now-to really fit in,I should scatter a few “Fucks” around.”

    Don’t make me quote Team Dresch lyrics at you! And, really, focusing on the profanity instead of addressing any of the points made is intellectually weak.

    Thanks again for all the trans women speaking the truth about LGB’s and getting to the T ‘later.’ That’s a tired, tired song, and I think we’re all quite done with it.

    I think I’m done doing any work with people who identify as SSM activists, or if they do my first question will be about what activism they’ve done outside of LGB or even T issues. Single-Issue activists are self-focused and their word isn’t worth shit.

    Ut-oh, I swore again.

  36. corwin @30: this may involve you having to do too much of that thinking thing that you pretend to be so big on, but how do you propose that, in this system, we fulfil our basic rights to food, shelter, clothing, and health care without employment? And how hard is it to differentiate between an anti-discrimination law prohibiting an employer from not hiring someone or firing them because of something that has nothing to do with their job and handing someone a job at a set salary.

    A guaranteed minimum salary no matter what the circumstances, independent of corporations being willing to make a profit of you would be a different argument.

    Kristen J.: yeah, discrimination is economically inefficient in that it reduces the amount produced and the value of what is produced, but it also serves to keep wages down by maintaining a permanent state of underemployment.

  37. Aleisha@35: i gorra run off and listen to that song, thanks for the reminder. however, before i do, here’s some lyrics for corwin’s puny mind to chew on:

    Queer sex is great, it’s fun as shit don’t worry
    Jesus is dead and God don’t exist and swearing is fun,
    it’s funner than piss, that’s it’s stupid is a cruel and classist myth.
    Queer sex is great, it’s fun as shit,
    Don’t kill yourself cause people can’t deal with your brilliance
    Sometimes I can’t remember why i want to live
    Then i think of all the freaks and i don’t want to miss this
    It’s just like Donna said it depends where you’re at in your head.

    hi, corwin, i’m one of Donna Dresch’s freaks. pleased to meet you!

  38. Pingback: We’re* Not An Afterthought « Little Lambs Eat Ivy

  40. Jill – yes, it is typical that even those doing their darnedest to be trans-friendly have to add a postscript like this.

    You’re doing your best. You’re showing genuine goodwill. I’m sure this is a wake-up call to you, and you must be wondering “how do I do better next time?”

    Don’t sweat it, OK? Cut yourself some slack. By my book, you are so many light years ahead of the game that it would be unjust to expect 100% perfection.

    You added a postscript. Most wouldn’t.

  41. I don’t think the New Hampshire state senate is all composed of people who WANT to see more discrimination against trans people. But the bill also didn’t fail because it was poorly written. It failed, at least in the opinion of the SPONSORS of the Bill, who also voted against it, because the attack campaign mounted against it by right-wing opponents was so successful, in their take, that there wasn’t a bat’s chance in hell.

    Is there anyone else who just doesn’t get this, or is it just me? Why would the sponsors of a bill vote against it?

    Even if it was going to fail, they could have prevented it from being a unanimous vote permitting anti-trans discrimination. That would have still sucked — but to the bill’s own sponsors to vote against the bill, when they didn’t need to, feels like a pointless betrayal.

    I just don’t get it.

  42. Have you not heard of the concept of stalls?

    Ha! No kidding! Bathroom politics are perplexing. Transphobic, absolutely, and FUCKING NOSEY. I don’t want to know who or what is going on behind any stall, just like I hope nobody’s uber-concerned about what kind of business I’m doing in mine. Whatever it is I’m doing in there can just as easily be done behind the door with the skirt on it as the one with the pants. Just get me to the john.

    There’s nothing I can imagine that compels a person to be THAT concerned about where anyone else shits and washes their hands than transphobia in its truest sense. Fear fucking sells.

  43. the bill’s own sponsors to vote against the bill, when they didn’t need to, feels like a pointless betrayal.

    I just don’t get it.

    My thoughts exactly.

    Yeah Lauren, and maybe the folks getting so upset are the ones who like to peek at their neighbor?

  44. but to the bill’s own sponsors to vote against the bill, when they didn’t need to, feels like a pointless betrayal.

    Because the hate campaign was so successful they were afraid of having a yes vote haunt them down the road, perhaps?

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