Guess what? Time for another post about ENDA, the bitter controversy that refuses to die! But first, let’s review, shall we?
A couple of months ago, the US House of Representatives passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would grant limited forms of protection to gay people… at least as long as they don’t “act gay.” As Jill noted at the time, it was a pretty Pyrrhic victory. Even the sponsor of the bill, veteran gay congressman Barney Frank, suggested that a presidential veto was likely, and that one of the real reasons to pass it was to try and soften up Congress — to get them used to voting for LGBT rights. Unfortunately, Frank also found it was necessary to throw trans people to the wolves as part of this effort to create a kinder, gentler, gay-friendlier Congress. Discarding trans rights into a pit full of rabid, conservative lupines is a habit Frank has acquired over the years by repeatedly talking about how freaky it would be if trans people and non-trans people had to share showers. (It’s worth noting that I’ve never actually heard any trans advocate suggest what Frank is so nervous about.)
Since then, there’s been a huge amount of bitterness over the decision by Frank and Nancy Pelosi, with the backing of the most powerful gay lobby in the country, the HRC, to go forward with the non-inclusive ENDA. Prominent trans activists working with the HRC felt compelled to resign. The HRC put out a jaw-droppingly tone-deaf PR plan to win back the hearts of the trans community. Pretty much every trans person who was paying attention to this debacle felt that it was far too little, far too late. Here in New York, HRC representatives were publicly excoriated at the local LGBT center by a crowd of activists, trans and non-trans alike, and picketed by a few dozen silver-haired veteran queer activists outside the heavily symbolic Stonewall Bar.
But now, apparently, a trans activist has really crossed the line, to paraphrase the headline of an editorial just posted by Kevin Naff. Naff is the editor of the Washington Blade, the nation’s second-largest gay paper:
The recent remarks by Meredith Bacon, president of the board of the National Center for Transgender Equality, denouncing the Human Rights Campaign’s handling of the ENDA debate, serve as a vivid and disappointing reminder of why the trans movement hasn’t progressed as far as the gay rights movement.
“[A]s the chair of the NCTE Board of Directors, I can assure all who read this blog that NCTE will not work with HRC in the foreseeable future, until the current leadership is completely purged, and until we are convinced that, unlike its predecessors, any new HRC leadership is totally committed to working for transgender rights,” Bacon wrote.
“As long as HRC is controlled by and is dependent upon white, rich, professional gay men, such collaboration may never occur,” she wrote.
Her comments are offensive, counterproductive and totally unacceptable. She should either retract those comments and apologize or be removed from her position post-haste if her organization is to retain any credibility whatsoever in the gay rights movement.
Now that… that is over the line! How dare she… how does she think she can get away with this kind of “name-calling,” as Naff puts it? You know, calling people nasty names lke “white,” and “rich,” and “professional gay men.” No wait, that can’t be what he means. Everyone KNOWS the HRC is beholden to affluent, mostly-white gay folks; they provide the money, they influence the agenda. Nobody even bothers to argue otherwise. It’s how most of the large non-profits in this country work.
Maybe the point is this: how dare Bacon claim that rich white men won’t eventually come back to help other oppressed people! It’s a totally offensive assumption, and wounds the sensitive feelings and dignity of rich white professional liberal dudes everywhere, whether they’re gay or not! I mean, the HRC and its overlords are totally liberal, I mean progressive, and will always fight for the little guy, right? It’s not like the HRC endorses Republican candidates who oppose reproductive rights, affirmative action, and perform racist caricatures of Asians. Oh, oops. They DID do that. But it’s not like the HRC supported the Bush Administration’s plan to privatize Social Security. Oh, oops. They did that too, in exchange for promises that gay partners might be able to receive benefits in a privatized program. Oh yeah, you can totally trust those Bush adminsitration guys. Just like you can trust the HRC, apparently.
How dare she say that her organization won’t trust the HRC anymore? It’s appalling, this lack of trust, and she ought to be removed from her position, or none of you trannies will ever work in this town again, I say! Harrumph, harrumph. Can’t have these people insulting the rich white professional men now, now can we? Absolutely improper. Totally unacceptable.
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to see this kind of editorial in the Blade, which previously hired GOP press-room stooge Jeff Gannon to write opinion columns. There’s a disgusting tendency in a lot of the more established, mainstream gay media (if you can call papers with a circulation of 30k “mainstream”) to openly push for a “me first,” single-issue approach to politics and human rights. If you want a really grotesque example, you need look no further than the oldest, largest gay publication, The Advocate. In April 2006 they published an editorial entitled “Gays First, then Illegals.” That basically says it all right there, doesn’t it? Or if you want, have another quote:
Immigration reform needs to get in line behind the LGBT civil rights movement, which has not yet realized all of its goals.
Which is not to say that I don’t recognize the plight of illegal immigrants. I do. But I didn’t break the law to come into this country.
They should have really given it a subhed like “I’m gonna keep calilng La Migra on your ass until I can get married, got it? Oh and keep paying for my social security, please.”
You know, I can give some of the rhetoric surrounding the ENDA controversy in the last few months a pass. Some people were making arguments about political wheeling and dealing, the price of doing business in Congress, and other “it’s an ugly political world out there and you take what you can get” arguments. At least those stances admit that the limited ENDA has all the regrettable problems of cut-throat pragmatism. But I always get the feeling that the emotional current that underlies most of these “incrementalist” arguments boils down to the same thing, over and over: get in line! I was here first! No really, I was, forget about Stonewall. There’s not enough for everyone, and I want MINE first! It’s a race to see who gets to Congress with the most cash first and who can yell the loudest, and what I care about the most is ME, not anyone else! Haven’t we learned better than that by now? Haven’t we learned that scarcity of liberty is a damned trick they try to play on you? Don’t make me start quoting Audre Lorde and Booker T. Washington on your ass. Hasn’t history taught us the value of solidarity and the fact that oppressions are interlinked? Ironically, ENDA is a brilliant example of that principle, if you follow the first link of this post.
The positive side of this is, it becomes clear fairly quick that there are plenty of voices in queer communities, amongst LGBT activists of many different stripes, that totally oppose this mindset. “Gays First, Then Illegals” was opposed by a coalition of 55 LGBT activists of color who wrote a brilliant letter refuting the editorial. A whole lot of the people disgusted with HRC are not trans, but long-time gay activists, like Steven Goldstein of New Jersey’s Garden State Equality. He works primarily for gay marriage, but took the time to speak out against HRC for lowering the “grades” of Congresspeople who refused to vote for a non-trans-inclusive ENDA on their annual “Congressional Scorecard” — a type of pressure that some members of Congress admitted was effective on them. And most impressive of all, a coalition of more than 300 LGBT organizations from around the country banded together to oppose what HRC and Barney Frank were doing with ENDA. Practically every major national gay organization stood against them, with the exception of GLAAD and probably the Log Cabin Republicans. Even the Blade pointed out that HRC’s poll supposedly showing support in the gay community for the crippled version of ENDA was seriously biased. And heck, nobody even told the people being polled that they could still be fired for “acting gay.” Simply put, it was clear to a whole lot of people who were thinking about the issue that when you get down to brass tacks, these political games are wrong. Leaving people behind is wrong. Sacrificing some rights in the rush for others is wrong, especially when everyone’s telling you it’s wrong.
There’s another irony here, which is that the National Center for Transgender Equality has done a complete about-face. Six months ago, the NCTE was widely regarded as the most “centrist” trans-advocacy organization around. As Vanessa Edwards Foster notes, the NCTE was formed in 2003 out of the ashes of the LAST round of political infighting and betrayal over whether there could be alliances between the HRC and trans advocacy groups in Washington. The NCTE, led by politically savvy executive director Mara Keisling, portrayed itself as the group that was going to achieve cooperation with the HRC. When the HRC announced in 2004 that they would only support a transgender-inclusive ENDA, the NCTE gained a huge amount of credibility. And hooo boy did they ever get bitten in the ass by their most important ally back in November. Keisling expressed outrage, but she’s still being praised by folks like Naff, who gives her a shout-out for playing the part of the good “company girl,” as Foster puts it. She stopped short of demanding the resignation of the HRC director for lying to so many people while taking their money. Howevre, Keisling’s board members, like Bacon, were incredibly upset by the betrayal. Now the NCTE is getting the same treatment from the Washington Blade as their predecessors, NTAC, got from NCTE. History repeats itself, and pretty damn quick, too.
I never wrote any posts about ENDA before this because I have to say… I’m royally sick of the whole business. Lobbying, employment discrimination, legislative politics. I prefer the arenas of public education, direct service to afflicted communities, grassroots building of political voice, and working towards policy influence on the administrative branch. Lobbying generally requires cash, no? To some extent, NCTE leaders complaining about HRC leaders being mostly rich and white is kind of like the pot calling the kettle… I mean… the snowflake calling the polar bear white. And this might sound confusing, but sometimes I feel like employment non-discrimination is a token issue that mostly benefits rich white people anyway, whether they’re trans or gay. This is not to say that an inclusive ENDA would be a bad thing… far from it. And it’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of people in need who could benefit from a non-discrimination law; Izza Lopez is a very good example. She’s not rich or white, and her hiring-then-firing is an incredibly clear case of discrimination.
But look — Lopez is being represented by Lambda Legal, which only takes the most ideal cases with the most spotless clients who have the best chances of winning. Around here, every other transgender discrimination case ends up getting referred to organizations like SRLP, which provides free legal services to low-income trans people and trans people of color who are getting stuck in and ground up by the gears of the system. And you know what? Most of the time, for most people who are slammed by employment discrimination, it’s virtually impossible to do anything to fight that discrimination. Emploment discrimination is a notoriously difficult kind of claim to bring, unless you have a team of expensive lawyers.
Most people who are discriminated against in hiring or firing simply don’t have a case, and that’s not their fault: most smart employers (especially the ones with legal departments) know exactly how to discriminate against people, fire them or refuse to hire them, and cover their tracks quite easily. You have to understand, I’m talking about a city, New York City, where discrimination against trans people has been illegal for five years. That doesn’t stop it from happening all the time, and that doesn’t necessarily give us much recourse to fight it. The legal issues around employment discrimination are pretty much stacked against employees, and it would take a lot more reform or precedent-setting lawsuits than just ENDA to fix that. When Bloomberg passed the non-discrimination law here in 2002, I heard that someone in a stockholder’s meeting of one of the large investment banks asked if it would affect personnel issues. The bankers laughed the question off and said that nobody was going to force them to hire any trans people. The next year, one of my friends was told by her employer that she’d be fired if she transitioned on the job; her employer was an attorney specializing in non-discrimination cases, and told her confidently that she’d never be successfully make a claim. (That friend, I’m proud to say, is going to graduate from law school herself this year, and I’m confident she’ll practice the law far more ethically.) I can count at least three other friends who have had employment discrimination problems that looked fruitless to pursue, and that’s not even including SRLP clients, who number in the hundreds.
Over the last five years, SRLP lawyers have ended up spending a lot of time pushing for administrative reform and education about the law in the city government, so that trans people going to the NYC Commission on Human Rights won’t get turned away or harassed while trying to use the bathroom. The existence of the non-discrimination law here has undoubtedly created a wedge that can be used to push for change, but it’s only one little tool–a reason you can give to some policy-maker or bureaucrat to listen to you. It’s not a cure, and acting like ENDA is really the lynchpin to fixing these problems would be like slathering icing all over a cake filled with maggots. It’s perhaps most effective as a symbolic gesture, aside from a few cases where it can actually be enforced in a court of law.
That said, as symbolic gestures go, HRC was making some pretty clear motions that looked a lot like “fuck you, us first! seeya.”
And that, in a nutshell, is why I am not a lobbyist. Too much goddamn drama.