The End of ENDA?

So, I've been sitting around for three days thinking about the situation with ENDA, and every time I sit down to write something, I find myself utterly voiceless, and wind up searching Wikipedia for the history of "Bizarre Love Triangle" or clicking the StumbleUpon button for hours on end. That's what I do when I want to procrastinate, and I am very, very good at procrastinating. I have procrastinated whole phases of my life with ease.

The dilemma with ENDA says volumes about the Left, and not just the LGBT movements, although you could write whole libraries just on the implications for queers. ENDA is desperately needed; I think it's a far more worthy cause for queers to focus their efforts in than marriage, and I never thought that it would get even this far. And now that it's gotten to Congress, it's about to be lost by the very same people that should be fighting for it. The Democratic party leadership (i.e., Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank) wants queers to flush the rights of transsexuals right down the toilet so that they can pass a weakened version of the bill, one that includes sexual preference, but not gender identity.

The controversy that's resulted says a lot about queer politics, as I said. It's exposed tensions and rifts in the communities that have been there for a long time, that most people pretend don't even exist, but they're like broken bones that have never quite knitted together as well as they should have. While most LGBT groups came out vehemently against the weakened bill, and over 90 organizations signed a letter to Congress demanding a trans-inclusive ENDA, there was one significant exception: the Human Rights Campaign took a “neutral” stance, declaring their support for a trans-inclusive ENDA, but not condemning the watered-down version, causing Donna Rose, their first and only transsexual board member, to resign.

The fact that the alphabet soup on the letterheads of queer organizations has grown over the years -- starting out at “lesbian and gay” and winding up with “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual” masks the fact that for most organizations, those last two letters mean bupkiss; they're just letters on the stationery. In the real world, the bi's and the trannies are seen as kind of tacky hanger-ons, and while activist groups are happy to take their donations, or use them to mobilize for this, that or the other campaign or demonstration, they're usually neglected otherwise. The national leadership of groups like the HRC likes to try to treat that alphabet soup on their letterhead like one single, undistinguished mass, and that the agenda of one naturally serves the interests of the others.

The ENDA controversy has implications that go far beyond this one piece of legislation, however important it is. It makes it nakedly obvious that there are serious problems with how trans people are seen in queer communities at large, and that the homogenized agenda of "LGBT" is pure bullshit. Not only are there people, both in the leadership and in the ranks, who are willing to toss transpeople to the side for a nominal victory in the legislature, but there are also many who question whether transpeople belong in the queer community at all. John Aravosis of AmericaBlog has made the argument utterly without inhibition or apology that the "T" got added not as a natural evolution within queer communities, but because a few people heading organizations were intimidated by trans activists:

I think that the transgender community was added to ENDA the same way the T got added on to the LGB. By force, and attrition, rather than by popular demand. I remember being at the beach with a bunch of gay friends about 6 or 7 years ago. There was an Advocate or OUT magazine on the table and it was open to some article about the transgender community. The details of the discussion now elude me, but I remember there being a lively debate about just how and when transexuals became part of the gay community, and vice versa - the consensus was that nobody knew how it happened, and nobody was quite sure that they agreed with the inclusion. Now zoom forward to today. We've heard a lot of anger from every single gay group on the planet, save HRC, that gender identity is being dropped from ENDA in order to save the bill. We've also heard from a number of vocal activists. But when I speak to friends and colleagues privately, senior members of the gay political/journalistic establishment, and just plain old gay friends around the country (and our own readers), the message I hear is far different from what I'm hearing from the groups. I'm clearly hearing three things. Well, four:

1. I feel empathy for transgendered people, and support their struggle for civil rights.
2. I want ENDA to pass this year even if we can't include transgendered people.
3. I don't understand when transgendered people became part of the gay community?

And then there's always #4: Please don't tell anyone I told you this.

(Emphasis mine.)

While most people who support the "compromise" version of ENDA express a great deal of regret that they think this has to be the "reality" of ENDA, and many seem even to be sincere in this regret, Aravosis keeps hammering at the issue like Carrie Nation going at a whiskey barrel. He sounds like he's relieved that this is finally out in the open, and that those leechlike trannies are finally about to get theirs.

The real beauty of Aravosis's trans-bashing lies in how -- like the pea-brains who sneer at every anti-racist or anti-sexist criticism as "politically correct" -- he frames it not merely as acceptable, but a virtuous act of resistance against the oppressive hordes. If transsexuals had as much political power as Aravosis credits them with, inclusion in ENDA would be downright redundant.

A statement by longtime lesbian activist Robin Tyler has also gotten a lot of circulation, by Avarosis, journalist Rex Wockner, and others:

I support full transgender rights. However, when I have been invited to legal weddings of some of my transgender friends, not one of them has said "we will not get married until Diane and you and other same gender couples can get married". They did not sacrifice their legal rights on the alter of political correctness to give up the State and Federal benefits of marriage.

And yet, with regard to ENDA, the lesbian and gay community is expected to do so, leaving millions and millions of us in the majority of States, once again, unprotected.

The best response to Tyler that I've found comes from Greta Christina, who is brilliant and passionate and absolutely uncompromising in a blog entry called Sacrificing Your Legal Rights, or, Why Robin Tyler is an Asshole:

For lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to ask transpeople to make "sacrifices" for us is laughable. T's have been getting the short end of the LGBT stick for years. The fact that heterosexual T's have one goddamn right that G's and L's and same-sex-oriented B's and T's don't have... this hardly balances the scales. It's hardly the injustice of the century. To present transpeople as a privileged class who should be willing to sacrifice some rights to be in solidarity with their oppressed gay/ lesbian/ bi siblings... it'd be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.

Is Ms. Tyler prepared to give up the rights she has in cities and states where GLB's have legal protections but T's don't? Is she willing to not sue for discrimination, not file hate crime charges, etc., in cities and states that give these protections to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but not to transpeople? If not, then she absolutely does not have a point. Or rather, she has a point, but it's shaped like a corkscrew.

At the risk of dredging up a sexist cliché, Greta is beautiful when she's angry -- at least as long as she's on your side.

And what I have to ask is -- haven't we all gotten tired of compromising our souls away? Just yesterday I walked into a Starbucks and saw a New York Times with a headline that said "Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers." Being someone who believes in justice and equality and constitutional rule nowadays is setting yourself up for heartbreak, not because we're faced with living under the thumbs of people whose entire ethical code consists of "I got mine, fuck you," and feel that the mere existence of queers, atheists, and liberals oppresses them, but because the people that we trusted to fight them for us sit quietly, chowing down on big platters of shit and assuring us that it's liver paté.

And now we're told that if we dump the trannies and ask them to wait patiently for their rights, we can get ENDA passed. Does anyone really believe that? Is it really credible that the people who have fought even the slightest acknowledgment of queers will look at a T-less version of ENDA and go "Well, that's all right, then"? Bush isn't going to sign ENDA with or without the T, and the Christian Right isn't going to take any less offense at ENDA if it excludes T.

There's something even more important at stake than the very important rights guaranteed by ENDA: the queer communities need to show the people who want them to disappear that they're willing to fight for one another. A compromise like this is damaging in the long run because it shows that queers can easily be split off from one another and made to do the fighting themselves. It's time to demand that the people we vote for and pay to represent us show some steel and fight for us.

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