Category: LGBTQ

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Trumped.

A gay male student of mine posted this to Facebook today. Trump’s rally was happening in downtown Appleton, just blocks from our campus. I thought it summarized really well what it’s like to be one of the kinds of people Trump hates, and all of this goes double/triple/ad infinitum for those who are of color, immigrants, etc.

This morning I had to keep the Trump rally in mind, even though I have the privilege of passing if I stay quiet, tone down any effeminate qualities I might exhibit on a daily basis. I kept in mind that going downtown near where the rally would be is unsafe and ill-advised today, but since I hadn’t planned to be downtown, it was a distant threat for me. However, upon getting to class this morning, things became very personal and uncomfortable for me even before the lecture started.

A few guys to my left were talking about the Trump rally and I ended up overhearing that they had gotten tickets for it. Curiously and perhaps stupidly, I listened in to what they were talking about. From what I understood, they didn’t necessarily support Trump or his proposed policies, but rather they just wanted to be there to see people get beat up and fights breaking out. Of course, as someone who was already keeping in mind the danger of downtown, I now felt uncomfortable in class, something I did not expect.

For anybody who does not fit the model of citizen Trump endorses and privileges, a world under Trump is not only insane, it’s dangerous and terrifying. As I noted this morning, you don’t just have to worry about policies: you have to worry about the even larger mass of people who just wish ill on someone else, just for their amusement and power over them. The guys in class probably didn’t wish ill on me for being gay or for my often very liberal views, but by hoping for violence at the Trump rally, they indirectly are wishing violence upon me. People who support Trump or people who just want to see the violence out in the world are indirectly supporting an environment in which many people who don’t fit Trump’s view of “a great America” have to fear daily harassment or assault, possibly for reasons they can’t even control.

This is not something that is easy to think about. However, if you are privileged enough to only have to consider this kind of violence because you’re reading this, please understand that for some people, this fear and terror is a reality every day already, but even more so if Trump ascends to power. All I ask is that you consider this.

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Fun Home Lecture

fun home

A few days ago I gave a lecture on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home for the first year students at Lawrence, and while I dme and oscaron’t have a video, I do have this audio, so if you’re interested in some of the LGBTQ history that’s tucked away in the book, or in the basics of queer theory, do give it a listen.

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WI Trans Bathroom Bill – Contact Your Legislators

AB 469 is back on the schedule, dammit. This is the bill that wants to undo local ordinances that will overturn local ordinances that allow trans students to use the correct bathroom.

It’s been scheduled for a hearing next Thursday, November 19th.

Sign the petition/contact your lawmakers here.

With just over a week before the hearing, please take a minute right now – and it really only takes a minute – to contact your lawmakers and let them know you oppose this harmful, unnecessary proposal.

It is our responsibility to care for and protect all Wisconsin students. Instead, this bill treats a group of young people with suspicion and fear, adding to existing and harmful stigma.

There are myriad serious issues facing our state and our communities. Our lawmakers in Madison should be focused on bills that will improve the lives of Wisconsinites.

Last week, hundreds of you took a moment to email your lawmakers; that’s a great start, but we can’t let up now.

Email your lawmakers right now, with just a few easy steps. Click here to get started.

When lawmakers meet on this bill next week, it is essential that they know where we stand – and we stand in strong opposition to this bill and any other that will lead to discrimination against the LGBT community.

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Houston, We Have a Problem

An amazing non discrimination ordinance in Houston was just struck down due to a paid-for campaign that focused, once again, on fear mongering: that somehow laws that allow trans people to use public bathrooms are going to result in sexual assault (of cis women) in those bathrooms.

So let me quote Red Durkin here for some clarification:

If a man wants to get away with sexual assault in America, he doesn’t have to put on a dress and sneak into the women’s restroom. He just has to join a frat or a band or professional/semi-professional sports team or the police department or get promoted to manager at Wendy’s or own his own business or go to a bar, stand on the street corner, go into a grocery store, star in a movie or sitcom, go to school with a woman, work with a woman, go on a date with a woman, live next door to a woman, deny the charges after the fact or, generally speaking, do anything EXCEPT disguise the fact that he’s a man in America.

And, I’ll add, there is no evidence whatsoever that any man who wanted to commit sexual assault did so by wearing women’s clothes and using the ladies’ room, and none, either, that any trans woman or crossdresser or GNC person has.

Sorry, Houston. I’m sure you’ll come back bigger and better and stronger as a result. In the meantime, because trans men who have not changed gender markers on their ID are now legally required to use women’s rooms, there’s a call for them to do so.

In the meantime, public hearings on a similar law in Wisconsin have been postponed.

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National Coming Out Day: For Those Not Out

The always awesome S. Bear Bergman put this up for National Coming Out
Day, and I immediately loved it, and shared it, like you do.

What surprised me was that a few people responded thinking it was sarcastic, not heartfelt. Bear said no one had interpreted that way before.

So it occurs to me that there is a subset of my readers, in particular, who take National Coming Out Day particularly hard: the crossdressers, surely, and even some (stealth) trans men and women. As groups, for the most part, they aren’t always or even often out. Sometimes they’re making sure to stay employed because of dependents. Sometimes a partner or spouse doesn’t want them to be. Sometimes it’s just easier for them not to, because they’re not the kind of people who want to explain shit all the time. (As I’ve always joked, I wrote my books so I could enjoy parties again.)

And recently I’ve been thinking about the alarming number of younger out folks who have committed suicide, and somewhat maternally wonder if maybe everyone shouldn’t be, or at the very least shouldn’t feel like they *have* to be. I still think there’s a huge difference between gays and lesbians vs. trans outness, but also, I now live in a place where the repercussions of being out are far more drastic than they might be elsewhere.

So maybe let’s remember that: all of us choose not just when and how we come out, but IF we do, and even why we might not. As per usual, let’s give ourselves some room for diversity of situation, judgment, and choices.

Love to you all whether or not you’re out. Pride doesn’t require us all to be the same.

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The Trevor Project: SEPT 10TH IS SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY

Dear Friends,

Today, on September 10th, people around the world will take action to raise awareness as part of World Suicide Prevention Day. At The Trevor Project, we fight this fight 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The statistics are staggering: the risk of suicide for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning youth is three to four times higher than their straight peers. Even more heartbreaking, the risk of suicide for transgender youth is even higher.

With your support, we can help prevent suicide. This past year, we reached nearly 200,000 youth through our crisis intervention and suicide prevention services. Our amazing staff and volunteers worked hard to answer more calls on our Trevor Lifeline, take more chats and text messages on TrevorChat and TrevorText, and support more members on TrevorSpace, our safe social media platform for LGBTQ youth and allies. So today, thanks to their efforts and supporters like you, more LGBTQ youth than ever before were able to turn to The Trevor Project—even in their darkest moments.

We are so proud to be making this impact, but our fight is far from over. Last year, the demand for our services was higher than we could meet. So, starting this year, in response to increased demand for our digital services, we are launching important new initiatives to help bolster our prevention efforts. These initiatives include the expansion of hours for TrevorText, the introduction of a critical suicide prevention research effort, and the launch of a more interactive and mobile-friendly version of TrevorSpace.

Take action today, on World Suicide Prevention Day, and help us keep this important work moving forward. Please advocate and raise awareness about our efforts, educate your community about the challenges LGBTQ youth face, or help provide crisis services through volunteering with The Trevor Project. Most importantly, so that we can continue the life-saving work that we do, please donate to The Trevor Project and consider making a regular contribution through one of our monthly or annual giving programs. We rely on you, our supporters, to directly impact our LGBTQ youth, their educators, parents, friends, and allies.

Help save even more LGBTQ lives on World Suicide Prevention Day.

The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. For more information visit TheTrevorProject.org
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call the Trevor Lifeline: 1-866-488-7386

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Being Legit

The SCOTUS ruling on same sex marriage is huge because people can finally marry yay! but there are so many other innumerable things. Today I went to get a new passport and they ask for the name of your spouse. Before the ruling, because we are both legally female and our marriage was only legal through loophole, I don’t know what would have happened or what the correct thing to do would have been: naming her could have been seen as fraud, and not naming her might have been, too. That was the weird place we were in before. Would they have rejected my application? Would the county clerk get twitchy? Maybe I would have had to go home and get our marriage certificate (proving we’re married) and her name change papers (proving she was the man I married).

What was nice today is that I just filled it out. 

Someday someone will fill it out and not even think about it afterwards.

 

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S onewall: the Movie (Because It’s Missing the T)

Again, I’ve been doing this a long time, so here’s the shorthand:

If, as a director, you want to make a movie about a young gay man who has been kicked out of his Kansas home by his Christian parents for being gay who then, in turn, comes to NYC & becomes a queer radical, make that awesome movie. It’s needed.

Just don’t, um, call it Stonewall. It can even be about that era, or that particular guy’s experience in the uprising, but calling it Stonewall implies it is about the whole of the event, not just one person’s experience in it.

  • This isn’t hard. If you’re going to make a movie about one of the most important moments of queer liberation – globally! – then maybe try to get the history right.
  • The burden is on the filmmaker to get it right.
  • Gay white men did an awful lot for queer liberation, actually, and there are plenty of stories to tell about them, including at Stonewall and during it. They just weren’t the ones who threw the first brick.
  • Hiring a few trans people to work on the film would have been great. Also black and latinx actors.

Miss Major explains the rest, as far as I’m concerned.

People aren’t upset just because of this movie; they’re upset because this has been happening since 1970 when Silvia Rivera was first asked not to speak at the 1st anniversary of Stonewall, the very 1st PRIDE. And you would think that perhaps someone might do their research and realize how incredibly frustrating it has been for the trans community to experience this erasure, especially after being dumped from legislation that benefited the LG and not the T. That is, there’s a history to the history.

I think I’m most disturbed by the idea that the director and screenwriter were surprised by this backlash and calls for a boycott. There are about 800 people who do trans history and advocacy who could have warned them, and maybe they were warned and dismissed the warning. That said, I’ve also seen them called out for using the word “transvestite” which – although it’s not used anymore – was, in fact, the word used by Rivera and Johnson, whose organization was called STAR, after all, for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. While I’m at it, there’s this:

What people fail to realize is that the Stonewall was not a drag queen bar. It was a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different races. Very few drag queens were allowed in there, because if they had allowed drag queens into the club, it would have brought the club down. That would have brought more problems to the club. It’s the way the Mafia thought, and so did the patrons. So the queens who were allowed in basically had inside connections. I used to go there to pick up drugs to take somewhere else. I had connections.

[From Rivera’s piece “Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones,” in J. Nestle, ed., Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, at pp. 67-85 (2002).]

 

Does all this mean the movie will suck? Maybe not. It does mean that I won’t go see it.

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EEOC Ruling

So what does this recent EEOC ruling mean? It means that sexual orientation discrimination is now considered sex discrimination, because the gender of you and the gender of who you love means it’s about gender, not orientation, per se.

The first time we saw this in any significant way was when Hawaii’s Baehr v Lewin case left the door open for civil unions back in 1993 (causing, some might argue, the whole DOMA movement at the federal and state levels).

This EEOC ruling is *not* binding in courts, but the EEOC investigates a lot of workplace cases and the courts, in turn, often defer to EEOC rulings precisely because the EEOC has more experience and expertise as their mission is to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1064.

NCTE adds:

The argument that gender identity, but not sexual orientation, is already covered by Title VII and other sex discrimination laws has sometimes been asserted as a reason to cut gender identity out of LGBT nondiscrimination bills at the state or local level. In fact, all forms of anti-LGBT nondiscrimination are inherently gender-based—and yet we still urgently need legislation to make clear beyond doubt, once and for all, that LGBT people are protected. The EEOC’s underscores that the entire LGBT community is in the same boat in that regard.

Which is NCTE’s way of saying that the EEOC ruling may help, but it does not (yet) invalidate the need for ENDA.