Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Interestingly, Ted Kennedy is sponsoring ENDA in the Senate, and even more interestingly, the Senate version will also exclude gender identity.
Of course Bush has already said he intends to veto whatever version comes his way. Still, this may be another opportunity for more education.
In the meantime, Mara Keisling of NCTE will be on C-SPAN tomorrow morning at 7:45 AM, & if you miss it, you can catch it on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal site.
The version of ENDA without gender identity protections passed the House today, just minutes ago.
ENDA will be voted on tomorrow, without the Baldwin Amendment.
& Apparently the decision to go ahead was based on HRC surveying 500 LGBT people across the country as to whether or not they should go ahead even though transgender people were included.
As if the 500 organizations that already said NOT to go ahead don’t count at all.
What really pisses me off is that this is how the question was worded:
“This proposal would make it illegal to fire gay, lesbian and bisexual workers because of their sexual orientation. This proposal does not include people who are transgender. Would you favor or oppose this proposal moving forward?”
No mention that the Tammy Baldwin variation isn’t just inclusive of transgender identities, but of GENDER IDENTITY. No mention that the inclusive ENDA would also protect gays and lesbians whose genders aren’t normative. That is, no mention of the butches and queens, sissies and bulldaggers. Apparently there to be hung out to dry along with the trans population. So now we can hear that a woman wasn’t fired for being a lesbian, oh no. She was fired because she’s just too masculine, of course.
Feh. Or, as a friend of mine comments when HRC comes up, “You expect anything from an organization that can’t even put GAY in its name?”
(Sources: PageOneQ, Gay.com, The Advocate, The Associated Press)
This list was compiled by Chuck Laird from information he found at Wiki.
Algeria – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Angola – Labor Camps
Antigua and Barbuda – 15 Years in Prison
Bahrain – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Bangladesh – 10 Years to Life in Prison
Barbados – Life in Prison
Belize – 10 Years in Prison
Benin – 3 Years in Prison
Bhutan – 1 Month to 1 Year in Prison
Botswana – A Fine to 7 Years in Prison
Brunei – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Cameroon – A Fine to 5 Years in Prison
Cook Islands – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Djibouti – 10 to 12 Years in Prison
Dominica – 10 Years in Prison
Egypt – 5 Years in Prison
Eritrea – 3 to 10 Years in Prison
Ethiopia – 10 Days to 3 Years in Prison
Gambia – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Ghana – Not Known
Grenada – 10 Years in Prison
Guinea – 6 Months to 3 Years in Prison
Guinea Bissau – Labor Camps
India – A Fine to Life in Prison
Iran – Death
Jamaica – 10 Years Hard Labor
Kenya – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Kiribati – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Kuwait – A Fine to 7 Years in Prison
Lebanon – A Fine to 1 Year in Prison
Lesotho – Not Known
Liberia – A Fine
Libya – A Fine to 5 Years in Prison
Malawi – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Malaysia – A Fine to 20 Years in Prison
Mauritania – Death
Mauritius – A Fine to 5 Years in Prison
Morocco – 6 Months to 3 Years in Prison
Mozambique – Labor Camps
Myanmar/Burma – 10 Years to Life in Prison
Namibia – Not Known
Nauru – 14 Years Hard Labor
Nepal – A Fine to 1 Year in Prison
Nicaragua – 1 to 3 Years in Prison
Nigeria – 5 Years in Prison to Death
Niue – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Oman – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Pakistan – 2 Years to Life in Prison
Palau – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Palestine – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Papua New Guinea – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Qatar – A Fine to 5 Years in Prison
Saint Kitts and Nevis – 10 Years in Prison
Saint Lucia – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Saint Vincent and Grenadines – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Samoa – A Fine to 7 Years in Prison
Sao Tome and Principe – Labor Camps
Saudi Arabia – Death
Senegal – 1 Month to 5 Years in Prison
Seychelles – A Fine to 2 Years in Prison
Sierra Leone – Life in Prison
Singapore – 2 Years in Prison
Solomon Islands – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Somalia – 3 Months in Prison to Death
Sri Lanka – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Sudan – 5 Years in Prison to Death
Swaziland – A Fine
Syria – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Tanzania – A Fine to 25 Years in Prison
Togo – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Tokelau – A Fine to 10 Years in Prison
Trinidad and Tobago – 25 Years in Prison
Tunisia – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Turkmenistan – A Fine to 2 Years in Prison
Tuvalu – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Uganda – A Fine to Life in Prison
United Arab Emirates – Death
Uzbekistan – A Fine to 3 Years in Prison
Yemen – Flogging to Death
Zambia – A Fine to 14 Years in Prison
Zimbabwe – A Fine to 1 Year in Prison
Sonia in CO directed me to this interesting selection of YouTube videos by the always-astute Wayne Besen about sham marriages, but what caught her eye, and mine, was the comment by Zeke:
Why are discussions about gay spouses and the spouses that they betray, take advantage of, lie to, devastate, degrade, etc. ALWAYS, 100% of the time, about gay men and their victim wives. Why do we NEVER, EVER hear people talking about married lesbians and the husbands that they betray, take advantage of, lie to, devastate, degrade etc.? Lesbians marry men just as much as gay men marry women but yet they are NEVER discussed in the same visceral judgmental terms that are used speak of gay men.
He goes on to talk more about the way men are always villains and women always victims when we talk about divorce, in general. But I think the one thing that Zeke didn’t mention is how people are freaked out by sex between men, because they think it’s all about anal sex. I think that’s one of the reasons people are more offended/freaked out by gay men than by lesbians. I mean, women are also so valued for “being” sexy but we don’t talk much about women’s sexuality either, so I think – other than the uber-femme “fake” girl on girl porn, we tend to think of women who have sex with each other as doing something more like naked cuddling than – pardon my french – fucking.
There’s a story in Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity where she talks about this one case, in the UK, a century + ago, where the judges ruled out the possibility of these two female headmasters having sex with each other because – according to him – that wasn’t *possible.*
We also tend to assume women are more loyal, & more emotional; that women who leave a husband for a woman are doing so for love, while men – you know – men are always just out to get their rocks off.
That is, I think what Zeke missed is all the latent sexuality issues going on when we talk about divorce & relationships, & with all the gender stereotypes that come into it.
This, plus the recent Vatican issue, makes me wonder when we’re going to work out that half the problem is that men who come out as gay are villified because of all our own sexual hangups & mythologies.
In SF, two of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence received communion, and Catholics – and Bill O’Reilly – are raising a ruckus and talking about “San Francisco values.” The Archbishop who served them has apologized, but a Jesuit theologian commented,
“The general sacramental principle is that you don’t deny the sacrament to someone who requests it,” said the Rev. Jim Bretzke, professor of moral theology at University of San Francisco, a Jesuit Catholic university. “The second principle is that you cannot give communion to someone who has been excommunicated.”
He said such people are designated “manifest public sinners” in canon law.
“This is someone who violates in a serious way one of the Ten Commandments or one of the important laws of the Church,” he said. “While I can see Bill O’Reilly and others might be offended, the sisters do not meet the criteria the church has for denying Communion. Over-accessorizing and poor taste in makeup is not an excommunicable offense.”
Bretzke added, “Even if these people were bizarrely dressed, the archbishop was following clear pastoral and canonical principles in giving them Communion. The default is, you give Holy Communion to one who presents himself.”
They make me thankful every day I was raised by Jesuits.
But the more important issue, to me, is that the Sisters practice what others only preach.
(Thanks again to Lena for the news item)
From NCTE:
ACTION ALERT on ENDA from the National Center for Transgender Equality
House committee meets Tuesday to decide whether or not a version of ENDA that cuts out protections for transgender people will advance in Congress.
Your Representative needs to hear from you TODAY.
The House Education and Labor Committee is holding a special meeting on Tuesday to discuss the strategy proposed by some House leaders to pass an ENDA that cuts out protections for transgender people. A committee vote on the bill is tentatively scheduled for Thursday.
A list of Committee members is available at http://edlabor.house.gov/about/members.shtml
Your Representative needs to hear from you TODAY about your opposition to the flawed strategy of advancing a bill that leaves transgender people behind.
Call your Representative right now at 202-224-3121, even if you have already called him/her already about this issue. Tell him/her to oppose advancing H.R. 3685, the bill that leaves transgender people behind. Tell him/her to push for a vote on H.R. 2015, the transgender-inclusive ENDA, instead.
Please call today. You have been asked to do a lot in the last few weeks to support transgender nondiscrimination protections. The action you take today might make the difference.
This is the text of the talk I gave in Denver on Tuesday. It probably won’t surprise anyone that I’ve been busting at the seams wanting to have a say in all of the dialogue going on about ENDA. At least I don’t think it should surprise anyone, not by now.
**
First, let me thank Ed and Jordan and all the students who asked them to bring me here. It’s a pleasure to be here in celebration of National Coming Out Day, a pleasure to see all of you gathered, celebrating who you are. Thanks to all the crossdressers, the gays, the lesbians, the genderqueers, the trans men & women, MTF and FTM, & to their partners. Thanks to all of you who are family, or friends, or allies, for being here.
Betty and I have been on tour a lot this year because I had a book published in March, and we’ve gotten a chance, once again, to meet a lot of people and to talk to a lot of trans people and partners, and this year, we’ve met more gay and lesbian people who aren’t trans than we did before. And it’s been a pleasure all around in hearing people’s stories of their own gender variance, or the stories of how they came out to loved ones, or of their first big crush or the moment when they realized they were trans or gay or lesbian or how they came to understand the first identity they understood themselves to be was not quite accurate in the long run. What I love to hear the most is about how queer people find one identity fits for a while and then not at all; like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ chambered nautilus, queer people build themselves bigger chambers, bigger categories, labels that are not so confining, over time.
That’s how it’s been for us, certainly. By the time people get used to what we’re calling ourselves our identities have shifted a little, changed usually by experiences we never expected and wouldn’t trade for anything. Continue reading “On ENDA, on National Coming Out Day”
Here are some photos and a report from the candlelight vigil held in SF last night, courtesy of Robert of Left in SF, and some from the HRC protest in DC.
For more reading about ENDA than you might ever want, I’ve put together a bunch of the articles, essays, & blog posts on the topic since it was introduced in April, below the break: