Category: politics & causes

politics, both trans & otherwise

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How To Be An Ally

I really like this short list of how to be an ally, although I would add an 11th: you will fuck up, so surround yourself with people who both expect and can accept apologies when you do. And obviously, be willing to admit when you have.

1. Don’t derail a discussion.
2. Do read links/books referenced in discussions.
3. Don’t expect your feelings to be a priority in a discussion about X issue.
4. Do shut up and listen.
5. Don’t play Oppression Olympics.
6. Do check your privilege. It’s hard and often unpleasant, but it’s really necessary.
7. Don’t expect a pass into safe spaces because you call yourself an ally.
8. Do be willing to stand up to bigots.
9. Don’t treat people like accessories or game tokens.
10. Do keep trying.

Do check out the whole list for the clarifications and explanations.

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Anti-Non-Discrimination, or Legal Discrimination

What the hell is going on in this country? While I find most of my students are surprised – and appalled – that there is no federal non-discrimination legislation that includes LGBTQs, states are now passing amendments to prevent any cities or towns in that state from passing any.

That is, states are passing legislation that makes it illegal to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.

What?

Bill Headed to Vote in State Senate Would Gut Nashville’s Anti-LGBT Discrimination Ordinance

In a letter to Tennessee state Senators, TLDEF and the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition (TTPC) raised concerns about the constitutionality of a proposed bill that would make it unlawful for any city or town in the state to pass a law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender Tennesseans from discrimination. If this sounds familiar, it should. We recently faced a similar bill in Montana.

Senate Bill 632 – which today passed the Senate State and Local Government Committee by a vote of 6-3 – would strike down local legal protections from discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans, and would make it impossible to pass such protections in the future. It previously passed the House of Representatives (where it was known as House Bill 600) on April 25 by a vote of 73-24. It is expected to be voted upon in the full Senate shortly.

On April 5, 2011, the Nashville and Davidson County Metropolitan Council passed an anti-discrimination ordinance which bars the Nashville government from doing business with any entity that does not prohibit discrimination in employment against LGBT workers. Mayor Karl Dean signed it into law three days later. SB 632 was immediately rushed through the Tennessee House of Representatives by opponents of Nashville’s anti-discrimination ordinance. Their goal was to strike down Nashville’s ordinance and ensure that no city or town in Tennessee could ever enact a law protecting LGBT Tennesseans from discrimination again.

SB 632 is motivated by bias, which is a constitutionally impermissible basis for legislation. It would deprive LGBT Tennesseans of their right to participate in the political process and seek help from their local governments. It would turn lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans into strangers to Tennessee’s government and would violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection under established United States Supreme Court precedent.

“Tennesseans have spoken through their local governments and have stated clearly that they want to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans from discrimination,” said TLDEF executive director Michael Silverman. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans want the same right to live and work free from discrimination that everyone else enjoys. It is unconstitutional for Tennessee to target them by taking away their right to pass local laws that protect them from the discrimination that they face in the cities and towns where they live,” he added. “Tennessee must treat all Tennesseans equally. It violates the Constitution when it closes its doors to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans simply because some people do not like them.”

“This bill is blatantly discriminatory,” said TTPC President Dr. Marisa Richmond. “It is an attempt to deny basic rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Tennesseans and we hope that the Senate will defeat it when it comes up for a vote.”

I’m really starting to wonder if I live in the US anymore. This kind of thinking seems antithetical to what I was always taught was American.

We need a national ENDA, and we need one with teeth.

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Finally: Osama Bin Laden is Dead.

Osama bin Laden is dead. I may be drunk for a week.

I had two year-old kittens on 9/11 who are 11 now; one was diagnosed with cancer last week.
It’s the 8th anniversary of Dubya’s bullshit “Mission Accomplished” photo op.
Nearly 50K US soldiers have been killed or wounded in the time since.
I hadn’t been married for even two months; in two months, we celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.

& That asshole has been alive all that time.

Osama bin Laden is dead.

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Required ID to Vote Suppresses Votes

This whole idea of requiring people to present photo ID to vote is bad news indeed for a lot of kinds of people, but especially for transgender ones, who, in exchange for expressing their right to vote, will have to deal with harassment, denial of suffrage, and lack of representation.

Because what exactly it takes to get a gender marker in your lived gender if you are trans varies from state to state.

But more important, as Alex Blaze points out, the whole idea is to suppress the vote of people who are most likely to be intimidated by needing an ID card & by the voting process in general.

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Texas Marriage Law

Monica Roberts has been covering a proposed bill call SB 723; her most recent update is here. It’s in the Senate, & what it will do is make it illegal to use a court order about name/gender change to apply for a marriage license. The only reason it’s been proposed is to mess with the legal marriages of trans women to men, such as in the Nikki Araguz.

If you live in TX, call your senators now and tell them to kill this bill. List below the break.

Continue reading “Texas Marriage Law”

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McDonald’s Employees

There is a petition at change.org which is calling for the McDonald’s employees who stood by, laughed, and videotaped the violent attack on a trans woman be held responsible.

I have no idea what kind of precedent that might be, but a law like this is long overdue.

Not at all ironically, it is in Maryland that a recent non-discrimination law recently went down in flames because gender identity was added to the bill and legislators, as per usual, were presented with the bullshit argument that somehow “men in dresses” would be hiding out in ladies’ room inflicting violence. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A CASE OF THIS HAPPENING, and as we can all see here, it is transpeople who require protection and safety from transphobic bigots. The Democratic Senators who backed out of supporting the bill – even after confirming their support – should be ashamed of themselves.

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Passing Privilege and Maine Politics

Last week, Jennifer Finney Boylan spoke to the Maine legislature over gender inclusion in Maine’s non discrimination laws. She writes:

Yesterday, I spoke to the Maine legislature’s Judiciary committee. A bill has been proposed to “exempt” transgender people from protections under the Maine Human Rights Act, which went into effect six years ago. Currently, Maine protects GLBT people from discrimination, and this includes a so called “public accommodations” provision of the very sort that was, in part, the deal breaker in the Maryland law that was shelved last week. (Although I should make it clear that the Maine law has been on the books for six years without problem, and the proposed legislation is to REMOVE the protection for trans people; Maryland currently has no such provisions and the shelved legislation would have put these protections into place.)

She made some lovely remarks to the Maine legislature’s judiciary committee, which she’s reprinted in full on her blog, but the issue that comes up is that of passing privilege: how people are more than ready to have trans people who pass in their transitioned gender protected and welcomed in gender-specific spaces, but that the people who don’t pass are suspect.

That’s obviously a problem, since it’s exactly the trans people (and cis people, for that matter) who don’t have “acceptable” or culturally legible genders that need the protection most. No one asks for anyone’s ID on the way into a public bathroom after all; we are carded by our gender expression, and if our gender isnt normative, there’s often trouble, whether the person is trans, butch or some other gender that doesn’t stick closely enough to “man” or “woman”.

A quick thanks to Boylan for the heads up and for speaking up, too.

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Marriage Equality: Conversion Narrative

NOM has lost a hater. A couple of weeks ago, Louis J. Marinelli jumped ship and now supports full marriage equality. He was turned off by the people who had gathered around the cause:

I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun to question. This would be timeline point number three. I wanted to extend an olive branch in some way and started to reinstate those who had been banned by previous administrators of my page. I welcomed them to participate on the page and did what I could do erase the worst comments and even ban those who posted them.

He explains as well exactly how, as a conservative, Catholic, and Republican, he has come to see where he was wrong:

Once you understand the great difference between civil marriage and holy marriage, there is not one valid reason to forbid the former from same-sex couples, and all that is left to protect is the latter.

Indeed Christians and Catholics alike are well within their right to demand that holy matrimony, a sacrament and service performed by the Church and recognized by the Church, remains between a man and a woman as their faith would dictate. However, that has nothing to do with civil marriage, performed and recognized by the State in accordance with state law.

My name is Louis J. Marinelli, a conservative-Republican and I now support full civil marriage equality. The constitution calls for nothing less.

For those of us for whom this is obvious, it’s easy to scoff, but I got goosebumps reading his entire letter about this conversion, and interestingly, I would place it very much in a huge tradition of Christian “conversion” literature – it’s not Saul to Paul, but I’ll take it!

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Speechless = Priceless

Yesterday, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) had one minute on the floor:

He makes me proud to be a Dem & a NYer. Really.

Happy Tax Day, everyone.

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Victories

What do you expect of two people who went on their first date to see Point of Order and now live in the birthplace of Joe McCarthy? You expect gung-ho progressive politics, dammit.

Tonight, after being a Daily Kos reader for a goddamn long time, Betty posted a piece about our local elections here in Appleton, WI:

I live and work in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Two of our Alderman elections were won by people I know and respect. Both were first-timers.
…
This is big and it’s nice. The town I live in has a progressive backbone and just showed it. The birthplace of Joe McCarthy.
Nice.
Appleton is part of the Green Bay/Oshkosh corridor (probably the biggest by population) and from what I can tell, leans conservative (I’m a recent emigré from Brooklyn, NYC).
Wahl and Metille are progressive. And they won. Impressively.
In Prosser’s back yard.
Small victories.
Appleton, WI has two more progressive voices in elected positions.
Nice.
I like the small victories. They smell like big ones.

Of course we are still waiting, will be waiting a while for the Prosser/Kloppenburg results, but in the meantime, we have these victories.