Someone was Listening

From Vanessa Edwards Foster:

“It was that simple. With the vote on Proposition 8 (in California) the GLBT community lost the right to marry. And we immediately disappeared from our rights movement as we used to know it.”

This above was a quote by a transgender friend of mine, former-activist, later burned out in frustration and now closeted, and who wishes to remain anonymous. It’s a sentiment I gravitated to shortly after.

“Say I’m crying,
I’m looking at what’s on TV.
Pain and suffering
and the struggle to be free.
It can’t ever be denied and I
Never will ignore.” — Disappear, Inxs

For years, another trans activist from Houston, attorney Katrina Rose, had warned us all that the gay and lesbian movement (personified by HRC) was going to win their rights, then move to marriage and other issues while incrementally leaving trans people behind. Initially I was even skeptical of that, especially circa 2000. Something that brazen, that pointedly self-expedient seemed too unconscionable to be possible. The collective hue and cry that would draw would be deafening. At least then.

Two years hence, we had a new leader in the trans community put forth a bold idea that working with those historically incrementalist, gay-centric organizations like HRC would provide us a watershed of support and integration into the GLBT movement. Two years after, we saw the first public signs that this concept was failing. Five years after that new shift, the new GLBT world order was discovered to be an obvious ruse, with the concept now fully in the hands of, and exploited by HRC.

Thanks ‘Ness.

At least I know someone was listening.

What was the reward for being able to analyze what was actually going on?  Watching non-trans people be hired as trans experts by even the non-HRC outfits.

And, yes, I’ve made that bitch about my own sitiation on a number of occasions – but what the HRC-addled, Task Force-numbed  masses fail to see is: I’m but one person.  ‘Ness isn’t a lawyer – but there’s even less legitimacy in all of these self-declared trans-inclusive organizations never being willing to let her earn a living from trans advocacy.  If the Scampaign or the Task Force or GLAAD or yadda, yadda, yadda actually gave a shit about trans issues, then they would have been beating down her door and offering her whatever she might have asked for in order to work for them.

But – we all know what they really wanted for us.