Another Exception That Proves the Rule

Every once in a while, Queer Channel Media actually has something that makes sense.  I feel an obligation to acknowledge such occurrences when they happen.

Most recently, Rebecca Armendariz mused about the recent re-introduction of the fraudulently-entitled ‘Marriage Protection Amendment’, which would put a gay marriage ban into the US Constitution.

Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter have co-sponsored the re-introduced Marriage Protection Amendment….

…

[T]here’s nothing to really worry about as far as the outcome of this measure, which has been around since 2000. But really?

Really David Vitter? You are a known client of the late D.C. Madam. You slapped your wife, Wendy Baldwin Vitter, in the face by flushing your “sacred union” down the toilet.

And Larry Craig - is this your way of trying to prove to the country that you’re not gay? We’re not buying it.

When Queer Channel Media is right, its right.

It just doesn’t happen very often.

Bailey Brouhaha NWSA Panel Post-Mortem

Dateline: Cincinnati

Event: the 2008 National Women’s Studies Association Conference

At this moment: I’m a weeeeeeeeeeeeeee bit sleepy after a very eventful day here at the conference (and, for me, several days of researching prior to the conference.)  I crashed almost immediately afterward and now find myself awake at 3:15 AM (EDT).  To recap - here is why I find myself in WKRP-land (I’m still looking for the flying turkeys; do they only come out at Thanksgiving?) for the first time:

THE BAILEY BROUHAHA: COMMUNITY MEMBERS SPEAK OUT ON RESISTING TRANSPHOBIA AND SEXISM IN ACADEMIA AND BEYOND

The publication of J. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would be Queen provoked a fire storm of controversy upon its publication in 2003. The book, claiming to be based on “science,” outraged members of the transgender community, who quickly mobilized to expose the book and its transphobic content. The controversy was reignited in 2007 when Alice Dreger published a lengthy apologia in which she exonerated Bailey and castigated transwomen activists for attempting to “ruin” Bailey’s career. These papers examine the transphobic backlash caused by Bailey/Dreger and document the academic and activist projects of trans community members to speak truth to power.

Katrina C. Rose, University of Iowa 

Andrea Jean James, GenderMedia Foundation

 

Élise R. Hendrick, Cincinnati, OH 

Moderator: Joelle Ruby Ryan, Bowling Green State University  

A PDF of the paper I presented can be found here.  It is an update of the paper I first put together in the aftermath of Alice Dreger initially unleashing her indefensible defense of J. Michael Bailey. 

I’m guessing that Andrea James will have some thoughts of her own on how the panel went over at her website, so check there; she and Lynn Conway videotaped the panel - and I recorded the audio - for purposes of wide distribution so, in some form, it should be available on the Net relatively soon.  And, when the audio and/or video pops up, I’ll let what happened speak for itself.  Here, however, are a few random 3AM thoughts:

First: It was nice to meet folks like Andrea, Lynn, Joelle and Elise in person finally (also, Gordene MacKenzie was at the conference and, despite my having appeared on Gender Talk several times over the last decade, this was the first time I’d bumped into her in 3-D since the 1996 Texas T Party.)

Second: I was impressed at the amount of trans-specific and trans-related panels.  Of course, here are two panels that took place at the same time as our Bailey-Dreger panel:

RESISTING NORMATIVE AND EXCLUSIONARY HEGEMONIES IN THE LGBTQ MOVEMENT 

This roundtable explores the failure of some aspects of the LGBTQ movement to resist dominant hegemonies, which in some cases has resulted in the installation of queer hegemonies or homonormatives. Our speakers will address topics including welfare politics and the LGBT movement, the controversies surrounding the Human Rights Campaign’s exclusionary homonormativity, “sex positive” as form of resistance, LGBT politics and controversies in Cincinnati, the effect of the hetero/homonormative media on youth, a critique of heteronormativity in Jennifer Baumgardner’s Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, and an exploration of the complexities of the marriage rights focus of the LGBT movement for anti-marriage individuals.

AND

STRATEGIES OF TRANSSEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER IDENTITY: A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION 

This panel examines transgender and transsexual identity deployments in philosophical, literary, and legal contexts. Focusing on the intervention of trans-identities into hegemonic gender discourse conceals that these identities are strategically forged as a matter of life and survival. By examining presentations of identity in specific moments, this cross-disciplinary panel hopes to shift the focus from debating the subversiveness and political potential of identities to recognizing the strategic nature of identity in context.

 

Third: Dreger herself was in attendance (recall her efforts against our panel), setting forth her lame position earlier in the day Saturday as well as sitting in the audience at our panel.  She sat silent, but there was one rather curious trans-self-identified defender in the audience.  Once the audio and/or video is up, I’ll let what transpired speak for itself but, give that its getting close to 4 now, I’ll close by saying: You certainly don’t need to be a lawyer to talk intelligently about the Constitution and the law, but being able to utter the words “First Amendment” does not translate into having any clue about the actual scope of free-speech protections.

And This Year’s Beren DeMotier Award for Pride-Time Trans-Exclusion Goes To…

Joseph DaBigotBrow.

What earned him this award, named for the self-proclaimed right-wing lesbian who, ten years ago, was given a platform at Pride time by Queer Channel Media to proclaim ‘Trans Issues Are Not What Pride is All About’?

Well, DaBrow gave the world this bit of Fox News-style historical analysis in Metroline, which claims to be New England’s “Oldest Gay & Lesbian Publication”:

Stonewall was not simply an activist protest where they went home afterwards and partied. They were beaten and dragged away to jail by the police. It was a time when fag bashing was an accepted method of controlling homos and keeping them out of the neighborhood. There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were.

As I remarked over at Pam’s House Blend, there is much room for historical debate and analysis about Stonewall, what it represented, what it represents and, of course, who all actually was there and participated.  But, there is no room for Stalinism-esque historical re-writing (I can’t bring myself to use the term of art ‘revisionism’ to describe DaBrow’s nonsense, as ‘revisionism’ can also accurately describe historical interpretations that right past interpretative wrongs.)

I was four years old and in Texas at the time of Stonewall, so I can’t offer a first-hand account to disprove DaBrow, but I can say that, even among all of the anti-trans, gay conservative historical revisionists who seek to de-emphasize Stonewall as a gay milestone and/or minimize the quantitative and qualitative significance of trans-participation there, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one make that bald of an intellectually reckless, historically insupportable and culturally defamatory assertion.  Even Dale Carpenter isn’t willing to erase the drag queens from the historical record of Stonewall:

Outside of New York, according to Stephen Murray in his book American Gay, gay activists initially paid little attention to Stonewall. Only through the annual pride parade commemorations that began a year later and spread significantly in the mid-1970s did Stonewall take on the singular importance in gay history it now enjoys. At the time it happened, however, the event simply did not carry the incredible motivating force we now attach to it.

Second, the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is probably exaggerated. Eyewitness accounts of what happened that night vary, as they usually do, and we have no videotape of the event and very few pictures.

But one thing is clear. It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary for genderqueers (unless that term encompasses non-transgendered gay men). Murray writes that “men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance.”

But don’t take Murray’s word for it, consider what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History: “The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time.” The night of the Stonewall riot was the first time Rivera had ever even been to the bar.

If Rivera is right, it seems likely the Stonewall patrons who rebelled that June night in 1969 included many (perhaps mostly) middle-class, non-transgendered, gay white males. It’s possible that the few drag queens present provided all (or most of) the rebellion while the others cowered. But there is no reason to make that assumption unless we indulge stereotypes about the timidity of gay men. So a description of the riot as an uprising of drag queens may be more politically correct, but as history it seems partial.

Make no mistake, I’m not endorsing Carpenter’s straight-gay-male-centric view of history.  However, it should cause DaBrow to make note of a rather simplistic mathematical axiom: Few > no.

Now, I do tend to view those who write of Stonewall utilizing only the words “gay” and “lesbian” and those who never say anything about the trans people who were there as committing the same crime that DaBrow committed - but to a far less serious degree.

Think ‘criminally negligent homocide’ as opposed to ‘first degree murder.’

But did DaClownBrow really think he could get away with this?  Did he think that no one wuld recall that even the first published gay account of the riots - penned by Dick Leitsch of the never-all-that-fond-of-anything-trans Mattachine Society - was entitled “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” for a reason?

I’m hoping that even some of the more intelligent, yet still sadly anti-trans, folks out there, such as Carpenter, will be willing to call him out as being so far off the mark that he should consider leaving the gay writing game to do Iraq War prognostication for William Kristol.

In Anticipation of Matthew Shepard + 10

[Cross-posted at Pam's House Blend]

I know there are a lot of hate-crime-statute addicts out there and my opinion of the usefulness of such statutes doesn’t exactly endear me to them.

OKay - lets stick to something we do have in common: hatred of laws (and those who create such laws) that allow gays and lesbians to discriminate against trans people.

Its still a few months off, but in October we’ll all be inundated (and not unjustifiably so) with ten-year remembrances of the disgusting murder of Matthew Shepard.

For some reason, I’m guessing that the following won’t be amonst the officially-consecrated corporate gay remembrances:

18-year-old Transvestite Stabbed, Beaten

 

An 18-year-old male, dressed as a woman, was stabbed late October 13 on South Park Street, just hours after a rally/vigil was held on the Capitol steps at State Street in memory of the murdered college student in Laramie, Wyoming. Madison officials originally considered adding Wisconsin’s Hate Crime enhancement charge onto the charge against the perpetrator, but backed off after carefully studying the law, and realizing “it didn’t cover cross-dressing.”

Johnny Louis Ellis, 43, was tentatively charged with aggravated battery while armed with a dangerous weapon. He was also accused of bail jumping because he was out of jail on bail on a domestic battery case. Ellis said to the victim, “I know what you are - you’re a man.”

Police say Ellis’ comments don’t show he “picked his victim because he thought he was Gay.” Police Office Dave Gouran was quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal saying, “You can be a cross-dresser without being Gay and the (hate crime) statute doesn’t speci fy cross-dressers.”

That was from a news item in the October 22, 1998 issue of WI Light.

Wisconsin law did not (and still does not) cover trans people - even though it does cover gays and lesbians.

I usually point this out in the context of general anti-discrimination laws (i.e., in a jurisdiction such as Wisconsin, the person doing the discriminating against the trans person easily could be GLB - after all, why should we trust those who will pass laws excluding us not to take advantage of that exclusion to avoid having to work with us), but it works here as well.

How do we know that Ellis - the assaulter - was not gay?

Does it matter?

Well, as a legal matter…NO!

With no trans-inclusion in the law, there’s no hate-crime enhancement standing, allegedly, as a disincentive to such assaults.  Translation: its open season against trans people by everyone else, GLBs as well as straights (genuine as well as those who claim to be so.)

But, think about what the situation would have been if the 18-year-old had been accused of assaulting Ellis - with the accusation specifying that the assault was because of Ellis’ sexual orientation - whatever that may happen to be, though, for purposes of this example, let’s assume its not hetero.

The 18-year-old gets tagged with not only the assault charge but also a hate-crime enhancement.

I know, with this I’m making the religionists’ case against hate crime laws.

So be it.

But I also just made the case for trans-inclusion in employment anti-discrimination laws - such as Wisconsin’s, which, in 1998 had been gay only for 16 years and, in 2008, has been gay-only for 26 years.  After all, some people do their discriminatin’ with their fists (or beer bottles, etc.) and some people do it with their power to exclude certain other people from being able to participate in the United States economy.

I don’t trust either group of people.

That means you, christianists.

And that means you too, HRC-oids.

Chappaquiddick! Chappaquiddick! Chappaquiddick!

Oh yeh…

Mary Jo Kopechne!

From Time:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is jumping into the middle of an uproar within the gay community whose causes he has long championed.

…

The Massachusetts Democrat is leading a push in the Senate for a federal ban on job bias against gays, lesbians and bisexuals — but not transsexuals, cross-dressers and others whose outward appearance doesn’t match their gender at birth.

My dear friend, the late Dee McKellar had a theory about why Teddy Bare is such a prick when it comes to the notion of trans-inclusion.

No proof of its validity, mind you - so I don’t feel comfortable sharing it -  but, a theory.

The longer he continues to be a prick about it, the more I think Dee was probably right.

Kudos to Sharon McGowan

From Bay Windows:

 Trans conference debates merits of anti-discrimination laws

Okay, the mere fact that (ostensibly) trans people are having a “debate” on this adds fuel to the belief of some that the true needs of trans people are being subverted in favor of exercies in queer theory (some legitimate, some rather loopy.)

Dean Spade, a teaching fellow at Harvard Law School and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, argued that in practice it is almost impossible to bring a successful case under such laws.Spade said that for the past several decades a series of Supreme Court decisions has made it nearly impossible for someone pressing a discrimination claim to prove intent on the part of his or her employer, blunting the effectiveness of the laws.

So I guess he’d be in favor of completely abandoning efforts to secure same-sex marriage, given that there have been a mega-series of court decisions (and ensuing state laws and constitutional amendments) foreclosing that?

“And I think all of us as lawyers recognize that a lot of these laws don’t really work,” said Spade, speaking on a Feb. 29 panel that presented an overview of the trans legal landscape. “I think we know that anti-discrimination laws aren’t enforced. I think we’re pretty aware that racism and able-ism and national origin discrimination, all other things that have been illegal for a while, haven’t gone away because the law changed.

All of us?  All of who?  All trans attorneys?  No one consulted me on that pronouncement.

What a fucking moron. 

This is the type of clown who has appropriated the ability to make a living as any form of representative of trans people? 

Tell ya what.  Lets take a legit poll of African-Americans and see if they think things are better now than they were prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - not perfect, but better, perhaps even much better.

Now, I’ve been a major critic of some categories of civil rights laws - most notably the genre of local ordinances and state/local executive orders that aren’t enforceable at all.  That’s a different issue  - and, if that’s what he was talking about, then he really didn’t make himself clear.

Its never going to be perfect.

All civil rights laws have loopholes that are clear.

All civil rights laws have loopholes that christofascist judges can use to re-write said laws into virtual non-existence.

So give up?

Why not give up and let St. Barney of Frank do whatever the hell he wants to subjugate trans people politically?  Why not give up and never say anything about how major gay rights groups have a worse track record on hiring trans people than do most inhuman multinational corporate monoliths?  Why not just give up live as the sex you were designated as birth and why not give up and adopt the sexual orientation that your parents undoubtely expected you to have?

I don’t think there’s any kind of naiveté amongst lawyers about that. And yet we are still wedded to those strategies in part because I think sometimes we think maybe they have another role. Maybe when we pass these laws they have a symbolic role, they change what people think of us. … And those are questions I want to keep on the table

Symbolic…

You mean like their presence on the books inspiring employers not to discriminate in the first instance when, otherwise, they would have?

Sorry, dude.  That’s not symbolic.  That’s substantive.

What a moron.

At a forum later that day on sex segregation and gender regulation Lisa Mottet, director of the Transgender Civil Rights Project for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), provided a different perspective, arguing that the 13 state non-discrimination laws that cover transgender people have provided no major court victories because no one has yet tested them.

Well, not no one.  Of course, when you get down to it there has been only one - the Minnesota catastrophe: Goins v. West Group (though there have been a few cases following that one, all ending at lower levels.)  And with each day that passes I’m more convinced that that decision was not an honest one (my suspicion is that Republican Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz - a state legislator when the law was passed - was not too thrilled to know that she had voted for a law that was more than GLB; during floor debate in 1993 she had indicated that she thought the law would be the same as that which existed in Wisconsin - which, of course, it was (and is) not.)

She said the solution is to test those laws in court and establish case law around gender identity discrimination, but for people facing discrimination there are many factors that prevent them from filing a lawsuit.“I am troubled by the fact that there aren’t a lot of lawsuits under these laws. Part of it is they’re new. We passed four laws last year, so a year ago we only had nine state laws for example, so that’s part of it,” said Mottet. “But I think it’s also that people don’t know they have rights, that people aren’t in the financial position to hire an attorney, and [when] there’s still a lot of other discrimination happening in a person’s life, their highest priority isn’t going after an employer that fired them. Their highest priority is finding a new job, finding a place to live that they can afford.”

I can’t say I disagree with any of that (though I feel obligated to add that, despte Mottet being good at what she does, I still feel it is a sickening travesty that NGLTF continues to employ a non-trans person as its trans legal expert.)  And though I increasinlg find myself at odds with the Phyllis Frye’s reasoning on many issues, she did saliently add to why the laws don’t generate as many high-profile cases with published decisions as might be expected:

“One of the reason why there is [little litigation under the non-discrimination laws] is that as litigators our primary duty is to represent our client, not to make case law, as much as we would like to. And if we can browbeat or otherwise get an employer or city or somebody else to actually follow the law, if we can sit down with their council and explain to them, ’A, B, C - oh, light bulb! - and get them to comply or settle, then that is our goal,” said Frye.

I’ve found Phyllis to be out of touch on some things of late, but this is basic attorney-client stuff.  She’s on the mark.

The debate over non-discrimination laws was part of a larger debate during the conference between two strands of the transgender movement. Paisley Currah, associate professor of political science for the City University of New York- Brooklyn, said during the legal overview panel that one political stance within the movement is to push for state recognition of transgender identity and transgender inclusion in structures like non-discrimination laws; a more leftist stance is to advocate for an end to all state efforts to define gender and for a more equitable redistribution of resources rather than equality under the law.

Gee…

And who might be playing the leftist theory game?  Transsexuals (disproportionately MTF) who have a very real fear of ending up living under a bridge if they get fired - or never hired - for having identification documentation that has a sex marker discrepancy?

Or folks (disproportionately FTM or gender-queer) who are privileged to rest comfortably each night knowing that they collect a paycheck espousing theory-oids that may or may not be in the best interests of those they purport to speak for?

Then, up to the plate stepped Sharon McGowan.

The divide was particularly evident during an exchange between Spade and Sharon McGowan, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) LGBT Project, during the legal overview panel. An audience member asked panelists to compare the ways that governments define both gender and race, and Spade answered, “As a trans person I feel frustrated that the state uses gender categories to administer everything that I need, and I’m really aware of that, and that can allow me to build a critical analysis of how the state administers wellbeing, period, right? So that I can have an ally politics as well with all the other sets of people who are misclassified and who experience this maldistribution that is what the state is administering.”

This is less than one step removed from Janice Raymond / Norah Vincent transsexual exerminationist philosophy. 

But McGowan, who also sat on the panel, countered that some transgender people may not want to do away with gender categories. She said while some may argue that the push for legal recognition of transgender identity means being co-opted by mainstream society, for others that recognition is important.“I get so inspired when I hear Dean’s rhetoric, but the way in which I think it assumes that there is a vision that everybody would just be going towards if we just stopped being such pussies about the whole thing and just did it and gave up the man - and my question is, at some level, for trans folks who feel very strongly as though a female gender identity in a world in which female identity means something, are they just co-opted, or is there something there that is also something worth fighting for, and can the two exist at the same time? … There is for me a tension in figuring out what is co-optation versus what are sustainable parallel tracks, if such a thing can exist.”

Not to place myself in the radical HBS camp (although I share some of the HBS folks’  views, there are some aspects of their posture of late that do bother me - and other transsexuals who, by physiology and identity, would seem to qualify as HBS), but it is people like Spade who are co-opting. 

Unlike most HBS folks, I see no problem with transsexual and transgender co-existing.  My being a woman who happens to be of transsexual experience is not inherently incompatible with gender-queer/third-gender folks.  Unfortunately, I feel that my position may be solely the product of the fact that I am an incredibly cynical attorney who has never really bought into the kum-bah-ya shit of either HRC or the radical gender leftists. 

However, I believe that time will prove me right.

In the mean time, thank you Sharon, for at representing the voice of those who, increasingly, have no voice at gender conferences.

Now is the Time

I think that the Human Rights Campaign has done as much if not more on transgender issues than most other national [gay and lesbian] organizations. If you really look at the actual work.

  - Elizabeth Birch, 1999

You know, no matter what happens in this contest, I am honored. I am honored to be here with Barack Obama.  I am absolutely honored.

  - Hillary Clinton, 2008

As now is the time to close the door on the candidacy of she who was anointed by the so-called Human Rights Campaign, now also is the time to rid ourselves of that ‘organization’ itself - time to remove the biggest barnicle from the hull of the S.S. Equality.

And, no, I don’t just mean it is time for transsexuals and other trans people to do so.

I mean everyone who HRC claims it speaks for but, in reality, does not - like gays and lesbians who don’t live, work(?) and own/rent pricey properties in DC and NYC?  Like gays and lesbians who make less than six figure salaries?  Like gays and lesbians who might not identify as trans-anything but nevertheless know that they are looked down upon by straight-acting robot-wannabes for not aspiring to be a straight-acting robot?

Yes - now is the time.  Actually of course, as the first quote at the beginning of this post  indicates, it is long past time.  As I wrote in the Texas Triangle in 1999:

HRC depends on your money. So, which is more important? Your life? Or the ability of the rich transphobes of the HRC to avoid associating with transsexuals in any meaningful way?

But, then, Hillary Clinton was only running for the Senate. 

Fast forward almost a decade.

The Scampaign hopped into bed with Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign at the earliest possible juncture and glommed onto her with a sticky ferocity unseen since a certain pile of goo attached itself to John Hurd’s face in the first Alien movie.

The Scampaign put all of its marbles - and, if you can actually believe that it really advocates for you, your marbles as well - in Hillary Clinton’s basket.  And, as the story behind the second of the quotes at the beginning indicates, Hillary herself seems to be recognizing that the bottom has fallen out of that basket.

Theoretically, the Scampaign will, for the remainder of the 2007-08 Congress, retain whatever influence and credibility it has - and, because it and the Democratic Congress are on the outside of a (criminally syndicalistic) Republican administration, it will be able to continue to credibly bamboozle people with claims to much more credibility and influence than it actually has.

But no HRC-aliens (with their typical, oh-so-trustworthy highly-educated-on-trans-issues quality) will be hopping out of President Hillary Clinton’s stomach to influence public policy from within beginning on Jan. 20, 2009 - because there will be no President Hillary Clinton on Jan. 20, 2009.

Hillary?  You’re not hired.

For that, you should thank whatever deity or other life force you tend to thank for good things.

HRC?  You’re fired!

For that, we need to engage in the caliber of economic euthanasia that the true GLBT community has heretofore been unable to sustain.  I’m going to repeat the call to action that I sounded eight years ago, in the aftermath of the disgusting consumerism-addled spectacle known as the Millennium March on Washington.

Dan Savage [ ] queried, “[W] hen did George Michael become a hero in the struggle for gay rights? Until he got arrested with his pants down in a public toilet, George Michael was an insipid closet-case.”

Yet Barney Frank uses the penis panic to exclude us from ENDA.

MMOW: where being TG warranted subjugation but being a gay male arrested for dick-diddling in a men’s room warranted canonization. Excuse me while I vomit.

Savage also opined that, after MMOW, it should be clear that “HRC is in charge.” If so, then its time to change that - and MMOW should have shown us how.

Money. Stop sending them your money.

Until HRC agrees to support transgender inclusion in ENDA, stop giving your money to this politically corrupt cesspool of transphobia. If you’re not TG but also are not an affluent, white, straight-acting conservaqueer, then the battle is yours as well as mine.

We can take HRC down. And we must.

We now know that any substance behind an HRC agreement to do something legitimate for trans people is like Edmund Blackadder’s four headed, man-eating haddock fish beast of Aberdeen.

It doesn’t exist.

We need to ensure that, by the next time ENDA is seriously discussed, the same thing can be said of the Human Right Scampaign.  They drank Hillary Clinton’s corporate Dem-shlock purple kool aid; it is now up to us to make sure that not one bit of green institutional antidote comes HRC’s way.

Exception That Proves The Rule: When Barney’s Right About History

(Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend) 

From a posting on TransAdvovate entitled ‘Back to Oz’:

Yeh - that’s gratuitous, but, when it comes to the Oz wars, there’s no question: St. Barney threw the first ruby slipper.

In response to Matt Foreman’s shot at St. Barney on Signorile on Wednesday, St. Barney saieth:

In 2002, when he was the head of Empire State Pride Agenda, he lobbied hard to get through the New York legislature a bill that did exactly what our bill did last year, it covered discrimination based on sexual orientation, but excluded people that were transgender. Some people didn’t like that. Tom Duane said at the time that Matt Foreman excluded him from meetings on the subject. Matt Foreman not only helped get that bill through, frankly, and this I disagreed with, as part of the deal to get it though, that year the Empire State Pride Agenda endorsed the Republican George Pataki for reelection over an outstanding African American Democrat, Carl McCall. So you had Matt Foreman guiding to passage an ENDA bill that didn’t cover transgender….

And of course, on this compartmentalized historical moment-oid, St. Barney is right - not that this isn’t something that pro-inclusionists (including myself) haven’t brought up on numerous occasions.

Marti Abernathey remarks:

Since Foreman has said in the past that he regrets that choice and thinks it was a mistake, I’m not sure why Congressman Frank is bringing this up, except to smear him.

Its making me ill to say this, but I’m going to have to side with St. Barney on this.  Sure, it is a smear, but its a legitimate smear.  Its factuality makes Foreman a hypocrite (even if he truly has had a change of heart since 2002.)

Of course, St. Barney couldn’t leave it at a moment-oid of historical accuracy - the exception which proves the transphobic rule.  He had to add:

I don’t usually talk like this, but no one in the history of the United States Congress has advocated explicitly for including transgender poeople in legislation as much as I have.

With that, I must conclude the posting.  I’m now going to lock myself in my basement for a few hours.  I sense a laughing jag coming on so strong that, were I to be even remotely in public view when it commences, would cause me to trucked away to the happy farm (though I will tack on the follwing questions to ponder whilst I laugh: Didn’t Queen Elizabeth of Birch say essentially the same thing about the Human Right Scampaign almost a decade ago?  Hasn’t that been proven to be bullshit - over and over again?  Does even St. Barney believe what he’s saying?)

Quasi-Lame Crain

Yes. Lame Crain can’t stand the thought of HRC’s HRC becoming prez either - but its from a different point of view than mine, of course.  From a recent  blog entry about Queer Channel Media’s interview with HRC’s HRC:

Hillary said she would prefer the Employment Non-Discrimination Act be introduced in the Senate in an “inclusive form,” meaning with transgender protection, but she declined to comment on the divisive House debate over whether to support ENDA as a gay-only measure if the votes aren’t there for gender identity.

Shouldn’t the complaint be ‘Queer Channel Media apparently didn’t ask her if she was willing to assure trans people that she would use her presidential muscle to ensure passage of a trans-inclusive ENDA’?

Oh…

I forgot.

You don’t really want that, now do you?

Of course, neither does HRC’s HRC…which brings me to:

Clinton was at her weakest when Kevin [Naff] asked her to respond to the claim by Obama supporters that he talks about gay rights much more often before non-gay audiences. Rather than respond to the substance, she quipped that she found the claim “ironic since Senator Obama had his gospel tour with [Donnie] McClurkin that he and his supporters would take credit for that.”

The real irony is that the McClurkin episode was only one of many when Obama did what Clinton will not, reiterating even to his own base supporters that he disagrees with them on gay rights and will work to fight homophobia within their community. Hillary Clinton has never showed that sort of strength.

I do hate agreeing with The Lame One, but….

These Are The Stakes

From ’Fighting for the LGBT Community,’ on the website of HRC’s HRC:

Hillary’s Vision

As President, Hillary will replace the divisive leadership of the past six years. She will work with the LGBT community and allies in Congress to change laws. The LGBT community will always have an open door to a Clinton White House. She knows that working together, we can continue to work against hate and stand united for equality.

How much less specific can one get than ‘to change laws’?  You’d never guess that this is the candidate that is politically married to the Human Right Scampaign, would you?

Now lets look at some specifics:

􀂙 Pass ENDA – It is inconceivable to Hillary that people who work hard and do a good job every day can still be fired because of who they are or who they love. It’s unfair, it’s un-American, and she will put a stop to it once and for all.

􀂙 Pass federal hate crimes legislation – Hillary believes that hate crimes undermine the fundamental principle upon which our nation was founded, namely that all men and women are equal. She will strengthen law enforcement and prosecution against discriminatory acts of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals by signing the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law.

One of those is not like the other.

Do I need to elaborate?

Now…

From ‘Barack Obama on LGBT Rights‘:

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes

In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported.  Obama co-sponsored legislation to expand federal hate crimes law to include crimes perpetrated because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fight Workplace Discrimination and Promote Rights

Obama believes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Obama sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Technically, one of thos is not like the other - but, unlike the two bullet points from HRC’s HRC, substantively, Obama’s are equal.  Remember: the legislation he refers to has having sponsored had only a ’sexual orientation’ category, but it was trans-inclusive.

Game.

Set.

Match.

Barack.