From the comments over at AmericaTrog(lodyte), Val has a nice retort to someone who claimed that “according to the ‘John is a bully’ crowd, it’s all John’s fault that T-ENDA didn’t have the votes to begin with,” and defended The John by asserting, “Silly me, I thought he was just reporting on that fact….”
Oh, what rot. John’s “reporting” has been strictly partisan editorializing - which is his right, but don’t try to pain him as an objective commentator, being unfairly criticized.
Will he “report” on Cheryl Jacque’s interview, which contradicts his own arguments and those of most of his apologists? He will not.
And don’t forget that this did not start *after* United ENDA took what may have been a poorly framed stance. Right out of the gate, John accused the trans community of attaching themselves to the GL movement by way of coercion. Even though several of us have acknowledged that passing ENDA in any form constitutes right action, neither he nor any of you have budged an inch from that initial position, insisting that trans people are only marginally part of “your” community, and refusing to see that perhaps many of your own alleged compatriots saw right action in the alliance to begin with.
Rot, I say. From the neck up.
I will again respectfully disagree with Val about passing Barney’s ENDA being right. But, the rest of this is spot-on (or rot-on as the case may be.)
In fact, the ‘attachment-by-coercion’ fantasy is one of the reasons that I will continue to refer to the passage of Barney’s ENDA as evil. I do understand that there are some non-transphobic GLBs who honestly analyzed the situation and feel as though that, ultimately, that was the right thing to do (and not because of the ‘attachment-by-coercion’ fantasy or the other fantasies o’ convenience manufactured by the Aravosis-Crain-Carpenter-Rosen-Stachelberg wing of the gay wrongs industry.)
The evil I predominantly point to is a creeping terror - an evil with origins long before most of the people doing most of the blogging about this got involved in GLBT politics.
There is some legitimate room for legitimate discussion about the exact degree to which trans people were involved at the beginning of the gay rights movement - even some legitimate room for legitimate discussion about the exact degree to which specific persons (such as Sylvia Rivera) participated at Stonewall.
However, what is unquestionable is that, early on, conscious decisions were made to force trans people and trans issues out. Who one wants to point to as patient zero of this sickness (Jean O’Leary, Robin Morgan, Steve Endean, etc.) is actually immaterial. What came after was the consecration of Janice Raymond’s paranoid psychosis as legitimate policy, an infant gay rights industry that would have rather french-kissed James Watt than even think about trans issues, and wilfull excision of all community institutional memory of the degree to which trans (particularly transsexual) issues and law actually had been accepted by mainstream law and society in spite of the negativity we endured from gays and lesbians.
That’s the evil.
In 2007, that abject hatred of anything trans - hatred put into policy by GL advocates of a quarter-century ago - has led to the false reality that the Aravosises, the Crains, the Carpenters, the Rosens and the Stachelbergs use as the foundation for new-generation fraud such as the ‘political necessity’ of passing Barney’s ENDA - and passing political gas in the faces of those who most need employment anti-discrimination protections.
That evil is embodied in Barney’s ENDA.
That evil is inseperable from Barney’s ENDA.
That evil is why I will never accept Barney’s ENDA as having any legitimacy.
That evil is why Barney’s ENDA is not legitimate - and why it will never be legitimate.
Posted by translegalhistorian
Posted by kynn
Posted by translegalhistorian
