Hypospadias: Hypospadias is a congenital defect of the penis in which the urinary tract opening, or urethral meatus, is abnormally located away from the tip of the penis.
I'm just wondering if anyone in Congress, or the community, outside of the "groups" and the activists-who-speak-for-everyone, realizes that ENDA (the gay employment discrimination bill) supposedly covers this condition as well (it sounds like a horrible condition, don't get me wrong, but I'm just a bit surprised to find out that this child is covered under ENDA, a gay rights bill).
Here's a letter from a parent, recently posted on Salon.com in response to the ENDA debate:
as the father of a "severely" hypospadic boy (his pediatrician's characterization, not mine) on of the first things i was told was (1) his penis is going to me really small (2) he was probably going to be gay (3) he had to have surgery starting right away. A few years of frustrating research and half completed surgeries later i'm still confused and i want so much to be able to give my son the firmest foundation possible as he heads into high school and has to deal with the locker room (a decade yet away, but still).
A reply to the letter, posted in Salon's comments:
yes in all the kerfuffle [over ENDA], neither "side" (and how bad is it when there are "sides") - has mentioned the Intersexed.
My son is mildly Intersexed, not severe but moderate hypospadias. Really bad chordee too, so genital reconstruction was needed before his gender became apparent, to avoid pain. We hope we guessed right. We opted for the minimum needed, to allow him to decide on further surgery later.
A T-inclusive ENDA would prevent your child from being fired, or prevented from using either restroom at work because of his non-conforming genitalia. ADA doesn't cover everything.
Your child is no more likely to be Gay than any other kid, and only 10% of IS people have significant issues with gender. (2 separate issues there, one sexual orientation, the other gender).
Chordee: Chordee is a condition in which the penis curves downward (that is, in a ventral direction). The curvature is usually most obvious during erection, but resistance to straightening is often apparent in the flaccid state as well. In many cases but not all, chordee is associated with hypospadias.
How many members of Congress know that this is what they're supposedly voting for in a trans-inclusive ENDA? If the "GLBT community" now covers boys who are born with a messed up urethra and a penis that bends the wrong way, then I guess I really am behind the times.
Gay legal advocacy group Lambda Legal (basically the gay ACLU) wrote a letter recently to US Representative Barney Frank (D-MA). The letter argues to Frank that we must have "gender identity" in the ENDA non-discrimination law. Why? Because, according to Lambda, if the law only covered discrimination based on sexual orientation, and didn't also cover gender identity, then employers could claim that they love their gay and lesbian employees, they simply object to having employees who are too fey or too butch, regardless of their orientation - i.e., they object to their employee's gender identity (fey-ness or butch-ness) not their sexual orientation. So those employees could still legally be fired, even under ENDA - or so the argument goes.
And Lambda says this isn't just a hypothetical loophole. No, we've actually had numerous cases where courts have used this loophole to let anti-gay bosses off the hook. Wow, I thought. That's pretty bad. Maybe the gay-only ENDA is a bad idea. So I did a little more digging. You're not going to be pleased with what I found.
Here is an excerpt from Lambda's letter to Barney:
You stated that you were not aware of any instances where state laws that prohibit only sexual orientation discrimination and not gender identity discrimination have proven inadequate. Unfortunately, such cases exist. For example, just two years ago, a federal court of appeal ruled that a lesbian who claimed that she was discriminated against because she did not conform to stereotypical expectations of femininity did not to have a viable claim under New York state's Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which fails to include an express prohibition on discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
Wow, so there are numerous cases (note Lambda's use of the plural) proving that when you don't have gender identity included in the sexual orientation law, gay people can then be legally fired for being too fey or too butch because the state law is just too weak to protect us. Again, wow.
So, having borrowed $60,000 to get a law degree at Georgetown, I figured I'd make my parents happy and actually put that legal education to work. I got a copy of the case and read it for myself. The case is Dawson v. Bumble & Bumble, 398 F.3d 211. The salient parts of the decision are on the last two pages. Let me walk you through the case.
A butch lesbian works in a NY hair salon. She claims that while employed at the hair salon, several of her coworkers made disaparaging remarks about her not conforming to gender norms for a women, e.g., she claims that they said that she had a "dyke" attitude and they didn't like it. She was subsequently fired, so she sued under NY and federal non-discrimination laws. Only the NY law is relevant to our discussion here since it, alone, covers sexual orientation (but it does not include gender identity).
Here is what the court found.
1. There was a disagreement among witnesses as to whether or not the disparaging comments were made at all.
2. Even if the court accepted that the disparaging comments were made, the lesbian employee could not prove that the coworkers who made the disparaging comments played any role whatsoever in her firing.
3. The court therefore sided with the defendants (i.e., against the lesbian employee), ruling that the plaintiff/employee had no facts to prove her case.
The court did not find, as Lambda Legal implies, that NY's sexual orientation law is inadequate because it permits employers to fire someone for their dyke attitude. The court did NOT find that the NY law is too weak and has a massive loophole because it does not include "gender identity." The court simply found that the defendant couldn't prove her case, she had no facts to back her up. (I will add, however, that Lambda Legal just did a great service to the homophobes by claiming that under NY law you CAN legally fire a lesbian for having a dyke attitude - way to go, guys.)
I'm going to include the entire two pages of the opinion dealing with this, below, so you can read it for yourself.
This is the only case - the only case - that the "include trans in ENDA or die" crowd have to "prove" that you can be fired for being too fey or too butch under sexual orientation laws that don't include gender identity (i.e, under the gay-only ENDA that Barney Frank is proposing). They don't have "cases," as Lambda claims, they have a single case. And the single case they claim has nothing to do with what they claim it does. The case is not an example of a butch lesbian not being protected under the law without gender identity. The case is an example of a court throwing you out because you don't have any evidence to prove your case. It doesn't matter what the law says, it doesn't matter what categories of personhood the law covers, if you don't have any facts to back you up. You'll lose every time.
This is incredibly dishonest of Lambda Legal. I have a hard time believing that they're such sloppy lawyers that they misread this case. But if they're bad lawyers, they sure are great PR spinmeisters. Labmda has done a bang-up job of convincing people that this case, these caseS, are real, judging by the comments from our readers and judging by the repeated mention of this supposed-loophole in posts on other blogs.
Lambda should stick to the law and leave the disingenuous PR spin to others in their coalition. Here are the two pages from the case covering NY law on sexual orientation. Read it for yourself, you don't need to be a lawyer, it's that clear.
UPDATE: Oh, it gets worse. I just re-read the footnote at the bottom of the first page, below. The footnote makes clear that nasty comments about the lesbian employee could have possibly proven sexual orientation discrimination, but that the actual comments in question were too "ambiguous." If the court wanted to rule that nasty comments weren't covered by the state ENDA, it would have said the comments were irrelevant regardless of whether they were ambiguous or not. Instead, the court ruled that the comments were too ambiguous - meaning, less ambiguous comments might have been sufficient to prove a case of sexual orientation discrimination. That is the exact opposite of what Lambda alleges the court decided.
Salon asked me to write an article about the ENDA controversy. I went up last night, you can read it here (and all you have to do is look at some ad and you can read the article for free). Just as interesting as the article is the comments section after. Other than few people who are categorically insane, it's a really interesting discussion. You can check out the letters/comments here.
An excerpt:
Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that's why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are "activists," that gays "recruit" children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn't like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we're right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we're right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth. When it comes time to pass legislation, too many liberals just expect good and virtuous bills to become law by magic, without the years of legwork necessary to secure a majority of the votes in Congress and the majority support of the people. We expect our congressional allies to fall on their swords for us when we've failed to create a culture in which it's safe for politicians to support our agenda and do the right thing. ENDA, introduced for the first time 30 years ago, is an exception to that rule. It took 30 years to get to the point where the Congress and the public are in favor of legislation banning job discrimination against gays. It's only been five months since transgendered people were included in ENDA for the first time....
Passage of ENDA, of any federal gay civil rights legislation, would be a huge victory for the gay community. Not just legally, but culturally. Hell, we could pass the legislative equivalent of "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds," the famous avant-garde musical composition that contains no notes and is nothing but silence, and it would still mark the beginning of the end of our long struggle for equality. I'm not joking. We could pass a bill titled "Gay Civil Rights Law" that contained no language whatsoever. The fact that the United States Congress finally passed legislation affirming gay and lesbian Americans as a legitimate civil rights community, as a protected class of American citizens rather than a group of mentally disturbed pedophiles, would empower our community, demoralize our opposition, and forever place us among the ranks of the great civil rights communities of the past and present.
That's why James Dobson, Tony Perkins and the men at the Concerned Women for America are so hell-bent on defeating ENDA. To the religious right, ENDA without gender identity isn't a weak, meaningless bill fraught with loopholes. Our enemies know that passage of any federal gay civil rights legislation is a legislative and cultural milestone that would make it that much easier for all of us -- gays and lesbians, bisexuals and eventually even the transgendered -- to realize all of our civil rights in our lifetime.
Mike Signorile is going to have Barney Frank on his show at 5:15pm Eastern today to talk about ENDA. Mike and Barney are on opposite sides of the current debate, so it should be an interesting back and forth no matter what side of the issue you're on. You can register online for free to listen to the show here. (Also, Mike is going to have Jon Davidson of Lambda Legal join him at 3:30 Eastern time. Mike and Lambda are on the same side of this debate, opposing proceeding with ENDA if trans isn't included.)
My take is: I support equality for transgender people. I think transgender people and anyone who cares about transgender equality should work to pass laws to protect transgender people and give them equal rights. I also think politics is politics. I think if Barney can get an LGB bill through Congress, he should do it, and we should let him. If Barney and whoever else can then get a T bill through Congress, they should do that, too. Nixing an LGB job-protection bill, which would directly affect in the neighborhood of 30 million Americans, because we can't simultaneously protect an unknown, vastly smaller number of T Americans doesn't seem reasonable. In a perfect world, of course we'd include the T folks. But we don't live in a perfect world. We're trying to make it more perfect. But that takes time, it takes process, and it means grabbing opportunities when they are available....
I'm also not convinced that homosexuality and transsexuality are the same thing, and I really don't think there is such a thing as "the LGBT community." Gay men and lesbians are the same thing (homosexuals) -- and bisexuals, when they're not exercising their heterosexual option, are then exercising their gay or lesbian option. Many transsexuals I've known have had surgery and then partnered with someone of the opposite sex, at which point they are, I'd imagine, heterosexual.
Robin Tyler is a LONG-time lesbian activist (I won't share her age, but let's just say that at the time of Stonewall, when I was busy watching Captain Kangaroo, Robin was well into her twenties). Robin was a co-founder of StopDrLaura.com, along with me, and she coordinated all of our grassroots events across the country, in 34 cities. She also has been a recent plaintfiff in a lawsuit to win marriage rights in California. The list goes on. For someone of Robin's stature to speak out on this issue is a rather big deal. Especially since, up until today, most people who have concerns about killing ENDA have been reluctant to speak out. No more.
Here is Robin's statement she emailed me this morning:
I support full transgender rights. However, when I have been invited to legal weddings of some of my transgender friends, not one of them has said "we will not get married until Diane and you and other same gender couples can get married". They did not sacrifice their legal rights on the alter of political correctness to give up the State and Federal benefits of marriage.
And yet, with regard to ENDA, the lesbian and gay community is expected to do so, leaving millions and millions of us in the majority of States, once again, unprotected.
A trans activist has asked me to publish their response to some of my posts on the ENDA issue. Here it is, in its entirety. I respond after.
Well, John, you make a number of things very clear.
You think the trans community was able to enter the LGB community not as a natural evolution of the community, as you pointed out happened with women and bi's, but through shame and fear. Fear? You're afraid of what, our political power? I don't think so. But maybe some folks in our community are afraid that trans people will highlight the gender nonconformity in the gay community and drag straight-acting gays into the sunlight.
Shame? Maybe, and if so, then for good reason. They should be ashamed of themselves. That they feel so privileged and so righteous is shameful.
I agree with you that there are "senior" gay journalists - among others - who don't get it. Barney Frank is apparently one such; Tammy Baldwin is not. Evidently the old school is not old enough to have read Susan Stryker's history of gay America to realize that it was the gay guys who were added to the trans community at the dawn of the "gay" rights revolution. We were at Dewey's Compton's and Stonewall. I celebrate the fact that gays and lesbians were depathologized in 1973; I mourn the ensuing turnabout, when newly "mainstreamed" gays and lesbians turned on the gender nonconformists, including gay drag queens, and piled on to psychiatry's pathologization of us. Jim Fouratt spewed his vile notion that trans women are nothing more than cowardly gay men who couldn't accept their homosexuality, and Janice Raymond and her 2nd wave radical lesbian feminists characterized us as the surgical construct of the patriarchy to be used as an avant garde to invade women's spaces.
You're right - there hadn't until this past week been an up swelling in the non-trans queer community to be trans-inclusive, just an evolution of adding one more letter to the alphabet soup - a change in nomenclature which has mirrored our own improved understanding of who we are and how we can identify to be as inclusive within our sub-community as possible. It saddens me that you ridicule that evolution.
Yet there had never been any kind of mass gay action in support of sexual minority rights until Stonewall, run by trans women, and then little thereafter until death started to sweep the gay community.
I have pointed out repeatedly that surveys, including those of HRC, show there is as much support for a trans-inclusive ENDA as a non-trans-inclusive one. Just because most Americans have never met one of us (or at least not outside of Oprah) doesn't mean Americans don't understand discrimination when they see it.
If Barney can't get the bill passed, then he should leave it to Tammy to get the job done. I can speak to the wavering Congresspersons in half an hour and give them enough of an understanding to respond effectively to any hate speech from the Republicans. Instead we show our cowardice again and run.
The bottom line is that when we're in the equation, the LGBT community can't hide from gender nonconformity and all the sub-issues that raises. You're right - let's deal with it. Generalized fear of transgender people can be overcome just as so many Americans have overcome their generalized fear of gay men. We can make this a better country together, and do so without sacrificing anyone.
Please feel free to post this response on your blog.
Dana Beyer, M.D.
HRC Board of Governors nominee
Dana,
Your argument boils down to the assertion that America really does accept transgendered people far more than I'm willing to realize and therefore we'd have no problem passing a trans-inclusive ENDA. Great. I'm game. Show me the votes. Show me that you have the votes to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA, that the bill won't go down in flames, that Democrats won't be forced en masse to vote in favor of some hideously anti-trans amendment lest they lose their jobs next election, and I'm there for you. You think this is some easy game, that we actually have the votes, but some of us simply don't like you and find you icky and that's why we're concerned. Fine, then I'll call your bluff. I adore you. Now prove to me that you have the votes to pass ENDA and that your strategy won't kill this legislation for the next two decades, and you have my support. You have two weeks, which should be ample time considering all of us are lying about there not being enough votes to pass ENDA with trans inclusion.
Editorial Susan Ryan-Vollmar Editor-in-Chief, Bay Windows
Rep. Barney Frank is right
If only we’d seen the passion, the blog posts and the last-minute organizing by LGBT organizations around a trans-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) last year. And the year before that. And the decade before that. Just yesterday, a coalition called United ENDA unveiled its website featuring talking points for a trans-inclusive ENDA; legal analysis showing that an ENDA bill that only protects lesbians, gay men and bisexuals will be too weak to actually protect lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (the bill’s failure to protect actual transmen and women is conspicuously absent from the analysis); and an impressively lengthy list of national and state LGBT organizations demanding an all-or-nothing approach to passing ENDA.
The outcry has been strong enough to convince House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who supports a trans-inclusive ENDA and U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, who has been lobbying House members on the trans-inclusive ENDA, to back off of their controversial plan to put forward two ENDA bills: one that is trans-inclusive and one that would make it illegal to fire an employee based solely on his or her sexual orientation.
In a lengthy statement outlining his rationale, Frank said that after House Leadership took an official count of the votes, it became clear that the trans-inclusive ENDA bill wouldn’t pass. Even worse, Frank wrote, a trans-inclusive ENDA would also be vulnerable to anti-trans amendments from Republicans: “[I]t became clear that an amendment offered by Republicans either to omit the transgender provision altogether or severely restrict it in very obnoxious ways would pass.”
LGBT organizations from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network are demanding that either a trans-inclusive ENDA be put forward or none at all.
This is madness.
The House is on the verge of passing groundbreaking workplace protections for millions of Americans. It’s the first piece of legislation Congress has seriously considered since the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed in 1993 that offers American workers protection from arbitrary firings. It’s not perfect. Few pieces of civil rights legislation are. But it would provide a concrete base upon which to expand ENDA protections not just to transmen and women but to also add provisions to the bill that would require employers to offer domestic partnership benefits to the partners of their LGBT employees if they offer such benefits to their heterosexual employees — a provision that is not in the current bill. As it happens, that’s exactly how Congress dealt with the FMLA. It was a nine-year fight of submitting bills, amending them and persevering through two vetoes of the bill by President George H.W. Bush. The bill that was eventually signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was much more comprehensive than the one first approved by Congress. This is not unusual; it’s how the legislative process works.
There is much concern that if a bill protecting employees solely on the basis of sexual orientation is passed then protections for transmen and women will be forgotten. It’s hard to take that concern seriously given the flurry of support that’s been forcefully expressed for trans rights now that we know a trans-inclusive ENDA simply will not pass in the House as its currently configured.
Claiming that Frank has betrayed the trans community, as some are now doing (Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels wrote this week that he was engaged in a strategy to “throw the transfolk overboard”) is breathtakingly ignorant of the facts.
The targeting of the Human Rights Campaign for its failure to align itself with the LGBT organizations that have promised to work to defeat a non-inclusive ENDA is equally ignorant of reality. Who can seriously expect the nation’s largest organization working to pass legislation on our behalf to refuse to work with Pelosi and Frank?
This petulant insistence on purity, principle and perfection is a hallmark not just of the LGBT community, but of American politics in general. Just look at James Dobson’s and the Christian right’s demands that the Republican Congress take up an overly broad Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when a much narrower provision that would have allowed for civil unions stood a much better chance of passage.
Not that I’m comparing progressive LGBT activists with the Christian right. After all, the Christian right is capable of delivering votes, huge sums of money to candidates and hundreds of thousands of phone calls to lawmakers when an issue is deemed important enough to warrant it. Progressive activists? Not so much.
WHY ADD GENDER IDENTITY TO ENDA WHEN YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE DROPPED ANYWAY?
Something has been bugging me. Why did Congress add gender identity to ENDA this year if they knew it didn't have the votes and they knew they were going to remove it anyway? I mean, they must have known that America isn't exactly as trans-friendly as it is gay-friendly (and calling America gay-friendly is already a stretch). And they must have known that they didn't yet have the votes in the House, and certainly the Senate, to pass a law that protects transexuals in the workplace. Yet, at the same time they added gender identity to ENDA for the first time ever, those same members of Congress knew that this year they were going to get ENDA passed, come hell or high water.
But none of this makes sense. If you're hell-bent on passing ENDA this year, then you don't add a provision to ENDA that you know is going to kill it. And if you were planning on eventually dropping transgendered people from the bill from the git-go, then why add them in the first place, when you know darn well that there's going to be hell to pay when you drop them? The entire thing doesn't make sense.
Or does it?
MY THEORY ON REVOLUTIONS
I have a theory about all of this. It's a theory about revolutions. I've always believed that you can't force a country to have a revolution, and then expect democracy to stick. Yes, you can launch a coup, topple a government, execute Saddam, but for a revolution to stick - for democracy to stick - a country's citizens need to be responsible for their OWN revolution. Otherwise they have no ownership - it wasn't their revolution, it was yours. (And actually, the Washington Post (I think) did a fascinating article about this a while back, about how statistically revolutions really don't stick when they're forced from the outside - anybody got the link?)
Anyway, that brings us back to transgender rights.
THE ORIGINS OF LGBT/GLBT
Once upon a time we were called "the gay community." Then some of the women in the community felt that the word "gay" really only applied to gay men - women were called "lesbian." So lesbian was added to gay (not clear by whom) and we became the "gay and lesbian" (or "lesbian and gay") community. Then a while after that, bisexuals were feeling left out. Someone then decided to add bisexual to the mix, so we became the "gay, lesbian and bisexual community" (or "lesbian, gay, bisexual"). And if you Google the phrase, you'll see that the phrase, while not used any more, was in popular use a while back, and if you put the lesbians in front, and call it "lgb community," you get 15,000 hits. While verbose, perhaps, none of these inclusions was terribly controversial as everyone in the community accepted that gays, lesbians and bisexuals were all "gay" (well, bisexuals were at least "part-time gays," as the religious right so affectionately calls them :-)
As little as 14 years ago, the phrase "lesbian and gay community" was used by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force back in 1993 (while NGLTF is now leading the charge for transgender inclusion in the "LGBT" community). And as little as two years ago, GLAAD (which has also been at the forefront of trans inclusion in the gay community) still used the phrase "LGB community" on their Web site to differentiate the gay community from the transgendered community ("By dismissing these issues as merely a by-product of comedy, the LGB community gives a free pass to the mockery of the trans community"). Then, sometime in the late 90s, groups like GLAAD and NGLTF started adding the T to the LGB, and I remember at the time scratching my head as to why. And I wasn't alone.
The moral of the story: Anyone who says that transgendered people have always been accepted as part of the gay community is simply wrong. A little over ten years ago, NGLTF, the group that was quite possibly at the forefront of pushing the inclusion of T in LGB (and who is leading the effort to include trans in ENDA) didn't even use the T themselves. So the question remains, if NGLTF has only accepted transgendered people as part of the community for a little over ten years, when did the rest of the gay community do the same, and has it yet?
I would argue that the gay community never collectively and overwhelmingly decided to include the T in LGB (or GLB). It happened because a few groups like NGLTF and GLAAD starting using it, and they and a handful of vocal activists and transgender leaders pretty much shamed everyone else into doing it. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the T shouldn't have been added. I'm just saying that I don't think the T was added because there was a groundswell of demand in the gay community that we add T to LGB. I think it happened through pressure, organizational fiat, shame, and osmosis.
And that is how we got into the mess we're in today.
WHEN REVOLUTIONS FAIL
I think that the transgender community was added to ENDA the same way the T got added on to the LGB. By force, and attrition, rather than by popular demand. I remember being at the beach with a bunch of gay friends about 6 or 7 years ago. There was an Advocate or OUT magazine on the table and it was open to some article about the transgender community. The details of the discussion now elude me, but I remember there being a lively debate about just how and when transexuals became part of the gay community, and vice versa - the consensus was that nobody knew how it happened, and nobody was quite sure that they agreed with the inclusion. Now zoom forward to today. We've heard a lot of anger from every single gay group on the planet, save HRC, that gender identity is being dropped from ENDA in order to save the bill. We've also heard from a number of vocal activists. But when I speak to friends and colleagues privately, senior members of the gay political/journalistic establishment, and just plain old gay friends around the country (and our own readers), the message I hear is far different from what I'm hearing from the groups. I'm clearly hearing three things. Well, four:
1. I feel empathy for transgendered people, and support their struggle for civil rights. 2. I want ENDA to pass this year even if we can't include transgendered people. 3. I don't understand when transgendered people became part of the gay community?
And then there's always #4: Please don't tell anyone I told you this.
What I'm hearing is a message far different from what you hear from NGLTF and some of the louder activist claiming to speak for the enlightened masses. I think that a lot of gay people never truly accepted the transgender revolution that was thrust upon them. They simply sat back and shut up about their questions and concerns and doubts out of a sense of shame that it was somehow impolite to even question what was happening, and fear that if they did ask questions they'd be marked as bigots. And now, that paper-thin transgender revolution is coming home to roost.
I have no insider information leading me to this conclusion, but, I think that gender identity was finally added to ENDA out of shame and fear. Neither the Congress nor the lead gay groups wanted to be seen as anti-trans, even though some of them clearly knew that adding trans was a death-blow to ENDA. So they did it anyway. Their calculus wasn't about including a vital, core member of the gay community (otherwise trans would never get dropped). And their calculus wasn't that we could win even with trans included (because in today's America, that's simply not true, and they know it). The calculus was one of fear and shame: I.e., If we don't add trans to the bill, we're going to get beaten up and labeled bigots. (Obviously other groups supported adding trans to ENDA because they accept the transgender revolution, but for the Congress and the lead groups, I don't think so.)
A STATE OF FEAR
People are simply afraid to ask any questions about this issue, and those unresolved conflicts are coming home to roost. I know I was afraid to write about this issue, and still am. I thought long and hard about even weighing in on this issue last week. Did I really want to have to deal with people screaming and calling me a bigot? And I've got gay journalist friends and gay political friends who have sent me private "atta boy"s supporting my public essays, while refusing to go public themselves.
There is a climate of fear and confusion and doubt about the transgender issue in the gay community. And no one wants to talk about it. And when you don't talk about your small concerns, when you're afraid to talk about them, when it's not considered PC for you to talk about them, one day those small concerns turn into big problems and the revolution comes tumbling down.
I'm sure it came as a surprise, even a shock to some, that the city official is transgender. But after 14 years of stellar service, this is what one person had to say about him:
Commissioner Mary Gray Black said Stanton's surprise announcement last week "caused stress, turmoil, distraction and work disruption" in the city. His contract says he can be fired without cause at any time.
"I do not feel he has the integrity, nor the trust, nor the respect, nor the confidence to continue as the city manager of the city of Largo," said Black, who introduced a resolution to fire Stanton on Monday.
The integrity? Well, if Largo, Florida wanted to sweep this one under the rug, they just created one hell of a scandal.
