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T’d off about ENDA
The historic passage earlier this
month of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the U.S. House has
exposed deep divisions among the activists who lead the movement for gay
rights and the people they claim to represent.
When gay Congressman Barney Frank
(D-Mass.) decided to drop transgender protections from ENDA because
including them would kill the entire bill, Matt Foreman and the National
Gay & Lesbian Task Force mobilized some 300 GLBT groups into a
coalition called “United ENDA.” These groups demanded that “gender
identity” either be added back into ENDA or the bill be scrapped
altogether.
By the time the dust settled last
week, any claim to a “united” community view about ENDA was downright
Orwellian. Barney’s gay-only ENDA passed the House overwhelmingly, with
only seven members voting against it based on the transgender issue.
The trans activists’ chief House
ally, lesbian Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), withdrew an amendment that
would add trans protections and voted herself for the gay-only bill.
Afterward, she called House passage of the compromise ENDA a “historic
moment.” Other top gay allies, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
and civil rights lion John Lewis (D-Ga.) praised passage in similar terms.
The Human Rights Campaign, the
NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights all endorsed passage
of the compromise bill, as did The New York Times, the Washington Post and
the Washington Blade. An HRC poll showed that some 70 percent of GLBT
Americans supported ENDA even without transgender protections.
Unfortunately, Foreman and the Task
Force appear undaunted in pursuing the “United ENDA” strategy that
demands workplace protection for GLB Americans wait until Congress, the
president and the country are also ready to protect transsexuals,
cross-dressers and other transgender people as well. Acting on a
combination of principle and a desire to compete with HRC on the national
stage, the Task Force is nonetheless disregarding the damage their
strategy is doing to their own cause.
In addition to isolating many GLBT
activists from their allies in Congress and the media, and from their own
GLBT constituents, the “trans or bust” ENDA strategy has opened deep
fault lines within “the GLBT community” itself. Respected gay
commentators, including Andrew Sullivan, John Aravosis and Rex Wockner,
have voiced long-held objections to the marrying of sexual orientation and
gender identity as conjoined issues and even to the idea that there is
such a thing as an “GLBT community.”
I’ve been asking similar
questions for years, ever since trans activists pressured GLB
organizations to add transgender to their mission statements. The idea
itself wasn’t objectionable, but it was deeply troubling to see trans
activists argue it was somehow “exclusionary” for gay people to have
any organizations focused solely on sexual orientation issues. Trans folks
have their own groups, so why shouldn’t we?
I also worried, unfortunately
prophetically, that including “T” in mission statements would become a
distraction for resource-strapped gay groups, as if our own battles
weren’t consuming enough. Even a group as important to our cause as
Lambda Legal has fallen victim to mission creep, feeling obliged to argue
that GLBs shouldn’t receive any legislative protection until the
political will is there for Ts to receive the same.
This “trans or bust”
legislative strategy may have been the crowning achievement for trans
activists successfully leveraging the gay rights movement, but now it has
blown up in their faces. The only adjustment in their rhetoric has been
the curious claim that ENDA, having just passed the House for the first
time, is somehow “dead” until 2009.
To the contrary, Sen. Edward
Kennedy has promised to introduce ENDA in the Senate, where it came just
one vote short of passing more than a decade ago. The White House did
issue a veto threat, though from the president’s advisers, not from him.
After the House amended ENDA to broaden the religious exemption and
reassure gay marriage foes, the president’s peeps have said they will
reevaluate the bill to decide their position.
It’s transparent how Foreman and
trans activists are calling ENDA “dead” based on a veto threat when
they never say the same about the trans-inclusive Matthew Shepard Hate
Crimes Act, which the president has also said he’ll veto. Senator
Kennedy protected the hate crime bill from a veto by attaching it to
Defense Department funding. The same could be done for ENDA, of course.
Having failed to persuade even our
closest allies in Congress, the civil rights community and the mainstream
media, or even their own constituents, you would think that trans
activists and the Task Force would ratchet back their rhetoric, and stop
pressing ENDA as an all or nothing proposition. At this point, they
proceed mostly at their own peril.
Chris Crain is former editor of the Washington Blade, Southern
Voice, and gay publications in three other cities. He can be reached via
his blog at www.citizencrain.com.
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