Gay v. Trans

How many times have we seen our history buried in with Gay history? When people talk about Stonewall as the beginning of the “Gay Rights” somehow it seems that we become all lumped together in history and loose our individual identity. I came across an article in the Philadelphia Gay News…

Separating trans, gay and lesbian histories
by Cei Bell
June 28, 2012

Last week, PGN published an article about Locust Street between 12th and 13th being renamed Barbara Gittings Way [“‘Gittings Way’ in the works,” June 22-28]. Malcolm Lazin, who proposed the renaming, referred to Gittings as the mother of the LGBT movement.

Just because something (or someone) is lesbian and gay doesn’t make it LGBT.

In the ’60s, when Gittings was one of the organizers of the Annual Reminders protest at Independence Hall, the point of the men dressing in suits and the women wearing dresses and carrying pocketbooks was they did not want drag queens, effeminate males and butch dykes — the homosexual stereotypes — at the protest. The reason effeminate males, drag queens and butch dykes were the stereotype is because they were the only people who were out of the closet. Rock Hudson certainly wouldn’t turn from kissing Doris Day and say, “I really want to suck tonsils with Troy Donahue!” That may have been the official moment that the movement began intentionally excluding and harassing gender-variant people out of the movement.

On the other hand, the earlier successful May 1965 sit-in demonstration by drag queens at Dewey’s (a restaurant at 17th and Chancellor streets where Little Pete’s is located) allowed straight-appearing gay men such as Clark Polak from the Janus Society and lesbians to join them. Social class may be the reason why the Independence Hall demonstrations by Gittings and others are promoted as historic while the earlier sit-in demonstration by drag queens at Dewey’s to be served has been ignored.

Much of the work that Sylvia Rivera in starting the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) began the quest for social justice, but Sylvia was pushed aside because she was trans. In a television show on the PBS station WQED the interviewer asks a white gay male if there is an image that the “manly homosexual is at the top of the heap, he is the guy who can easily fit in to both worlds and therefore he is king homosexual?”  The person who was being interviewed said, “Yes, I would think so.” The interviewer then asks, “Then is the drag queen at the bottom?” and the person answers “Yes, more or less.” That view is still held by some even today. When we look at what happened in New York state with the push to pass the Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act. When the governor mentioned that he supported marriage equality, GENDA got pushed aside and the marriage took front and center.  The same thing happened on the federal level, the head of the Human Rights Campaign got up in front of around 800 trans-people at a conference and promised their support of the gender inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) only weeks later to pull their support for the bill in favor of a non-inclusive bill.

Even in death we get mislabeled, the article in the Philadelphia Gay News goes on to say,

In November 2009 in Puerto Rico, Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was murdered. It was initially reported as a gay murder. Malcolm Lazin chose to hold a memorial service for what he thought was a murdered gay man on Transgender Day of Remembrance. At the gay memorial service, he had several speakers and the Gay Men’s Chorus. It came out in the meantime that the gay male victim was in drag, making it a transgender murder. Someone might nitpick that being in drag doesn’t necessarily make him transgender, but the murderer wasn’t parsing definitions. Lazin used the opportunity to speak about Barbara Gittings and her Independence Mall Protest.

The organizer of this didn’t even have a clue about the Transgender Day of Remembrance and he claimed to be speaking for the LGBT community. He had no idea that we even had a day where we remembered those trans-people who were murdered that year let alone the actual day.

When we get lumped together people forget about us. In the past I have written about how when we were trying to pass a gender inclusive anti-discrimination law, the feedback that we heard was that we were already covered because the anti-discrimination law protects gays. When people use “Gay” to describe LGBT, the LBT population becomes lost in the lump. Take a look at what happened with the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t.  At the Pentagon they held a celebration for Pride Month and do you know what their next goal is for the military?

Pentagon celebrates gay pride month, but can it really make gays equal?
The repeal of 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' has exposed some inequalities – between spousal benefits for heterosexual troops and those for homosexual troops who are also in legal partnerships.
Christian Science Monitor
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
June 29, 2012

A year and a half after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” US military officials in a standing-room-only Pentagon auditorium celebrated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.

For Sue Fulton, a US Army veteran and 1980 graduate of West Point, it was a time to “really celebrate the professionalism of the force in handling the repeal so well” – at an event that would have until quite recently been unimaginable.
[…]
Yet though senior military officials have marveled at the ease of transition, they acknowledge that the repeal also “exposes certain inequalities” – as Johnson put it, between spousal benefits for heterosexual US troops and those for homosexual troops who are also in legal partnerships. “This troubles our leaders,” he told the audience at the Pentagon LGBT event.

For this reason, the Pentagon is studying which benefits could be extended to the legal partners of gay troops. Many benefits that spouses of heterosexual troops enjoy – such as new GI Bill benefits and access to base medical care – are prohibited for gay spouses under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Yup, we got lost. They are worrying over benefits for spouses of same-sex partners, never mind the fact that trans-people are still kicked out of the military. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell did absolutely nothing for the transgender military personnel, we still are seen as being “unfit” for military service. When we are all “Gay” people forget the individual needs of each subgroup. When one voice dominates the oppressed they become the oppressor.