Slap In The Face

While we are the parade season and floats in bad taste, at a Pride Parade in Portland Oregon we were put in the back of the bus again…

Where in the parade do you usually put the person who was awarded the “Spirit of the Pride” maybe up in front with the other honorees? What about at the very end of the parade with no sign or anything to identify the honoree?

Well that is what they did in the Portland parade.

In a series of tweets listed on Storify, Ms. Macy start out all happy and enthused at being one of the honorees but then slowly that enthusiasm to disgust about her treatment. Ms. Macy was the person who filed a discrimination case against her employer with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2012 that lead to the ruling that we are protected under Title VII’s sex discrimination.

Planet Transgender had this to say about her treatment,

As Pride marches forward every weekend, things, however, did not go that well in Portland’s PDX Pride, where the Grand Marshal of the Trans-March Pride Parade was a cisgender person while transgender activist and public figure Mia Marie Macy was relegated to the end of the parade with no signage, car or representation.
[…]
Planet Transgender reached out to Mia Macy about her experience at PDX and she had this to say, “From the moment my wife and I (they knew she was coming) arrived we were treated like an afterthought. From bringing a smart car with one seat, an option to ride in a car full of drag queens, taxi or walk I was humiliated. As a trans woman that has fought against the negative stigma of society, for our rights and educate others that trans is not drag, sitting in a car surrounded by drag performers is one of the most insulting request.”

She continued, “I had to resort to showing staff my phone with their website and my face on the homepage to try unsuccessfully convince them I was to be allowed to stand in shaded backstage area awaiting an award they asked me to come and receive. Multiple times throughout the day the president of Portland Pride had opportunities to make a difference and didn’t. After years of fighting for our equality, this was the first time someone recognized my efforts and it was supposed to be special. Instead, I was an afterthought, humiliated and embarrassed.”

Storify has Portland’s Pride response…

Pride Northwest chose to honor Mia Macy for her work in securing legal rights and protections for the Transgender community, nationwide. Her work deserves recognition and honor. And we, at Pride Northwest, failed her this weekend.
Since yesterday, a formal apology has been sent to Mia and we have actively begun addressing the circumstances and factors that led up to that failure. We have been reaching out, and will continue to reach out, to the Transgender community, particularly the Trans women's community, in order to set a course for ensuring that we-as an organization-consistently act in a way that honors, supports, and celebrates the community, and does not harm it.
The board and staff of Pride Northwest is fully committed to doing the work necessary (and more) to ensure that we are a Pride organization worthy of the entire LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming spectrum.
Thank you and if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please email president @ pridenw.org.
Debra Porta
President
Pride Northwest, Inc.
*Edited to correct the use of "Transwomen" to "Trans woman"...thank you for that call out and correction.

That thump, thumping noise that you hear are the tires from the "Gay Inc." bus as it runs over us.