LGBT is not just a fancy new term for ‘the gays.’

I’ve been noticing a pattern these days.  It seems like a lot of folks have gotten the memo that the politically correct thing to do these days is to include lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people when talking about gay rights.  However, in many cases this seems to be a tokenistic attempt at best.

My local state representative came to talk to one of my organizations and he gave a speech ending in a call for rights for “everyone regardless of whether they are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.” 
A member of the audience called our “or transgender.”
But he couldn’t hear all the way across the room and said, “or… what?”
“transgender”
“what?”
“transgender.”
“Oh, yes, or if your heterosexual too.”
“No, transgender.”
“Oh, transgender.”

After that embarrassing exchange, the next time I heard him speak he didn’t forget to include the T in LGBT.  But I seriously doubt how much his agenda has expanded to include trans people.  While he’s gotten rather good at saying LGBT, I’ve never heard him talk about trans issues or trans people specifically.

I might expect something like this from a random straight cisgender democrat.  However, I most certainly did not expect it from the opening plenary of Creating Change, the largest annual conference of LGBTQ activists.  I must say that the other plenary sessions discussed trans issues in detail (including Matt Foreman’s State of the Movement Address, which went to great lengths to show the need for gender identity in ENDA), however, the opening plenary fell into the same trap as my local representative. 

The word transgender was mentioned maybe four or five times the entire evening, and only as the end of the string “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.”  From the content of the speeches, I wondered if the speakers knew that trans people are anything other than one of those confusing new sexual orientations the kids keep coming up with like pansexual, omnisexual, or heteroflexible.

Now I wouldn’t be complaining so much about a simple use of language if it didn’t make so much of a difference.  A few times the speakers discussed “gay and lesbian” rights and I found myself wondering, “Didn’t we go through this in the 90’s, bisexuals are a part of the movement too.”  Yet forgetting about bisexuals and forgetting about trans people have entirely different policy implications.

If someone forgets (or maybe purposefully leaves out) bisexuals, it’s pretty unlikely that any resulting policy regarding sexual orientation would leave bi people out.  I doubt we’ll be seeing a bisexual-exclusive ENDA anytime soon.  But we’ve seen from experience that some folks are all too happy to leave gender identity behind when the opportunity comes up.

If people aren’t talking about gender identity and trans people, and I mean more than mentioning those words without displaying any understanding of what they mean, then we’re in trouble.  Including the ‘T’ must be more than remembering that we’re a part of the coalition, it must be remembered that we have distinct needs and issues that must be addressed.

Forgetting to discuss those distinct needs and issues not only corrupts our attempts at policy reform, but also degrades the accessibility and usefulness of our community resources.  Four or five years ago was the first time I was trying to help a trans friend getting out of an abusive relationship.  While searching for any information on the topic I had to wade through a sea of resources for “LGBT” people in abusive relationships.  Webpage after webpage, pamphlet after pamphlet, there was never ANY information usefully to trans people.  They just took their same-sex abuse pamphlet and stamped the word transgender on top of it.

There are some resources specifically on abuse for trans people, but it’s buried in the thousands of so-called LGBT resources which are in reality only addressing same-sex abuse.  That makes it incredibly difficult to find that needed information.  And giving one of those “LGBT” pamphlets to a trans person experiencing abuse is going to be about as useful as giving a pamphlet designed for straight women to a gay man.

We need to shift this thinking.  The same way activists demanded that the ‘B’ and the ‘T’ become a part of our organizations names and language, we must demand that both are more than just letters.  Representing trans people in word means nothing if we are not represented in action.

What World is The Advocate living in?

When was in high school I loved reading my parent’s copy of the advocate. When I first started working as a queer activist on campus, it was great to see issues of The Advocate hanging around the queer offices. That’s why I’m so dissapointed with the direction it’s been going. While there are still some great stories in it, the focus seems to be slipping.

The January, Year in Review, issue of The Advocate named the biggest queer event of 2007. No, it wasn’t the non-discrimination and relationship recognition rights that passed in several states. It wasn’t the tens of thousands of activists who rushed to defend a trans-inclusive ENDA. It wasn’t even the half dozen right-wing conservatives caught having gay sex. The biggest queer event of 2007 was Lance Bass.

Lance who? Well, you might better know him as ‘that guy from ‘N Sync.’ I didn’t actually know his name until after he was outed. And I had forgotten it by the time the Advocate ran this article on him. But that isn’t even the worst of it. The article wasn’t so much about the great impact that Lance Bass has had on the queer community, but complaining about all the whining queers who think there’s something more important going on.

Despite the article’s premise, I hold no scorn for Lance Bass, only indifference. My scorn is for The Advocate’s choice to relegate all the more significant events of the year to lesser stories or off their pages entirely. And as if this article wasn’t enough to convince us that The Advocate has given up fighting homophobia and strives only to be a queer version of People, they also ran a listing of “The Sissy Awards.”

After seeing the title I was excitedly wondering if my favorite radical political drag troop, the Sissy Boys, were included. Unfortunately they were not recognizing and appreciating the contributions of femme members of our community, nor were they addressing the intense sissy-phobia that many have to deal with. Instead, they were legitimizing this slur by uncritically slinging it against political opponents. Who were the top sissies of the year? Larry Craig, Dick Cheney, and Pope Benedict XVI. Yes, because the best way to remove homophobia and gender oppression from our society is by claiming that homophobes aren’t manly enough throwing homophobic slurs at them.

Perhaps the editors of The Advocate might be straight-acting enough to not have to worry about being called sissies too often, but what about the real sissies in all this? Those who will never be able to, or want to, claim that Dick Cheney is more of a sissy then they are. By empowering the term as something negative that you don’t want to be called, The Advocate is only giving more power to those who would like to attack our community.

Since they’re unquestioningly using anti-gay epithets against our political opponents, I can’t wait to see them do an article on how the war is “so gay” or how the democrats unwillingness to fight for our rights makes them “pansy-assed faggots.” They might even fall back on the “Anne Coulter’s a tranny” line.

I don’t know who The Advocate is advocating for anymore, but it doesn’t seem to be anyone I know.