Trans News > Sexual Minorities
Issue of transgender
rights divides many gay activists
Boston Sunday Globe, April 23, 2000
Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107
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By Chryss Cada, Globe Correspondent
DENVER "You may have noticed that some
of our gay brothers and sisters are hesitant
to acknowledge us as part of the movement,"
Dana Rivers said to the banquet hall filled
with men (and former men) in evening gowns.
"It seems they think we're a little
weird."
The keynote speaker's comment started a ripple of laughter that
sent sequins sparkling and gold lam・flashing as it rolled
through the crowd of about 200. One particularly husky
laugh was enough to knock a wig loose.
"Well, I say to them, it is our weirdness, our differences,
our queerness that unites us," Rivers concluded.
The post-operative male-to-female transsexual (she prefers to be
called simply a woman) was speaking at Gold Rush 2000, a
gathering of transgender people from across the West.
Rivers spoke about becoming an activist after she was fired from
her job as a high school teacher in Sacramento when she underwent
a sex-change operation. She urged the audience to leave the
comfort of conferences like the one they were attending and to
join her in being visible in the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender) movement.
Putting the "T" in the GLBT is the aim of Rivers and
other representatives of the transgender community who say they
are often the forgotten or shunned segment of the gay-rights
movement. Now, they are seeking the same protection from
discrimination and visibility they've seen their gay counterparts
gain in recent years.
Rivers said it is important for the transgender community to
affirm its place in the gay community through involvement in
gay-visibility events such as next Sunday's Millennium March on
Washington for Equality.
"We have a place there," said Rivers who will speak at
the march and is on the event's board of directors.
"I'm not a token, I represent a significant segment of the
movement, and I'm proud to be there."
However, a sizable number of people in the gay-rights movement
said the movement's quest for political and social acceptance
would be jeopardized by being identified with cross-dressers,
transsexuals who have undergone sex-change operations, and others
on the outer edges of gender differences.
That discrimination, some say, is manifested within the movement
in such ways as when gay social and fund-raising events leave the
"Trannys" off the guest lists as well as when
transgendered individuals are heckled by gays. How the two
movements fit together is a hot topic within the gay community.
"I have a problem with the transgendered movement riding on
the coattails of the gay-rights movement when the two actually
have very little in common," said Lynn Raymond, a
politically active lesbian who lives in Colorado. "We
try to be politically correct and include everybody, and as a
result lose our focus as a movement. And, as much as I hate
to say it, there is a freak factor with transgendered individuals
that sets us back as a movement."
This attitude on the part of gays has some in the transgender
movement feeling unwelcomed.
The International Foundation for Gender Education, based in Waltham [MA], is one of the nation's
leading sources of information for the transgender
community. The group has 1,000 paid
members and 10,000 around the country and
the world who use its resources.
Although members of the group, including Rivers, will attend the
Millennium March, the foundation is not officially participating
because some of its members resent how the transgender community
has been treated by the gay-rights movement.
"It seems some think of the [gay] movement as a lifeboat,
that they can only bring so many people in before it sinks,"
said Alison Laing of the foundation. "There's some
resentment that if you're not a Log Cabin Republican [a gay
Republican group] in a navy suit, they're not fighting for
you."
March officials have extended an invitation to the transgender
community to compensate for such feelings of exclusion. The
march's board passed a resolution supporting inclusion of
"visible gender variance," which is a current term for
people who present themselves as the opposite sex, and appointed
an outreach coordinator for the transgender community.
"We [the gay community] have to do a better job of including
these issues," said Dianne Hardy-Garcia, co-executive
director of the march. "Our community is just becoming
aware of the needs of this segment. We've got a long way to
go."
Part of the challenge of understanding the transgender community
is the diversity of people who fit under the broad label.
"Transgendered includes a continuum of behaviors and
feeling," said Beth Firestein, a psychologist who holds a
monthly support group for transgender people in Northern
Colorado. "From a man who just enjoys the feel and
variety of women's clothes to a woman who feels she is truly a
man and undergoes sexual-reassignment surgery, they all fit under
the category of being transgendered."
To further complicate matters, groups within the movement aren't
always in agreement. According to the International
Foundation for Gender Education, the majority of male
cross-dressers identify themselves as straight. And some
heterosexual cross-dressers are homophobic.
"The transgender movement is not united,"
said David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's most powerful gay and lesbian
lobbying and advocacy group. "There's
education needed inside and outside the movement."
The Human Rights Campaign, whose slogan is "Working for
lesbian and gay equal rights," has yet to add the
"T."
"HRC is not unique in its evolution," he said.
"We were a gay organization in the early '70s, gay and
lesbian in the late '70s, and in the early '90s, we started
including bisexual issues. Just because the "B"
and the "T" aren't stated doesn't mean we aren't doing
very important work to end discrimination for all. We
are."
The disagreement between the transgender and the gay movement
came to a boiling point during a debate on the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that aims to prohibit employment
discrimination based on sexual orientation. The bill is in
a House subcommittee.
"The transgender community is angry there's not supporting
language in" the bill, Smith said. "But in this
political environment, it couldn't move forward with that
inclusive language. It still might not move forward at
all."
Riki Anne Wilchins, an advocate for gender rights, is angered by
such sentiments.
"This type of thinking separates and excludes," she
said in an interview from her New York office. "It's
not even a valid question to ask if this group should be
included, they are and always have been a part of the
movement."
Wilchins points out that it was drag queens who were involved in
the Stonewall riots 31 years ago in New York that began the
gay-rights movement. Saying the transgender movement "isn't
part of the gay movement is like saying water isn't part of the
Earth," she said.
Still, the gay community is split on the
question of whether transgendered people
should be part of the gay rights movement.
Forty-seven percent answered "yes"
to the question, the same percentage said
"no" and 6 percent of respondents
said they were undecided in an online poll
last May by the Advocate, a gay and lesbian newspaper.
Wilchins is executive director of GenderPAC, a group that hopes to transcend labels
such as gay, lesbian, and transgender.
"We say everyone deserves basic civil
rights regardless of the boxes people put
them in," Wilchins said.
The march's Hardy-Garcia said there is some resistance within the
gay movement to have sexual orientation considered merely a
subset of the greater issue of gender discrimination.
"Many in the gay community worked very hard to identify
ourselves as out and proud," she said. "There's
resistance to changing that identification now. But
whatever theory people subscribe to, the sentiment is the same:
We're all facing the same discrimination."
It's a discrimination that is a reality for transgender people
and their loved ones living far from the debate in Washington.
One such person is Elia Keller in Salt Lake City, who fears for
her husband, Scott, when he goes to the mall as Sandy. Or
"Katherine Palmer" (cross-dressers use different names
to refer to themselves when they are dressed as the opposite
gender), who leaves his home each morning to jog before daylight
in a tennis skirt and his hair in a bow.
He fears that if his neighbors see him in the feminine clothes he
prefers, they will have him evicted from his condo. Then
there are people such as Kathy Haley and Wendi Madsen in Boulder,
Colo., who worked to have transgender people protected by the
city's nondiscrimination policy.
"It's unfortunate, but in the end, we are defined by our
opposition," Rivers said of the entire gay-rights
movement. "They don't make distinctions and neither
can we afford to. As long as any of us are repressed, all
of us are."
Copyright 2000 The Boston Globe