Homer writes about a piece by John Aravosis on transgendered people vs. gays. Aravosis opposes gay groups’ efforts to get gender identity included in ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act), because (1) the bill is never going to pass if transgendered people are included, and (2) when did transgendered people become part of the “gay community” anyway?
Homer takes issue with Aravosis on this, as well as with Andrew Sullivan (who agrees with Aravosis), calling it the opinion of some “well-to-do white men. Enough said there.”
The thing is… I understand where Aravosis is coming from, for a couple of reasons.
One, being transgendered is not the same as being gay. The former is about gender identity, and the latter is about sexual attraction. They’re different. Lumping the two groups together just plays into the misconception that gay men really want to be women and gay women really want to be men. It brings to mind the uninformed straight guy who asks a gay couple, “I don’t get how your relationship works. Which one of you’s the woman?” Um, neither of us. We’re both men.
Granted, sexual identity is not totally separate from gender identity. There are the studies showing that gay people’s brains are more similar to the brains of straight people of the opposite gender, and many of us certainly have characteristics that are more stereotypical of the opposite sex (whether this is learned behavior or has a biological basis isn’t clear).
But some of us are comfortable with this and some aren’t. Among gay men, for example, there’a a whole range of behaviors. On one extreme, some embrace hyper-feminine stereoypes, either as a big fuck-you to society — for example, Chris Crocker; as a way to show gay pride; or for other reasons. On the other extreme, some embrace hyper-masculine stereotypes, searching themselves in fear of any trace of femininity — for example, “I’m lookin’ for other hot dudes.” And then there’s the majority of us who are somewhere in the middle. How you feel about including transgendered people as part of the “gay community” probably has a lot to do with how comfortable you are embracing opposite-gender stereotypes.
Furthermore, all groups that work for change have an inner divide. Do you try to accommodate and compromise, or do you brook no opposition? Do you try to change the majority’s attitudes, which takes longer, or do you accept that attitudes are hard to change and work for what you can get? There are advantages and disadvantages either way.
(I do get embarrassed when I hear people at rallies speaking in support of the “lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community,” or “the LGBTQ-identified community,” or whatever, because it sounds like a parody of early-’90s university English department political correctness. I’m not saying the concept is unworthy; I’m just saying it’s unfortunate how it comes across.)
So it’s complicated, as everything always is, and I think both sides have some points. I love ya, Homer — but I think it’s a bit simplistic to say that Aravosis’s opinion arises merely from his being a “well-to-do white man.”
You know those conservative Christian African-Americans who wince when gay rights are referred to as “civil rights”? That’s exactly where Aravosis and Sullivan are putting themselves in our community.
Each modern civil rights movement has helped birth another civil rights movement for an even more marginalized and powerless group.
Here we are thirty years after Stonewall and we are, for the first time, in a position to help a group that has even less power than us and what do men like Aravosis and Sullivan want to do? Let the Trans-folk get fired, harrassed and discriminated against, because trying to help them would make our movement take a little longer. Hell yes Aravosis and Sullivan are well-to-do white men, and they can’t conceive for a moment of being inconvenienced for the greater good.
We (some of us) include Trans people in our fight for equal rights because we know that they deserve equal rights as well. There is a moral imperative.
Putting that argument aside for a moment, I would also point out that many many Trans people (as in, every single F2M I know) identify as gay because they have a same-sex sexual preference. When they hook up with guys, it is gay sex, and when they hook up with women they approach it as lesbian sex.
I know that this seems contradictory and confusing, but that doesn’t really matter. They are part of a sexual minority that is being discriminated against.
ENDA (and our LGB-only community) can serve those who already have a certain level of safety and security, or it can help those who truly need it’s protection.
It has been my impression that “well-to-do white men” often have little understanding of what life is like for people not in that same situation. “Well-to-do white men” have always run this country and they want to set the rules. They want to maintain their perceived superiority over other groups. I should note that I grew up very poor, and have always empathized with the disadvantaged, even as I have moved into the middle class.
Aravosis meets these criteria, in my opinion. Reading through his post and subsequent comments on comments, you see that he doesn’t know any trans people, doesn’t understand why they should be included in civil rights legislation. He also expresses, in my opinion, that they aren’t worthy of joining with g/l/b people in our quest for civil rights- he resents their inclusion. In one example, he says that since they weren’t at Stonewall, they shouldn’t be included. Of course he wasn’t at Stonewall (neither was I) and doesn’t have a good grasp on who was there (transvestites!),
To me the issue boils down to guaranteeing basic civil rights for sexual minorities. I am not willing to tell trans people that they have to wait. I can well imagine the lawsuits that will be filed “Well, I didn’t know they were gay, I thought they were transgender, so I didn’t mean to discriminate, etc.”
It really doesn’t matter anyway, does it? George Bush will veto any ENDA legislation that reaches his desk to appease his born-again base.
Tin Man, I just posted on this very topic.
to recap: I don’t get the need to push out a community which needs to stand together if for nothing than our perceived common “enemies” and our perceived common goals, but I also see the need to fight tooth and nail for every advance, even if said advance leaves someone out. It’s unfortunate but the fight should be to get everything passed without stopping to let a member fall behind. It might not pass, it mght not pass for a long time but something might pass. Incremental equality can still lead us where we need to go.
I could never support, and would actively work against, any effort to legally or politically separate transgenders; Yes, they’re not necessarily homosexual in their shared psycho-biology, but they are our closest ideological kin. To abandon these people or, somehow, deny them the fruits of our so-far mutual battles is morally wrong — and says much of a legalism overly dependent upon logic, prone to ignoring the heart.
During my first gay-pride the first speaker on the Great Lawn was a drag-queen. She reminded the crowd that is wasn’t the straight-acting queers who started the Stonewall riot, but it was the transgender community. And she also reminded us that it was the transgenders who manned the now mythic barricades of Stonewall, while the rest of our community’s ilk ran in the face the massive police-offensive.
There is, to me, an almost unrecognizable strength in someone who overcomes immeasurable culture taboos in order to represent one’s true self, regardless of their happenstance biology. In that unique struggle (to be true *and* publicly express one’s honest character) we are true kin to transgenders.
That weathered strength, and that particular brand of personal struggle, is easily recognizable in transgenders, much as it in fellow gays, Maybe it’s gaydar, but it should say something to us and strongly influence of the nature of our everyday political priorities.
rob@egoz.org
I think the transgender community should be included in the larger gay rights movement because the discrimination they suffer largely comes from the same place. Social conservatives believe that there are “men” and there are “women” and that “1 man” and “1 woman” should get married and that’s it. The reason that variations on that basic theme are considered sinful or immoral is because they depart from the basic “And God created them, male and female” understanding that they take from the Bible. And, in the typically theocratic views of the people in America who still hold on to these simplistic ideas, they aim to legislate those beliefs to disadvantage anyone who doesn’t fit into Category M or Category F.
Many of the legal issues that transgender people face are the same as the gay community. If you have a transgender person, they can’t get married if the gender on their birth certificate matches the gender of their partner. With transfolks, you have added layers of complexity: at my alma mater, one professor returned after a summer break having transitioned to a woman. She was still married to her wife, and they had made the decision to stay together. So, are they lesbians now? And what is the legal status of their marriage?
Whatever the sexual orientation of a transperson is, there’s some degree of queerness going on. One of my very best friends is trans; he likes women, so I figured that made him heterosexual. He said no. He doesn’t identify as a “lesbian,” obviously, because he doesn’t identify as a woman. He’s just “queer.”
I think the notion that we should drop the transfolks from inclusive civil rights legislation in order to get it passed is a simply abhorrent notion. Isn’t that what the Democrats have been doing to the gay community for the last 30 years in order to get elected? And how do we feel about it? Are we victims of discrimination now willing to tolerate discrimination against a subset of our community simply for political convenience?
What’s the basic common denominator? That no one should be persecuted or attacked or discriminated against for who they are — be it their gender identity or their sexual orientation. Our goal should be equality where each person is judged “not be the color of their skin [or their sexual orientation or their gender identity] but by the content of their character.”
But how to achieve that? It’s the pragmatics that are the problem. I do not think that equality can be won wholesale through the present democratic system. We have to pick our battles carefully because we’re not going to get everything we want handed to us at once. Bourgeois America isn’t ready to accept trans people — they can’t even comprehend it. But they’re learning. Look at home much progress gays and lesbians have made. We were in the same position once that trans people are now, but it has taken time and a great deal of effort to get there.
But we’re succeeding in pushing the boundaries of mainstream society ever outward to include more and more formerly-disenfranchised groups.
Politics is a nasty, evil business. It’s not a place for morality and idealism. One succeeds in politics by doing what works, not necessarily what is right — the best one can hope for is to try to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. If a piece of legislation stands to pass and benefit a large number of people excluding trans people but will fail if trans people are included, then I think the exclusive law should be passed first. Every incremental growth in freedom eventually benefits the whole of society. It’s not fair to the trans community, but it would be easier later to push for an amendment to an existing law to cover them.
An example is the issue of slavery in the Declaration of Independence. The southern colonies would not accept it and the sacrifice had to be made to leave the issue of slavery on the table for later so the more immediate goal of independence could be secured. It wasn’t right and it only let severe problems continue to fester to explode later, but it had to be done.
Now, if we were willing to all admit that democracy is a sham and that the system is irreparably weighted in favor of the ruling elite and that the system cannot be fixed but only overthrown, then we’d have more options! :-)
I sit here staring at my computer screen in absolute disbelief. I read all sorts about how transgendered people were at Stonewall. Now we owe them inclusion with ENDA.
I for one, support equal rights for everyone. BUT I am a realist. It is not going to happen when we try to ram it down the throats of average Americans. A small step FORWARD is still a small step FORWARD. Not going anywhere keeps you at status quo.
Now, for the main reason for my disbelief. I was at STONEWALL. I was one involved in the battles there. I was a DRAG QUEEN. I was not a transgendered person. I was an ENTERTAINER! I, along with many of my drag friends had no want to become real women. We loved to entertain, and we did that as drag performers. We sought our regular 15 minutes of fame every weekend at some bar. We had NO desires to be a real woman. Since when, do you DARE speak for us? Your little asses were not even born yet when we fought for GAY rights. Yes, G-A-Y rights, not LGBT, just GAY. We were sick of being arrested, harassed and prevented from living our lifestyle. We wanted the rights to live the way we wanted to. I have lost many of my fellow drag queens to AIDS in the 80’s. I am sure a great many of them are rolling in their graves to think that what they did to start the Gay Rights Movement has come to this. I am appalled at people who were not even born rewriting history to fit their point of view. Well, babies, stop opening your mouths and spewing out YOUR version of history. As long as I am alive, that history will stay correct.
I worked long and hard over the years for the advancement of gay rights. I do not expect MY work to be trivialized because some of you now want to include everyone on our bandwagon. Get a life. That is not the way it started. Yes, I think everyone should have equal protection and rights under the law. But don’t I deserve the chance to grab some of what I worked for? If a bill will not pass including LGBT, then I say take WHAT will pass and get off your lazy asses and WORK for the rest!
Most gay men have NO idea what I went through in the 50/60’s before we fought back. You have enjoyed the fruits of my efforts. Now I expect you to realize that any movement FORWARD is better than nothing. Stonewall did not CURE the ills of America, it just started the ball rolling.
Right on Miss Kitty! You make the excellent point that DRAG QUEENS are NOT transgendered. And transgendered does not translate to gay. Nobody should get discriminated against, but this issue is about gay discrimination; so what’s the point of including the whole boat? i.e.: The ERA amendment went down, so should we also include women?
Bashing someone for being a middle class white man, and basing that bashing on a ridiculously simplistic stereotype, is racism, classism, and sexism.
And Miss Kitty is right.
Hey Ted, if you are implying that I’m racist and sexist, well that’s just fucked up.
Classist? I’ll admit to that. Growing up in a poor household and seeing the reactions of affluent people towards poor folks, tends to make one suspicious of the accumulation of large amounts of wealth and political power.
This debate is eerily similar to one that occurred within the women’s suffrage movement. The movement eventually split in the mid 19th century over disagreement whether to combine the efforts of the reconstruction and women’s suffrage. As we all know, both African American men and, eventually, women gained the right to vote, but my personal belief is that the feminist movement (and as a result civil rights in general) has spend a good part of the last century trying to heal the rift that occurred because of this split. I think we would be wise to learn from history on this one. To the dominant heterosexist society, we are all queers whether lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. I for one do not want to conform to this societies oppressive standards of gender in order to gain access to their equally restrictive institutions (i.e. Marriage). We need to stick to our main values.
I also posted this on Homer’s blog, and I’m putting it here, too, because this where my offending comment was posted:
I didn’t call you a racist, a sexist, or a classist. I said bashing someone simply because they are a rich white man is racist, sexist, and classist. And it is. You’re confusing–or conflating, I’m not sure–an appellation with an adjective. I don’t think you’re a racist (or a sexist or, really, a classist), but I do think that you stereotype people unfairly. You wrote that the Andrew Sullivan and John Aravosis have their opinions simply because they are a “Couple of well-to-do white men. Enough said there.” Imagine how you would have reacted if Andrew Sullivan had claimed that someone’s opinion could be explained by saying, “She’s just a poor black lady. ‘Nuff said.” I was pointing out a double standard. Which is something you like to point out in others.
Obviously, rich white men run the world, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not bashing them for simply being rich white men is right or wrong.
Pingback: The Tin Man » Aravosis Cont’d.
What need is there to assail Aravosis for being an upper-class white gay man when his raging transphobia is so explicit:
“It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I’m not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause.”
Aravosis might have had a legitimate case had he stuck to justifying the Congressional Democrats’ legislative strategy for passing ENDA. Instead, he used ENDA as an excuse to launch a misguided and divisive broadside against LGBT solidarity. In the process, he exposed his own transphobic ignorance, insulting trans people with tabloid stereotypes straight out of right-wing talk radio.
When I confronted Aravosis on his blatant disrespect for trans people he made this public reply:
“I’m sorry if not using buzz words and code words that people don’t understand, like gender identity, offends you, but I think I gave a pretty accurate definition of pre-op transsexual, did I not?”
No John, I think you gave us a pretty accurate picture of how much contempt you have for trans people.