A recent focus groups poll commissioned by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) has found out where the public stands on the issue of trans-inclusive non-discrimination laws. A vast majority of those surveyed support trans-inclusive laws, despite being asked transphobic language in their questions by the pollsters.
“We used a trans-unfriendly language to describe what we were talking about, and we said a law that would protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity would specifically protect transgender people. Transgender people are men who identify or present themselves as women and women who identify or present themselves as men and includes transsexuals, cross dressers, and people who have had or are considering sex change operations… And now I’m going to ask you again, I’m not going to ask you about your values, I’m going to ask you do you favor a law that protects people on the basis of both sexual orientation, gender identity, one or the other or neither? And we got 59 percent said both, nine percent one or the other, 23 percent said nobody. It’s good news,” said Candy Cox, NGLTF’s communications senior strategist.
What is the official position?
The LGBT community’s access to civil rights has remained traditionally absent. Every time a proposal is made to include people with alternate sexual orientations and identities, the power structure has reacted in the negative. As a result, the United States has a comprehensive hate crimes bill finally. And yet, the truth is this law is not trans-inclusive.
Amidst applauds during last September, the House of Representatives passed a hate crimes bill that provided protections for transgender individuals. The lead co-sponsors of the House version were Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), who is a lesbian, and Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich), Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), and gay Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.).
However, the bill went through rough weather in the Senate. US senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) and Gorden Smith (R-Ore) refused to make the Senate version of the bill trans-inclusive. They apprehended the bill with a change of language could not have even seen light of the day. Their concerns were genuine, considering past overall hostilities towards similar gay civil rights bills.
In essence, both the House and Senate versions of the legislation had called for amending an existing federal anti-hate crimes statute that authorizes federal prosecution for hate crimes based on someone’s race, religion and ethnicity. The Kennedy-Smith bill in the Senate then went ahead and added sexual orientation, gender, and disability to the categories covered under the existing law. The House version also had added the categories of sexual orientation, gender, disability and gender identity.
Not all is well:
Although the House version had added gender identity, it pertains only to the hate crimes bill, not to the employment sector. The leading co-sponsor in the House Rep. Barney Frank opposes adding transgender language to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. ENDA calls for banning employment discrimination in the private sector based on sexual orientation. Relevant to note here is the fact that ENDA itself is lying dormant in Congress since the 1970s. This has lent more apprehensions for Frank who says adding a transgender clause to ENDA would result in fewer co-sponsors.
The mainstream applied logic is that transgender clause helps prevent physical attack, and hence it should be suited for hate crimes bill. And considering that ENDA’s destiny is doomed in the Republican-controlled Congress as such, even without a transgender clause, any further alteration would harm the prospects ever greater.
What’s the real issue?
Well, few things have emerged. First off, categorizing people as LGBT would help only when they are provided with equal in-group access. In other words, the LGB people and the transgender individuals do not share the same concern, much less do they enjoy similar privileges.
As is becoming of a system of governance which has historically oppressed few groups and privileged certain others (in some unsophisticated terms, Malcolm X had alluded to this as ‘divide and rule’ policy), the current administration more so has been actively vocal about creating the distinctions more apparent. That the LGBT people do not enjoy similar rights as heterosexual people is no new knowledge. But to mar the united opposition to this systematic discrimination, the LGBT peoples themselves have been divided since some time now, in terms of the degree of their access to resources and rights.
Latest in the lowest ladder of oppression are the transgendered people, who have found absolutely no support from either the House or the Senate. If the House supports their inclusion in Hate Crimes bill, it refuses them access to ENDA. As for Senate versions, not even the Hate Crimes bill has time for the transgender.
The layers of difficulties that have been systematically in place to seclude the transgender people from the minimum safety and comfort that most heterosexual people take simply for granted poses few serious questions.
The ones that currently surface, even as the recent poll shows solidarity to causes of the transgender individuals include but are not limited to, the awareness of transgender, the privilege of the heterosexuality, and the redundant administrative hurdles.
Awareness of the transgender: It’s not just a few history textbooks filled with systematic lies for consumption of school children, its also the composite lot of media, military and industrial nexus that have refused to deal with the whole truths. As a result, heterosexuality has been taken for granted to such an extent as a religiously accurate norm, that any alternative is considered to be one non-normal group called LGBT. At this point, the dismissal of the minorities are done at the alter of celebration of the norm. Therefore, most are kept oblivious of distinguishing the nuances of gender and sexuality.
Without education of an understanding of what constitutes “gender identity” or “gender identity and expression”, we are finding resistance to their inclusion as forming the explicit language that’s needed to be there in proposed legislations. The transgendered people are absolutely accurate in their fear that the proposed laws will continue to discriminate against them, since judges may interpret the victims from a lens that’s indifferent or silent about covering them.
In the process, the politicians are acting on priority to ensure passage of the bill, and looking at the technicalities that will facilitate the process. They are in no way interested to get educated on the crucial differences between the LGB and the T communities and how non-inclusion of some languages might actually work in detriment to the transgender peoples’ right in the civil society and employment sector.
Privilege of heterosexuality: The ruling elites have always advocated the inevitability of hierarchy of oppression. And so, it is considered that sustainable reforms, not radical changes need to take place while all along posing one oppressed group against another. So different systems of oppressions such as race, sex, gender, etc are poised in a prioritized hierarchy, and not as constituents of a multi-layered complex that is exploited all at once.
To quote Audre Lorde from a chapter in “Oppression and social justice: Critical frameworks.” (5th ed., p. 51, Edited by J Andrzejewski, 1996), “Within the lesbian community, I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black.” The privilege of heterosexuality ignores the fact that heterosexuality itself is not a privilege by default any longer once one considers the oppressions of other race, class and gender variants.
Administrative hurdles: Administration poses deliberate problems because it gains from the divisive tendencies. The monopolist politicians who have thus far believed in standardized notions of the male supremacy have not stopped either at ensuring draconic laws that recognize marriage only between a man and a woman and grant them the best of civil rights, they have also countless number of times prevented progressive proposals from becoming legislations.
I am tempted to quote Lorde again, “It is not accidental that the Family Protection Act, which is virtually anti-woman and anti-Black, is also anti-gay. As a Black person, I know who my enemies are, and when the Ku Klux Klan goes to court in Detroit to try and force the Board of Education to remove books that the Klan believes “hint at homosexuality”, then I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”
That’s a serious lesson for our well-meaning politicians if they are genuinely contemplating to benefit the people thus far discriminated against. Not merely for the representatives to see their names hit the halls of fame, for passing of yet another ineffectual bill.
Not just his homophobic reactions to suppress freedom for LGBT communities, but also his own admission of private online relationships with young gay men worked against his reputation as a public official while he was living. After his death, one would have expected continuance of scathing criticisms of his legacy. But we find 
