“You see here tonight a man named John Aravosis, a Gay man, totally divorced from Reality and History, vainly trying to understand why his world is not what it is. He is confused and afraid. Past the STOP sign, next turn to the left and ahead… there stands the Trans-woman. AIYEEEE!” Welcome to the AAA Gay Zone. (Also called the Balls of Confusion.)
(No… I’m not going to play nice. Being PC to thine enemies is the worst form of hypocrisy and lunacy.)
My desire at this point in time is to go “postal” and not stop for days and days. The fight for Gender Identity has gone on for over a century and a half, and just as this recognition under law comes almost to our finger tips (yes, the Bushite’s gonna veto either version of the bill), it is being yanked away by men who do not want us around.
Here’s the opener for an opinion piece by Susan Stryker in Salon a few days ago:
“Pity poor John Aravosis, the gay rights crusader from AmericaBlog whose “How Did the T Get in LGBT?” essay, in reference to the controversy over gender identity protections in the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act, was published on Salon a few days ago. To hear Aravosis tell it, he and multitudes of like-minded gay souls have been sitting at the civil rights table for more than 30 years, waiting to be served. Now, after many years of blood, sweat, toil and tears, a feast in the form of federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace has finally been prepared. Lips are being licked, chops smacked, saliva salivated, when — WTF!?! — a gaunt figure lurches through the door.
It is a transgender person, cupped hands extended, begging for food. Seems somebody on the guest list — maybe a lot of somebodies — let this stranger in off the streets without consulting everyone else beforehand, claiming he-she-it-or-whatever was a relative of some sort. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a fabulous dinner party starts surreally morphing into one of those OxFam fundraisers dramatizing third-world hunger whose sole function is to make the “haves” feel guilty for the plight of the “have-nots.”
And this:
“Aravosis isn’t questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he’s just concerned with properly marking the distinction between “enough like me” and “too different from me” to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies. His position is a bit like those kerfuffled astronomers not too long ago, scratching their noggins over how to define Pluto’s place in the conceptual scheme of the solar system. Sure, we’ve been calling it a planet for a good number of years because it’s round and orbits the sun just like our Earth, but now it appears that if we keep doing so we’ll have to let a bunch of the bigger asteroids into the planet category, as well as some other weird faraway stuff we only recently learned about, which stretches the definition of “planet” into a name for things we don’t really think of as being much like good ol’ Earth, so let’s just demote Pluto instead. In Aravosis’ homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto.”
And this:
“Transgender people have their own history of civil rights activism in the United States, one that is in fact older, though smaller and less consequential, than the gay civil rights movement. In 1895, a group of self-described “androgynes” in New York organized a “little club” called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their self-perceived need “to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution.” Half a century later, at the same time some gay and lesbian people were forming the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, transgender people were forming the Society for Equality in Dress. When gay and lesbian people were fighting for social justice in the militant heyday of the 1960s, transgender people were conducting sit-in protests at Dewey’s lunch counter in Philadelphia, fighting in the streets with cops from hell outside Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and mixing it up at Stonewall along with lots of other folks.”
In summary:
“Aravosis and those who agree with him think that the “trans revolution” has come from outside, or from above, the rank-and-file gay movement. No — it comes from below, and from within. The outrage that many people in the queer, trans, LGBT or whatever-you-want-to-call-it community feel over how a gender-inclusive ENDA has been torpedoed from within is directed at so-called leaders who are out of touch with social reality. It has to do with a generation of effort directed toward building an inclusive movement being pissed away by the clueless and the phobic. That’s why every single GLBT organization of any size at the national and state levels — with the sole exception of the spineless Human Rights Campaign — has unequivocally come out in support of gender protections within ENDA, and has opposed the effort to pass legislation protecting only sexual orientation.”
Me and mine may be from Pluto or the Oort Cloud, but with people like the AAA Gays on this planet, I think the Oorts are wonderful, especially this time of year, but I’d rather spend my time in New Orleans.
