If We Divide, They Conquer

A historic event happened at City College in San Francisco over the weekend of October 13-14, Transforming Justice, the “first-ever gathering of activists, advocates, former prisoners, and community members from across the country working to stop the cycles of poverty, criminalization, and imprisonment in transgender and gender non-conforming communities”. The conference came at the perfect time for the NLGSF to debut our Know Your Rights for the Transgender Community fact sheets in the areas of criminal, immigration, housing and employment law which were developed by the 2007 Thomas Steel intern, Becky Straus, this past summer.
The first day of the conference, attended by approximately 200 people, focused on the causes of the criminalization epidemic faced by transgender people. During the powerful morning session, first hand accounts of transgender people’s experience with incarceration were voiced. Many told of being rejected by their families, having to drop out of school and turning to street work after being unable to procure any legitimate kind of employment.

It is not surprising to learn that access to education and employment are two of the biggest factors contributing to transgender people getting caught up in our inhumane legal system. However, the stories shared were particularly poignant in light of the recent firestorm that was set off within the LGBT community in September, when a revised version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was presented to the House by Rep. Barney Frank. An earlier version of ENDA, a bill that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, was introduced as H.R. 2015 in April. The revised version that Frank has put forth no longer includes language regarding protections for transgendered or gender non-conforming people.

ENDA has taken many incarnations over the years, originally introduced in 1974, the “Gay Rights Bill” would have added “sexual orientation” to the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. In 1996, the first bill using the title ENDA lost in the Senate by just one vote. However, H.R. 2015 is historic because of it’s protections for transgender people which none of the previous bills have included. This language represented a huge victory for transgender activists and allies, in particular the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which has been working since 1999 to build community consensus for a trans-inclusive bill.
I was saddened and dismayed to hear that Barney Frank, who has represented my home state of Massachusetts since 1981, was behind this divisive move. As one of the first out gay Congressmen, Frank has faced his fair share of discrimination (in 1995 House Majority Leader Dick Armey famously referred to him as “Barney Fag” in a press interview), and he should know better. It feels like a betrayal for him to use his position and political power to undermine nearly a decade’s worth of both grassroots and national activist work. The new bill not only denies protections to transgender people, but will also fail to protect lesbian, gay and bisexual people who are gender non-conforming (such as “effeminate” men and “butch” women).

Wresting power and protections for the oppressed has never been an easy task and lessons of how easy it is to divide and destroy movements abound on the Left. Congressman Frank believes that we should move forward with the non-inclusive bill because “you protect people when you can” and that those who don’t “take reality into account…make it impossible to govern.” Although he knows that Bush will veto any bill that comes before him dealing with rights for the LGBT community, to him the important thing is a symbolic win for the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi’s congress. He also made it clear that he resents any charges of betrayal. However, his actions caused an outpouring of anger and frustration from the LGBT community and more than 280 organizations, including the NLG Queer Committee, have signed onto a statement opposing the non-inclusive bill. The public reaffirming of support for transgender rights is one of the only upsides of this unfortunate situation.
At the Transforming Justice conference, no one had any illusions that spending two days talking and brainstorming together would immediately bring about of the end of a monolith like the prison industrial complex. But the goal of abolition, like the dream of equality, is not something that will be achieved in a weekend or through the passage of a law, it is a process of individual and societal transformation. Wisely, the importance of creating connections was emphasized over and over throughout the conference by organizers, and I think that is how change occurs: by ending isolation and reaffirming the value of community.

It is not clear what will happen with ENDA. I personally hope that the amended bill will be withdrawn and if the inclusive bill fails, then we all go down together. The late, great, lesbian poet, Audre Lorde, warned that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. So if the passage of ENDA in Congress is to be a symbolic victory then let it stand for the fact that the queer community will no longer sell out the most vulnerable amongst our ranks to gain access to a bigger piece of the American pie, because the apples are rotten anyway.