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Allyson Robinson asks a poignant question for trans people like me, as well as — by extention — for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people too.
Allyson Robinson asks Who are the natural partners with the trans community in the work of getting our civil rights?
Natural partners in our trans civil rights work? on 12seconds.tv
For those who don’t want to answer more broadly than Allyson’s question, I’d ask you to answer one of two other questions:
Choice 2: Who are the natural partners with the broad lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community in the work of getting our LGB civil rights?Choice 3: Who are the natural partners with the broad lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in the work of getting our LGBT civil rights?
I’ll answer all three questions.
For the trans community question, I’d definitely say LGB people. I’d say gender expression (“too” butch for some lesbian people; “too” feminine for some gay people; and not conforming to gender norms for trans people) is a reason for LGBT people to see commonalities in our broader civil rights issues.
For the LGB community question, I’d say trans people for the reason I stated above — the commonality of discrimination all want ended based on gender norms/gender expression.
For the LGBT community question, I’d say immigration reform community members — The LGB & T community have immigration issues that could be tied to the broader immigration reform movement. Basically, if LGBT people took immigration reform as their issue, and immigration reform people took on LGBT issues as their issues — all based on the overlap of immigration reform both groups want — I believe we’d have a bigger base of support for working on LGBT and immigration reform issues.
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For LGB people:Atheists, agnostics, freethinkers; and moderate/liberal religious people and orgs who, despite having religious beliefs themselves, want a secular society and care very deeply about the separation of church and state. You could sum that all up as “secularists” I suppose.
And, going along with this, scientists. Particularly those who work in fields in which nature’s diversity is constantly made apparent. Namely, biology, and anyone who studies human culture (anthropology, sociology, etc.).
Because (and I’ll say it again – and again and again and again…) religion is THE primary source of homophobia in the United States, and THE number one justification used to deny us rights. You cannot even begin to tackle LGBT discrimination without questioning religion, and those who are prepared to do that have already taken a step toward supporting all of us.
This also means straight people who break from traditional religious values, and have more liberal social attitudes especially toward sexuality, also tend to be on our side automatically.
Sadly, I’m not sure I can automatically say all those people are on the side of trans equality, but that’s only because it is new to them. Also, I am finding that in reason-based circles, there is an unfortunate perception that transsexuality is something “made-up” and akin to a belief or ideology, or even a delusion. “Queer theory” and postmodernism aren’t helping anything either, because they tend to be pretentious and overly convoluted, which to say the least doesn’t appeal to people who value logic and clarity in communicating ideas.
But I think these people can be turned around if you can present transsexuality as the natural phenomenon that it is (I am confident you can do this without having to underplay the purely social/cultural aspects of gender), and already, I have seen prominent scientists/freethinkers such as PZ Myers speak out in favor of trans people and issues.
Still, I would agree that LBG people are the most natural partners for trans. And although some gay people are assholes and don’t get the connection, you are absolutely right that all LGB and T discrimination really boils down to gender and gender identity issues.
It’s hit and miss with biology and related fields…A depressing number of biologists and the like are quite attached to their habit of projecting patriarchy onto everything — bad for feminism, bad for LGBT people (not to mention bad science…there’s a reason that so much still has to be done in science studies). As I’m starting to go into biophysics, I’m finding out that there are a shocking number of quasi-theocratic religious reactionaries in physics. It’s bizarre — though it probably varies among physics departments to some extent.
The social-sciences people tend to be more supportive — though there are some creepy hyper-conformist trends in psychology and sociology.
So there are certainly allies in the sciences — but people in the sciences as a community…well, sometimes not so much.
Immigration alliesFound this article at Gay AmericaBlog
Obama admin to deport gay Brazilian man who was raped in Brazil, and is now married to an American man in Massachusetts
by John Aravosis
http://gay.americablog.com/200…
“In violation of US law, the Obama administration has decided to stay the deportation of heterosexual foreign-born nationals married to Americans who have since deceased, reportedly in order to curry favor with the Latino community. But when a gay foreign-born national, married legally in Massachusetts to an American, who has been raped in his home country, seeks to stay in the US the Obama administration deports him. More on this couple’s battle here.”
http://www.reunitethisfamily.c…
Bi-National Same Sex CouplesI think the idea of all these various groups joining together is a great idea. Bi-National couples are for the most part forgotten because we are such a small minority within the lgbt community.
Living exiled in a foreign country for the last 3 and a half years, I have seen little movement on lgbt immigration. My partner and I have been together for almost 15 years, our life waits on hold permanently in a place where we are strangers with no friends or family. Sure the Uniting American Families Act has lots of sponsors but no signs of movement and the worst part is many lgbt people don’t even know what it is.
Natural Partners for the Trans Community
With that stated, natural allies for the U.S. Trans community (even if they don’t know it):
Women
African-Americans
Atheists
Freethinkers
Agnostics
Ethical Culturists
Unitarian/Universalists
Quakers
Jews
Christians (as opposed to christianists)
Cafeteria Catholics
Intersex people
Bisexual people
Lesbians
Gay men
Libertarians
Liberals
Democrats
ANYONE with a well-formed moral compass and a modicum of intelligence
LGB people for a lot of reasonsTalibangelical rightards consistently and deliberately conflate transgendered individuals, drag queens and cross-dressers. In the tiny minds of our common enemies we are one and the same, so it makes logical sense that we should be united in our voices and efforts to prevent them from establishing policy.
Many ancient cultures recognized and honored both “two spirit” individuals — men or women who adopted the mannerisms, dress and social role of the opposite gender, or who held a distinct “third gender” role — and those presumably not “two spirit” men and women who sought these people out as spouses and partners. In modern societies, transgendered individuals found safety and acceptance among gay men and lesbians, as people with less rigid ideas about sex and sexuality. The sharp distinction between GLB and T is a pretty recent development, and I think many people have been too quick to dismiss old alliances.
Beyond that, civil rights are civil rights. When any group in our community is oppressed, everyone in the community is danger of being next. Any person who is willing to fight for civil rights is a natural ally for transgender civil rights.
YesYou’ve got it right on both counts including the hesitance sometimes on trans rights. You’re also right to suspect natural evidence. Recently there was a hen who transitioned to a rooster and acted in all of those sex characteristics and there’s a smattering of some other examples.
In short, there’s actually some evidence of gender dissonance occurring in the wild in sexually dimorphic species.
And M above, those scientists known as “evolutionary psychologists” or “evopsych” are known charlatans. The public loves them because they reinforce stereotypes and turn vague memories of The Flintstones into “fact”. Feminists and LGBT hate them because they are wrong in ways that harm their communities and scientists hate them because AHEM IT’S NOT FUCKING SCIENCE!
I’m a biologist, so we get triggered like that a lot whenever one of these pseudoscientists and frauds gets treated like a respected member of the scientific community. Drives us mad.
I know the evopsych types are spouting B.S…What shocked me was to find people in biology taking the same approach. It’s probably related to me currently doing my lower-division work in the nowhere to which they send all the reactionary bad-science types, but it’s still depressing.
Natural partners with the Trans communityOur natural partners ‘should’ be the GLB group – after all many trans people are also GLB. but many in the Trans community do wonder just how welcomed we really are and how strong the partnership really is between trans folk and gen GLB people? The rift that was created in 2007 when HRC sold us out still hasn’t completly healed. Check out Donna Bloom’s blog (donnabloom.com. She is an articulate advocate for GLBT rights and served on the HRC board but resigned in 2007 – many others also withdrew their support in 2007 as well. This uneasy partnership is getting better, however. As a trans women and a lesbian, I have found that I am fully accepted by some lesbian groups – but not others – so yes lesbian issues matter to me – I just don’t feel the reciprocity all the time
Don’t mess with Mama Bear I was going to write this big diatribe about how the 70′s John Money style gender clinics and the people that ran them really created the basis for the current environment. And how the man that closed even that scrap of treatment at Hopkins became the psych adviser to the pope. And how the whole ‘gender-as-a-purely-social-construct’ movement drove the feminists to attack trans folk as well. And how we got dropped from the 70′s political efforts led by gay white males. And then the whole HRC debacle. And finally the rise of the Republican / Christian right that used the vacuum left behind by the end of the cold war to find a new social enemy; those that dare to transgress gender expectations in any way. And how our natural allies are really anyone outside of that group, including other Christians and anyone willing to be educated. But that first draft was too negative and I would have rambled. Good thing I avoided it.
Instead, I’ll offer this group that no one else has mentioned but is a strong force that you do NOT want to cross:
The accepting parents of trans kids.
Most have full hetero-normal privilege and are not afraid to use it. They’ll cut ties to their own extended families rather than allow their kids to be hurt or mistreated, and they are relentless in getting policy changed as it affects their kids. Consider them a completely separate thread that is working toward the same end goal.
Regarding “new to them”In the United States, trans folk are not “new”. This is part of the thinking that is present only in the LGB communities, for the most part.
What trans folk are is maligned. Used as points of ridicule and examples of sadness and despair.
Saying that we are “new” is saying that most people don’t know about us, despite headlines dealing with people such as Renee Richards and Christine Jorgenson that go back ages, or writers like George Sand.
New is, point blank, rather insulting. We have been taboo, we have been hidden, we have been buried, and erased and we have especially been unmentioned.
We are not new.
Indeed, for the last 120 years, we have been been discussed consistently, and about the only thing that is new is the separation between “Gay” and “Trans” — and that’s only been going on in the broader US community the last 30 years or so. Until the mid to late 70′s, it was all one mass of “gay”.
So do not, please, think we are “new”, when we are the butt of more jokes, do not think we are new when we’ve had “Klinger” types around for ages.
Do not say we are new, for when people do, it tells me they do not know enough of their own history.
We are not new.
As a multi-disciplinarian social scientistYou can bet the social sciences are more generally allies. And to discount the work of folks like Joan Roughgarden in biology is a bit questionable, (although rampant).
Note as well, that I’m a social evolutionist, in terms of theory, and see a great deal of potential for biology to be affected by social causation.
I stepped out of academics because the politics within it were anathema to me at the time, but there’s a lot of work that seeks to erase the inherent social biases that plague the work of many in the so called “hard sciences”.
Add to this listMen
Children
Asian-Americans
Native Americans
Unions
Straight men and women
Muslims
Buddhists
Siks
Shintoists
Republicans
Fundamentalists
Baptists
Sex workers
And keep on going. Because all people are the natural allies since transfolks are anyone ho’s ever been a women and cut her hair short or worn pants, any man who’s ever grown his hair long or been “swishy”.
Expand it to answer all the questions.
Because util we reach a point where we are speaking to all people, of all backgrounds, and cease speaking and thinking in terms of limited focus.
cisGLB folks need to remember that this movement includes straight people.
That they are fighting for straight folks rights to marry as well as their own. And that by highlighting that fact, they reveal, once and for all, that the animus behind all this is illegal, under Romer.
Transfolks need to remember that study after study shows that the majority of transfolks are GLB as well — that straight transfolks are only between 25% and 35% of the total.
And we — all of us — need to remember that we are not merely fighting to get ours, so that we can then stop and say I’ve got mine, and walk away. We need to stand and fight util we have ours.
Because until we do, we will never really be able to say “I’ve got mine”.
What I’ve observed… is that the first communities to step up and embrace the marginalized tend to be anarchists and socialists, sometimes leatherfolk, then any who are involved with social justice and conscientious youth. Certainly, most marginalized communities can find common ground and empathy with LGB and T communities in some form or other, but it tends to be the truly selfless who step up to the plate first.
In Alberta, the first groups out to support the trans community this year were the marxist-leninists, the anti-racists, the personnel with the local shelters and HIV and sex work organizations, and school gay-straight alliances. Then gradually, reluctantly, the LGB came next (with some exceptions who were quick to be behind us from the first second).
There is a barrier to establishing connections, even where they should naturally exist: self-interest. We sometimes get so close to our own issues that we feel we don’t have the energy to support others’. I’m on a bit of a decolonial kick, but I do believe that if we could reassess our thinking in this way, it would go a long way to promoting universal progress and kinship.