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The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.
~The Supreme Court Of The United States‘ ruling in Loving V. Virginia
You would think that after Loving v. Virginia, one wouldn’t need to ask if any group should be allowed to legally marry — as in legally marry, period. But, My Fox Houston “went there,” and asked this question:
Q: Should transgender or transsexual people be allowed to legally marry?
Trans people have been freeping the poll, via twitter and FaceBook messaging with each other — among use of other social networking tools. Last night (August 18, 2010), the poll results looked like this:
Q: Should transgender or transsexual people be allowed to legally marry?Yes – 80.4 %
No – 18.4%
Not sure – 0.8%
Last I checked (August 19, 2010, approximately 11:00 AM PDT), the number of those who answered ‘No” was down to 7.5%, but the answers to the posed question isn’t solely where the problem lies — the problem also lies in forming and asking the question in the first place. This is not the kind of question a responsible news organization would ask for a non-scientific poll.
Seriously, would My Fox Houston ask their website readers in a non-scientific poll if African-American, Hispanic, Muslim, Buddhist, disabled, or infertile people should be “allowed to legally marry?” It is an example of how in our society, it is still safe to express antitrans prejudice.
And by the way, it’s survey’s like this that remind me why this quote is a guiding principle for me:
“[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment.”~Bayard Rustin, From Montgomery to Stonewall (1986)
In my thought process, I add “antitransgender sentiment” to Bayard Rustin’s “antigay sentiment.”
Seriously, the privilege and implied prejudice that went into creation of the My Fox Houston non-scientific poll is just beyond the pale, and the editors and producers at My Fox Houston should be ashamed of their fostering animosity towards those whom they identify as “transgender or transsexual people.” In my mind, the framing of their non-scientific poll question is an unconscionable parsing out of known minority populations in the United States; an unconscionable action to give their website readers a anonymous means to identify certain Americans as not deserving of fundamental rights.
And too, there is the basic othering of gender variant people that My Fox Houston is fostering as well…
So much wrong with this non-scientific poll, y’know?
~~~~~
Related:
* Drawing Small Circles Of Normal
* One’s Gender Identity Isn’t Societal Perception Of It; Marriage Equality Isn’t Just A GLB Issue
* Wednesday This & That: Open Thread
* The “Alleged” Transgender Wife Of A Texas Firefighter And Inheritance
16 Comments
Poll link doesn’t seem to workI click on the poll link, and I get a very minimalist page that just has the poll questions on it, and when I try to vote it comes up with a failure. I looked at the My Fox Houston web site and the related article, and I see no poll or link to one. Any chance they may have responded to criticism and yanked it already?
The question is a bit of a softball, too“Should transgender or transexual people be allowed to marry?” all by itself should get a “yes” answer from a lot of people.
Add the nuance as to who we can marry, and te numbers are likely to go all over the place, and people may or may not make a difference if it’s based on birth assignment, whether surgery makes a difference, and who the trans person is allowed to marry.
Further stratification might be separating those who support marriage equality in general from those who don’t.
I’d hypothesize that among those who don’t support marriage equality, they’d probably be more likely to be strict enforcers of birth sex assignment as the basis – they’re more likely to see post-ops as “really” belonging to their original erroneous sex assignment – and thus would prefer to see all WBTs, regarsless of op status as being allowed to marry women, and all MBTs as allowed to marry men, though a WBT could marry an MBT, with the WBT as “husband” and MBT as “wife” on the paperwork, regardless of how they consider themselves.
I think that such a result is terribly unfair to those trans people who are really straight. Those with a gay or lesbian orientation can happily get married, while the straight ones languish. It’s what the result was in Littleton, Gardiner and Kantaras. There are other states with different results.
Better, though…was the debate that was connected to it.
Cristan Williams, of the Transgender Foundation, absolutely eviscerated a WingNutDaily-oid. I’ve got a link to the video on my ENDABlog item about it.
spot onAutumn, nice job.
Click on the top image……and don’t forget to fill in the CAPTCHA language if you answer the poll question..
The non-scientific poll is currently (August 19, at about 3:30 PM PDT) running 93% in favor of trans people being able to “legally marry.”
Absolutely.When it comes to marriage, in the end, the problem isn’t “can we” it’s who can we marry. THe further it gets away from anyone who dislikes the idea of even remotely having to recognize kinship with someone who is LGBT, the better — but only so far as that union itself doesn’t create kinship.
Who is always what it’s all about.
Must be my computerThey block access to a lot of stuff at work. I’ll check it when I get home.
Updated numbersAs of 7pm EDT, after I voted, here are the results:
Yes 93.5%
No 6.2%
Not sure 0.3%
93.7% For / 6% AgainstYah, I saw this last night and stayed up way past my bed time… hey, I’m from Chicago.
Its been up for 24 hours…How long do they keep these things up for? Until they get numbers they like?
wtfHow is this even a question?
Should plumbers be allowed to marry?
Should people with glasses be allowed to marry?
Should brunettes be allowed to marry?
I don’t care if the numbers come out in support of trans people here, I find it absurd that this is even a question.
FREEPED???How do you know the poll is being freeped? Why would you come to that conclusion?
I don’t knowbut I recall that the Polling Point poll on marriage equality is still “live”, in other words ongoing and open, and they put that up years ago.
I just voted yes.At 7:20am CDT it was at 94% yes.
I also think it ridiculous they had to even ask the question.
I say, freep the MF’s!
The real question is…Should employees of My Fox Houston be allowed to marry?
Let’s just be gratefulthey’re not asking whether trans people should be allowed to breathe. Yet.