Some considerationsEspecially when you bring up Mehlman, there are some extra complexities that need to be addressed when we discuss this.
While it’s true that other minority individuals have the choice to identify with the community or not, in a lot of cases, they are still identified by others as a member of the minority. Racially, that’s generally fairly obvious, and when you walk away from a religion or philosophy, you generally stop being a member of the minority.
We can hide. We can actually be a member of our minority with literally nobody else knowing.
So don’t  we actually have two distinct variations on each of the four burdens?
We have the collective experience of those who are part of the community (however you define that, even as loosely as “those who publicly claim to be a member of the minority, whether they are part of a community or not”) and the additional question of how that translates to the people in the closet.
Obviously, some things simply can’t be experienced until you come out. But others can. Being a dinosaur, I remember the first time I found out there was actually a word for what I was, I can remember the first gay character I saw on TV, and so on. Todays young kids have the internet, out gay celebrities and TV characters, and so on. Even the most closeted person experiences people around them saying and doing supportive things, speaking up for them, and so on.
I think the fear is probably our biggest hurdle, as a community and as a group. Not in any way to minimize people’s problems, oppression, or pain, but in a lot of cases, if we overcome the fear, the rest can follow, however many hurdles there are. We can move to a more supportive area, find new friends, and so on. But not if we hold on to the fear.
And I think that is relative, too. What you can do as a self-sufficient adult in an urban area of a Blue state is obviously different from what you can do as a teen in the rural south. But if each of us comes out as much as we can, and lives as openly as we can, those pockets where it is ever safer to be open get bigger and bigger, and everywhere gets a little better.  

There’s a lot of Homophobia tooIn Trans circles.
I see Gay men who feel their masculinity is under attack by being seen as wannabe women. I see Trans women whose femininity is under attack by those who see them as uber-Gay men.
The first wants a distinction from all things Trans – after all, aren’t many Trans people straight? Autumn’s courageous stand severely damaged their credibility, but they still exist, and have the ear of the powerful (ie the HRC).
The second is often purely and simply blatantly homophobic. They have had ample cause historically to be that way too. The HRC’s actions in 2007 certainly gave them a lot of ammunition to use. But they forget that fully 2/3 of the GLB organisations didn’t go along with the backstab.
And yet… in MA, there’s still no T protections. Neither are there any in NH, where the senate unanimously vetoed giving trans people the same rights as GLBs on the same day that they assented to gay marriage. It’s not just past history.
OK, let’s look at the 3 points, from an IS/TS viewpoint.
Overcoming Fear – we dare not. It’s too freaking dangerous. Fear keeps us alive, just as unreasoning terror would kill us. That sounds dramatic, but most of us know someone who’s been murdered, and pretty much all of us know someone who’s taken the easy way out. We fo not overcome Fear – we use it. Fear can be transmuted to Anger, and Anger is an Energy.
Overcoming self-hate – often it’s not self-hatred as such. It’s just that for those who are classically TS, we don’t value our lives very highly – not till we transition, anyway. Self-hate is very easy to succumb to though, under constant bombardment from both Left and Right – and sometimes GLB too. Intersexed people are possibly more vulnerable to this, it takes courage and willpower to tell the world to sod off, my genitalia may be unusual, but they’re mine and they suit me just fine. And all too many of us don’t have suitable genitalia, the scar tissue and nerve damage from surgeon’s scalpels when we were infants has seen to that.
Overcoming self-denial – I’m the last one qualified to talk about this. I didn’t, not until circumstances forced me to. I was an Epic FAIL here.

I see a lot of self-hateI wish I had more time to expound but I have to prepare for class.
I hope to see a good healthy discussion develop and maybe an action plan to how we can progress as a community.
It won’t happen overnight but it can happen.

Bayard RustinI love the quotes from Bayard Rustin. While some compare and contrast the two movements, Bayard Rustin is the bridge between them.  I do believe our community is full of self hate. We see it when people like Mehlman and countless other prominent people fight so hard and say such nasty things about us when all along they are gay themselves.  It is hard to grow up hearing such things and not feel animus for ourselves.
The Trans community suffers from the same issues within the trans community as well as the gay community. Hell, the gay community can’t get along. Overcoming fear, self-hate, and denial will not be achieved without a change in the political and ultimately the change in the people. I think it is a balancing act to get thru all 4 at the same time.
As long as we are bombarded by the anti-LGBT side we will all have to deal with the first 3. If we work on the 4th we are bound to make the changes that will lead to a better chance of not having the stigma and stereotypes that force us to live with hate and denial.  
I am a legally married lesbian. I am a Mrs. . I never thought I would be Mrs. Anyone.  Our fight has come so far in my 50 years and is changing at light speed. Our country has changed so fast in its short history that I think we can expect greater things to happen soon. It may not seem fast enough for some but in the bigger picture, America has proven we are capable and most are willing to fight for and live up to “Freedom for All”.

Overcoming self-hateand the other factors Rustin mentioned will not be possible until we address the source of that self-hate: ORGANIZED RELIGION, which in this country of course usually takes the form of Christianity (though Islam and Hinduism and the rest are no better).  
I certainly agree with what Rustin said, as far as it goes.  I’ve been saying for years that our aim should not be getting all of America to give us a big, warm hug but to erect a legal framework that makes it as difficult as possible for bigots to express and/or act upon their bigotry.
But there is no doubt in my mind that religion, the major irrational force in our society, is at the root of irrational homophobia and self-hatred.  As I said in a comment a few days ago, I’ve debated a lot of homophobes over the years, in various public forums, on radio shows, etc., and every last one of them, without exception, has fallen back on the Bible and church teachings as justification for their views.  They say it, not me.  Take their word for it.
As Nietzsche so memorably put it, “Christianity makes suffering contagious.”

Hi QSelf hate is not caused by the organized religions.  It is some of the people in some of the religions that are doing that, and others blindly follow.
The internalized issue isn’t really self hate, either — it is internalized stigma, which isn’t hate, but rather simply a reflection of social disapproval, and even if we were to get rid of every single organized religion’s perspective, the stigma would still remain.
SO it isn’t an issue that one can look at externally, it must be dealt with internally — we need to look at ourselves to deal with it, not someone else.  
Changing the social pressures, yes, that’s important, but that’s a long term task that requires extraordinary time and effort and is not going to happen in the lifetimes of most of the people alive today — it was 90 years ago that women gained the ability to vote and we are still dealing with that.  It’s been 160 years since the country tried to establish equality in law, and racism is still widely and deeply prevalent today.
We are at a point where we will likely have a better track record than either of those things, but it will still take years to erase the social stigma from the world outside.
So it is more important for us to work on our own weaknesses and failings within, because until we do, there will be no change without.

I have.I am as ruthless as I can be in that sense, and I am that way in order to possibly show others who have the ability to do so — and I am not convinced that all of us have that ability — that often the things we do are not nearly as difficult or as dangerous as we like to think they are.
It’s why I use things like foursquare — I tell people where I am.  My home address is easily found, my work is known, and my life is fairly transparent and people can know my name without much trouble.
Overcoming fear is essential — and while I have many more fears to go through, I’m doing pretty good overall.  It’s like the tales of high steel workers, who don’t fear the fall from a 110 story building, it’s the 20 foot drop they find terrifying because you know the outcome already.
Over coming self hate is always a challenge, because a goodly portion of that self hate — the stigma itself now internalized — is often incorporated into the way that we refer and speak about things ourselves, and we rarely take the time to follow the old advice and come to know ourselves.
There are aspects such as “passing” and “disclosure” and “stealth” and “woodworking” that all work to perpetuate in both our own minds and those around us to say that we are trying to deceive, that we are not “buying into” our own ideas and our self knowledge, that it can’t really be true, because those concepts contain within them not provisions for protection, but rather aspects of fear of external and enacted stigma that are reinforced by the internal and self inflicted stigma we carry from living on a society that is sexist and racist and homophobic and transphobic.
Overcoming self denial isn’t even really an issue once you pass the first two, and to a great extent you cannot see it until you have. We see it everyday in the internal arguments between rad fems and mainlines, in the racial divide, in the class divide, in the interplay of derailings and privilege that populate the internet.
I generally don’t give a rat’s ass about Brian Brown and Maggie.  I’m not too worried about FOTF or the AFA.  I could care less what Coral Ridge has done lately, or if TVC and Porno Pete are railing against inequity they see around them.
They are lunatics.
I spend most of my time know reaching out inside the LGBT to try and correct the perceptions, to overcome ignorance and prejudice inside us, and then I take that same show on the road and out beyond the LGBT community to the everyday people around me.
Has the community, though?
No.
Look at PHB, or Toweleroad or Joe.My.God or Bilerico — they are filled with stories that are all about not the wider world, but the focus on the bread and circuses of the extremists.
And make no mistake — they are the extremists.  WE, the LGBT community, are to blame for the interviews that allow an extremist to sit side by side with a member of the community on a mainstream news channel because we give them too damn much attention.
We need to be talking not to the people who show up at a NOM event, but to the people who pass by on the street as one goes on and asking them what they think.
We need to focus on holding the media institutions and advertising agencies and employers accountable for what they do to perpetuate this.
The people who are “invisible” behind the scenes in those places are the one’s we should be interviewing, as they are the ones who shape this debate, who look at the two sides and see us bickering and then let the emotion run.
We still have self-hate within our community — L and G and B and T all bickering and fighting and arguing and ranking oppressions and similar crap.
We are still in denial — the T isn’t part of the LG, and the B gets left in the cold. We still have people surprised at the anger of the trans community or that don’t know the difference between play for pay and living one’s life.
We are still afraid. Still wallowing in fear, and we repeat the same tropes and allow terrorism to run our lives, making us no different internally than those who seek to deny a community center being built in a city because they don’t like the religion of those doing it.
Hell, as a larger group, we actually attack those within our own movement who are religious, pushing them out and away, when they can be a critical part of the outreach to those people the bad guys already have. No wonder we often think of NOM and TVC and FOTF as having more power than they really do, forgetting that for them it really is just about the money.
No, the community — and not jut the trans community, but the LGBT as a whole and as individual parts of it — has not reached that.
Hell, we haven’t even started on it yet.

I don’t agree at all.People who grow up Christian are taught that they are sinners.  All of us, so the party line goes, are sinners–born with sin on our souls, unworthy of this or that, required to do penance before an angry God, almost to apologize to “him” for our very existence.
Those of us who grow up gay and Christian are taught not only that we are unworthy sinners, like everyone else, but we are abominations in the eyes of God, aberrations of nature who cause horror and revulsion in “normal” people.  If that isn’t a recipe for self-hatred, I can’t imagine what might qualify as one.
You can’t point to an anti-gay law anywhere in the Western world that can not be traced back, ultimately (and usually directly) to Christian teaching.  Organized religion never stops beating its anti-LGBT drum.  The handful of congregations who do otherwise are the exceptions that prove the rule.
I’d suggest you read Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton.  He details at enormous length the pernicious influence of Christianity.  In places like Japan, gayness was quite accepted.  Emperors, shoguns, samurai, people at all levels of society were quite open about their loves, and no one gave it a second thought.  Then Christian missionaries arrived and started spreading heir evil nonsense, and within a few generations gayness carried the same stigma it did in Western nations.
Religion, and in our culture specifically Christianity, is the root.  Until it’s killed, the weeds will keep growing.

We’ve got work to do on all threeOn the fear part…well, look at the No On 8 campaign.
No On 8 (and to some extent No On 1 in Maine) focused on GOTV in areas that were friendly as opposed to branching out to lukewarm or even hostile areas (i.e. communities of color, The Inland Empire…I need Louise to feel me in on upstate (and kinda rural Maine).
We can’t keep preaching to the choir. And both fear and self-hatred is involved in that.
I believe that’s that self-hatred and self-denial is one of the reasons that the GLBT community leans on the Black Civil Rights movement a little too much. The Black Civil Rights Movement, after all, is a known and honored quantity.
GLBTs have quite an honorable history of struggle, persecution, and survival but I don’t think that a lot of us realize it because…well, many of us don’t know it ourselves (and this is probably my role in all of this; I looooooooooves me some history).
Self-Denial, to me, means the closet. Again, I refer you to the closeted No On 8 campaign.

Sorry, dyssonance, that’s a lot of irrational chasing your own tail…

Self hate is not caused by the organized religions.  It is some of the people in some of the religions that are doing that, and others blindly follow.

Yes, some people followed by many others: the DEFINITION of any organization, including organized religion. The MAJORITY of organized religion.

The internalized issue isn’t really self hate, either — it is internalized stigma, which isn’t hate, but rather simply a reflection of social disapproval,

GOBBLEDYGOOK!

it was 90 years ago that women gained the ability to vote and we are still dealing with that.  It’s been 160 years since the country tried to establish equality in law, and racism is still widely and deeply prevalent today.

CLICHED EXAGGERATION! Bumper sticker sophistry masquerading as Great Truth.
OF COURSE, healing of the symptoms takes time, but it can only begin if the cause, the cancer, is removed…and that is the self-loathing and the loathing of others that originated with and is perpetuated by religion, even among those who were officially without religion for decades.This from a report by Rex Wockner on a poll of Russian attitudes toward gays:
74 per cent of Russians believe gays and lesbians are morally dissolute or mentally defective.
“Thirty-nine per cent of those questioned believe that homosexuals should be forcibly treated for their condition or isolated from society, 24 per cent think gays should be sent to psychologists, 25 per cent think gays should be left in peace, and 4 per cent think homosexuals should be eliminated.
On the matter of equal rights, the findings were better, with 45 per cent of Russians saying gays and lesbians should have equal rights — unless the issue is marriage. Only 14 per cent of those questioned support letting gay couples marry.”
Eighty-two percent of Russians object to gay pride parades.
Why are such attitudes so persistent decades after athiesm became the mantra of the state? Because, for nearly 20 years, the religion-based Focus on the Family has poured oceans of homohating poison into the country through Russian-language radio broadcasts.
And, of course, it’s not just “Judeo-Xtianity,” and we’ll never know if these guys had successfully worked on their “own weaknesses and failings within.”

Yes and noI think there is a generational divide here too. As a Christian and lesbian late bloomer (came out early 40s), I’ll certainly raise my hand for a lot of internalized homophobia, fear and self-denial. But I was recently at an event for gay Christians (the community voted most likely to succeed in this area) and most people my age had been in straight marriages. They’re now dealing with all that baggage as well as coming out. The young ones weren’t even thinking about that. They’re still having problems with parents, church communities, etc. but they’re coming out young and ok with who they are.  

as a notewhen saying “gobbledygook”, do try and explain why it’s such, as otherwise you leave me a huge opening to seriously dig in and demonstrate why it isn’t.
Since I’m so late getting to this, it’s kinda wasted effort to do it now, but you’ve given me something to write about, assuming I ever recover from the nightmare of moving, lol