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Crossposted with permission from the Facebook note Somebody Is Saying It’s Time To Come Together
By Eva Kraus
The Maryland HB235 debacle is over. No matter which way you wanted it to turn out, it was an absolute mess. Now the hand wringing will start. It is time for the Monday morning quarterbacking. I will let the professionals in our community, our leaders figure out just what the hell happened. While politically aware, I am not particularly savvy about the backroom deals at the statehouse or in Congress. All I know is that a half-assed bill, not supported by the trans community went down in flames (and it should have), another year of equality in Maryland is lost, and we are back to square one.
With the loss of ENDA in the 111th Congress, any near term national protections are shot. The loss of ENDA was a disaster, but it may ultimately serve a greater good. It is the same good that HB 235 adds to. It is teaching the trans community that we have to stand on our own. It is teaching us that we can’t let others speak for us. It is teaching us that WE have to control our own destiny. Our gay and straight allies (cisgendered) need to follow our lead on trans rights. We can welcome, and should welcome, their help. They have the access, the support, the money that we as a community lack. But we cannot allow them to lead the discussion. They cannot be allowed to tell us what enough civil rights are. They cannot be allowed to tell us what enough equality is. They cannot be allowed to tell us that “separate but equal” restrooms or other facilities are ok. That process has thankfully started. It is an ugly process. State and local trans organizations are starting to come out from the shadows of LGB groups to stake out their positions. Trans individuals all over the country were involved in the Maryland debate.
We need trans men in the debate. We need trans women in the debate. We need trans people of color in the debate. All of our voices need to be heard. Yes, I represent the trans woman who lost white male cis-privilege. I want is back. I don’t apologize for it. I don’t want or care to be male. I want the opportunity and rights to compete on the same basis as before. I didn’t become less or get stupid from transition.
But I want more. I want those of my sisters and brothers to have a full bite at the apple. People of Color need the opportunity to work, to have a home, visit a public accommodation without harassment and discrimination. It is ridiculous that we, as either trans people or cis people, do not tap into all of the talents of all of our citizens. Trans POC need to be well represented in our organizations.
Our national organizations like the NTCE need to represent OUR interests. I was saddened to see their support of this piecemeal bill. They should not settle for the best deal they can get. The crumbs of incrementalism are unacceptable. This is not a funding bill that deserves compromise. It is a civil rights bill. There is NO compromise on basic human rights. Does our national lobby group need a “congress” of us to come together each year so they know what we want? Can we send “delegates” to this national group elected or appointed on a state basis through our state groups? Should our lobby groups because more of a political representation of our collective desire than that of insiders who think they know what we want? Should we vote on what to include in a national and state platform? Should this happen at the state level? Are they willing to share power and represent the will of the people? Would this increase the power and influence of trans people and help us control our own destiny?
These are just some thoughts as we begin the process of redesign. What does need to stop is the rampant name calling of those we disagree with politically. Yes, basic human rights are personal. The difference on how we view the process is not. I am not much for the “collaborator” or turncoat” type of term. What it tells me is that we can’t have a discussion on an intelligent level. We need to not be reduced to the behavior of the wing nuts that dehumanize us.
What it does tell me is that we don’t have the strength in our own organizations to stand alone. It means that we are forced to work through the perceived “Gay, Inc.” and compromise our values with those that don’t always understand them don’t support them or see us as a point of leverage or compromise. We need to design our own movement, uncompromising in OUR agenda and representing our aspirations and human beings and Americans.
Eva Kraus is a businesswoman and emerging trans voice. Her Facebook page is here.
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12 Comments
The last paragraph.I completely agree with it. =)
RespectfullyPlease tell me why anyone in Maryland should give a shit what Eva Krause says. Who is Eva Kraus? A new self-appointed leader?
Self-indulgent bullshit, this is. Blogs are like opinions are like … Everyone has one.
It is true what they say about you…You really are an ugly individual. I would feel a little ugly inside if I were you. If I watched marriage equality go down the toilet and screwed up trans rights as bad as you did, I would not want to look in the mirror either. It is easier to hate others that propose a new way than admit you have really mucked things up.
Why would people care about what something that someone else says besides you? Well, you and EQMD have pretty well screwed it all up….so, why not?
BTW, Cathy…it’s a rhetorical question. Your ugly responses are not required.
A little less talk, a little more action
Do it. I dare you. I double dog dare you.
Only in trying will you begin to appreciate the obstacles that stand in your way. I could write at extreme length about those obstacles, but I won’t waste my time doing so. Until you try, it won’t mean anything to you. Don’t talk. Do. Go experience reality. You’ll see.
Your words….“PHB is hardly the place one would come to make friends, and I didn’t expect any accolades resulting from diving into this mosh pit. I don’t enjoy this. However, it can be a medium for distributing ideas broadly, however brutally those ideas and their originators get beat up in the process. I’m simply using this as a medium to throw my idea out there in hopes that something good can come from it.”
What I do outside this forum to work for TLGBI equality I don’t often shout about….but a call to action may begin with an essay that motivates others. I like what you had to say about why we write.
Gurlz, please.
The issue is resourcesAs surprised as I am that you or anyone might remember anything I may have written, the character of your essay that I take issue with is that you are trying to motivate other people to carrying out a grand plan you have never tried yourself. If you had, you wouldn’t have written what you wrote. Once you do, you will write something very different.
There’s a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where they have an urgent technical problem to solve in the crippled Apollo spacecraft (I won’t bog down the metaphor by describing in detail the problem). There’s a scene where a group of NASA engineers are gathered in a room and a supervisor comes in and dumps the contents of a cardboard box on a table. It’s a scattered, seemingly random and disconnected collection of odd objects. He then says (paraphrasing from memory), “This is all they have on the spaceship. You have to solve the problem with only what’s on this table.”
That situation is more like ours than you realize. We have a problem to solve: discrimination against members of our community. We have a finite and specific set of resources with which to solve it. The only solutions that will work will be the ones that can be done with the available resources. The best solution will be the one that makes best use of the available resources. The solutions that fail will be the ones that ignore the available resources, make assumptions about resources that are inaccurate, assumes more resources than there really are, expects resources that don’t exist, and/or doesn’t understand the nature and limitations of the available resources. In the end, the solution that works will be driven by the resources. The resources will not rise to satisfy the solution. You cannot come up with an effective solution until you understand your resources.
The Apollo 13 metaphor is good because it has a nice visual of what it means to have limited resources: the stuff that’s on the table, which is the same as what’s on the ship. The ship can’t get anymore resources. Where the metaphor breaks down is that for us, our resources are largely invisible. They’re on the table, but you can’t see them, you don’t know what they are, and you don’t know how much of them there are. You clearly have a firm grasp of the problem. The problem is easy to see and comprehend. What you don’t realize is that you have no comprehension of your resources. Because our resources are invisible, you have no way of knowing what they are, how much of them there are, the nature of what they are, or for that matter what resources you don’t have. Non-existent resources look almost exactly like existent ones. The only way to find out what resources you actually have is to try to press them into service. If the resources come through for you, they were there all along. If they don’t, you probably never had them. If they don’t act like you expected them to, then you didn’t understand them to begin with. When it comes to resources, you are working blind. You have to feel them out. You have to discover by sheer experimentation what works and what doesn’t work.
What you have written here is nothing new. I have seen it echoed by so many people. It is pretty much the same novice solution everyone gravitates toward out of ignorance of reality. All you have done was to phrase it in your own personal writing style. The fact that you wrote it illustrates that you are a neophyte to activism, but that’s OK. We all have to start somewhere, and honestly, nearly everyone starts right where you are right now. I did. I was you about six years ago. Hopefully, you’re a little bit like me six years ago as well. I actually tried doing what you’re talking about. I took the time, committed the effort, and made the sacrifices to learn.
The world isn’t what we want it to be. That’s our problem. There’s discrimination in the world, and we don’t want it to be in our world. Even though we understand that, people are slow to realize that the resources it takes to change that aren’t what we want them to be either. We just assume that our community and our available resources are infinite and will always come through for us to satisfy the demands of our grand schemes to change the world. However, if the outside world isn’t what we want it to be, by what logic do we assume that our people and resources are going to be exactly what we want them to be? The answer is easy: the problem we can see, the resources we cannot. Since we cannot see our resources, we just assume them to be what we envision them to be. It’s only what we see that seems limited. We can see the problem. It seems finite. We can’t see our resources. They seem infinite. Applying infinite resources to solving a finite problem seems like an easy task. So easy in fact that we feel at liberty to tell other people to go out and do it, and made even easier for us by doing so.
So we form grand schemes counting on limitless resources, just like yours. If you try carrying it out, I guarantee you it will fail. When it does, if you are like most people, you will get very angry at the world for not being what you expected it to be and not coming through with the resources you demanded to make your plan work. You will blame the world for the failure of your solution that ignored the available resources right from the very beginning, and in the end, throw up you hands in utter frustration and storm away swearing to never do activism again. It’s an odd reaction, because if the world were what they wanted it to be, there would be no discrimination problem to solve, but that’s how people think.
However, if you are that extremely rare, intelligent, aware individual, able to see beyond your own ego and accept that the world is what it is, you will look at the failure of your plan and ask, “OK, why didn’t that work?” You will study what happened, learn what it told you about your available resources, gain a better understanding of your resources, and come up with a new solution that works within your new understanding of your invisible resources. Then that new plan will fail. It will fail because you didn’t learn enough about your resources from the first attempt. However, you will have learned more and you will keep trying, failing, and learning, until you find a way through. The person who can do that will be the person who finds our path to equality.
So you say you are writing to motivate others to action. That is at its core the thing about this essay I most take issue with. You are writing about what other people ought to do. However, until you try doing it yourself, you have no idea what works and what doesn’t work. In other words, you are attempting to motivate people to act on a plan that you have no idea if it will work because you have never tried doing it. I know you’ve never tried doing it because if you had, you wouldn’t have written what you wrote. By now, you would have tasted the Fruit Of Knowledge and been driven out of that Eden (or more accurately, have Eden driven out of you). And so far, you’re not even willing to try doing it. You wrote that essay. Every word flowed out of your mind and out through your fingers. You crafted every sentence and paragraph and even proofread it several times (I trust). Now, on top of that, I’ve dared you to try doing it. What better motivator is there than a dare? People do all kinds of stupid stuff on a dare, and you’ve even brushed that off. So, even though you are extremely intimate with this essay and have even been dared to actually do it and it still hasn’t motivated you to actually try it, what makes you think it’s going to motivate anyone else? Let’s say you do motivate someone to act on this plan. Odds are they’re going to be one of those people who confront failure by blaming the world for not working their way and swear to never do activism again. If you’re successful in motivating with this plan, you will be successful in chasing people away from activism. If you’re going to motivate people to action, shouldn’t it at least be a tried and tested plan?
I’m not kidding. I’m not playing games with you. I’m not trying to call your bluff. I’m serious. Try it. Just trying it. Before you go wasting people’s time motivating them to carrying out a cockamamie scheme that just won’t work because the resources to achieve it don’t exist at least show them the respect of trying to make it work and discovering that fact for yourself. Your essay is a proposed solution to a problem. It is a solution formulated with utter disregard and out of complete ignorance of available resources. It is a solution that demands that resources come forward to satisfy it, and not a solution crafted to fit the available resources. Yours is a solution that is doomed to fail. You only have to try it to discover that, but you also have to approach that failure with an open mind to understand why. If you’re the type to blame the world for not rising to meet your plan then you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.
We have too many people talking about what other people ought to do. We need people doing. We need people experimenting. We need people probing the limits of our resources and coming up with working plans that work within our resources. That’s what you should be motivating people to do. To do that, you need to become one of them.
One thing to addto this astute comment: when you do put your plan into action, be prepared to have self-important jerks throwing rocks from the sidelines and telling you how wrong you and your plan are, undercutting your effectiveness. People who dare to act become visible to people they never even knew existed, and far too many of those people will care more about expressing their dim view of you than they do about helping make progress. This is because your taking action highlights their own inaction by contrast and embarrasses them. Many will send you their critiques on the tips of poison darts.
Thank you allQuite frankly, as I get more active in the community, I see all of the reasons to NOT be active. As we have talked off line, Laurel, it is one thing to respectfully disagree, suggest other ways and provide for consensus, it is another thing to throw mud and call names. You and others have been huge victims of that. You and I have disagreed on HB 235, but at no time did we make it personal. That is what political discourse is about. I had a community politician try to take me to task for simply being saddened by the NCTE’s position. I got a lecture about Mara Keisling and all of the hard work she does. I didn’t reference Mara, who I believe works tirelessly. I was taken to task for simply disagreeing with the organization’s position. You have people like Cathy Brennan and others who figure since they are doing something, we all have to love it.
We spend so much energy on labels. It is a joke. Who is Trans enough. Who is TS. Who is TG. Gay,Inc. It is all crap.
You are right, that the minute you speak out, you get ripped at. Even Azerica, above, who is trying to provide positive guidance and motivation to my thoughts has stated I am green, a neophyte and doomed to failure. Maybe so. She says it is about resources. Maybe so. All I know is that I see enough of our people flying and driving around the country going to dinners and other events to thing that there are resources, just very ineffectively used. Turn SCC or First Event into a side meeting for a Trans Congress. Hell, we are all in one place.
The problem is also that we have created a lobbying industry with its own fiefdoms. You can see it in the online responses.
What she, and others, don’t see is someone who has run a 22 state billion dollar company. And it didn’t start out that way. Regardless, I see so many small people wasting so much energy and assets. But what do I know? I have a life to live.
I hope you will stay engaged, EvaI can vouch for the fact that you are able to disagree without being disagreeable, and in my book that goes a long way. I think that you and I have the same ultimate goals in sight, even if we don’t always agree on tactics. Let’s both keep at it. We’ll get there.
You’re not doomed to failure.The plan you described in your essay is doomed to failure. I could list the specific reasons, but it all boils down to the same thing. The people and resources aren’t there to support it. Until you experience it for yourself, you will never truly understand. However, that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to failure, unless of course you don’t try. Failing, and failing many times over, is an absolute inevitable milestone on the road to success. You can’t hope to succeed without failing. There is no shame in failing. The only shame is in not trying. I’m just trying to get you to try. When you try, you will find out why it doesn’t work. Trying is the only way to find out why it doesn’t work. Finding out what doesn’t work is the only way to come up with something that does work. You’re writing to motivate others, and I’m writing to motivate you.
Try. Act. Do. It’s the only way.
As I said…I have a life to live…