Columnists :: Holding The Center
Red October by Richard J. Rosendall
contributing writerThursday Oct 25, 2007 Red October used to be a fictional Soviet submarine imagined by Tom Clancy. This month it has been applied to the heat wave in the eastern United States. I think I will remember this Red October not for the unseasonable weather but for the storm of rage by many LGBT activists against Rep. Barney Frank and others over the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
Late in the balmiest October in memory, we face the incredible prospect that LGBT organizations - if Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s transgender-inclusive amendment fails on the House floor - will seek the defeat of a gay rights bill that has been kicking around in one form or another for 33 years. It’s enough to make activists who know their history see red.
I suspect, however, that if the Baldwin Amendment fails, Frank’s gay-only version of ENDA, H.R. 3685, will pass. (The vote, which was scheduled for this week, has been postponed.) The question is, what will activists do then? Punish members of Congress for supporting a pro-gay bill? If they are prepared to do that, they might as well send champagne to our enemies.
Our October madness, like the World Series, will soon be a memory. Strange as it may seem, many in our community have paid little attention to this fight. Of course, popular apathy is not exclusive to ENDA; yet even people who follow politics might ask whether issues like military discrimination are not more important. Indeed, most employers, after decades of experience under Title VII, know enough to keep quiet about their biased motives. The main value of a law like ENDA may be its confirmation of changing social standards. But your perspective will be different if you are a transgender person who cannot get a job. We all have learning to do.
We tend to take our civil order for granted. The grisly images following a terrorist attack on Benazir Bhutto’s motorcade in Karachi, Pakistan last week help put things into perspective. As misguided as I consider the all-or-nothing approach to ENDA, and as unfair as I think many of the accompanying attacks are, angry messages fall a good deal short of insurrection. Neither did Barney Frank hurl incendiary devices; he talked to his colleagues and called a press conference.
Creating change requires gaining receptive attention for your concerns. Visibility does not automatically bring understanding, but it is a prerequisite. The point is that gender variance exists whether it is acknowledged or not, and repressing it is as useless as punishing left-handed children. Bringing home to people the recognition that transgender people are not remote abstractions but are their neighbors requires persistent and patient engagement.
The acrimony notwithstanding, this month’s outpouring of higher-profile advocacy for transgender equality, like the Senate’s passage of trans-inclusive hate crime legislation, is progress on which to build. As vehement as our intra-movement disagreements are, we can find ways to channel our frustration and anger productively instead of maligning one another.
But as most of us move on, we should face the reality that some among us are by temperament perpetually disaffected. They are the sort of people who believe that complex conspiracy theories are the best explanations for every calamity, and are so mistrustful of their own allies that they readily believe the worst about them. These are people who refuse to take "yes" for an answer. Like the 1960s Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), they would rather remain protesting outsiders than join their colleagues who are taking responsibility and moving into governance. At some point, we have to let these self-exiled people go.
This has an ideological dimension, of course. For some, any coexistence with the established order, even when it involves significant but less than perfect change to that order, is a betrayal of the cause. By contrast, most of us do not want even an armchair revolution - we just want equality under the law. Similarly, most of us who support equal rights for transgender people do not feel compelled on that account to embrace the farthest-out theories of gender. When Gabriel Rotello suggested that research points to the idea that we are all transgender, he was masking a tendentious redefinition of terms as science, as if respecting atypical gender identities requires the majority to ignore their own biology. That is like telling me that to end discrimination against Muslims I must convert to Islam.
I know better than to ascribe this radicalism to everyone with another view. That would be as bad as accusing all incrementalists of transphobia, or dismissing transgender rights altogether as if we were merely discussing academic theories and not actual people. Just as gay equality has moved closer to the vital center of American politics, so will transgender equality. It will happen faster if we do not act against our own interests by denouncing politicians for giving us only 80 percent of what we want. Should we be satisfied with that 80 percent? Of course not. We take the 80 percent and keep working. That is, unless we are locked inside an ideological echo chamber.
Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us, describes (among much else) the damage done by water’s expansion into hexagonal crystals when it freezes: "Pretty six-sided crystals suggest snowflakes so gossamer it’s hard to conceive of them pushing apart slabs of sidewalk." The fact is, small pressure repeatedly applied over time has a powerful effect, whether against sidewalks or discrimination.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist whose work has appeared on Salon.com and the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.com). He can be reached at rrosendall@starpower.net.
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