Friday Philosophy: Faded Rumors of Equality

Once upon a time, way back at Forest Hills Elementary School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, we were taught about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  Included in that was the Whitman Massacre by members of the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes, who blamed the Whitmans for bringing measles to them along with their religion.  I remember going to the library and reading, among other things, about the Nez Perce and how they were treated by our government.  They now have a reservation in Idaho and who usually call themselves the Nimiipuu.

Out of such things are activists born.

I became, at that moment a firm believer that people should have equal rights in the eyes of the government, that nobody should be treated as second-class citizens, or worse.

I’m old.  I was born the year that President Truman signed an order enforcing equality in the military for people of color and different ethnic backgrounds and different religions.

I was six when Brown v Board of Education was decided.  I didn’t learn about it until several years later, however.  Among other reasons, we didn’t have television at the time.

Emmet Till was murdered when I was 7.  And Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.  Central High School in Little Rock was “integrated” when I was 9.  We had television by then.

LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when I was a sophomore at LOHS.  When I was a senior, our school in the suburbs of Portland, OR was integrated.  Darrell Copper came from Delaware with his family as employees of a former congressional aide.  Darrell was one of my back-ups when I was stating center on the basketball team.

And I learned that many of my former friends were racists…not vocally, but certainly in private.

Goddess help me, they were also homophobes.  They said really awful things about my friend, Terry Bean (a co-founder of the precursor of the Human Rights Campaign).  I learned that what I felt inside me should not be expressed…and, unfortunately, not to hang out with Terry.

When I ran away to Haight Street to dodge the draft after flunking out of Penn because of those things I was still keeping locked inside, I learned the awful truth that even there I would have to keep silent.

Then Martin was murdered and so I boarded a bus in San Francisco for the Poor People’s March on Washington, a bus headed for Resurrection City, which I helped a little to erect in Washington, DC.  And LBJ signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Then began the long dark times.  Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan (who vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, but was overridden by Congress), and Bush I.

By the time Clinton came along, I had had enough and I came out, using the Clintons as a very small bit of cover for this professor at an Arkansas university transitioning from male to female.  And I discovered that I could not just transition and keep my mouth shut.  Not any longer.

People said what was required was a major education effort.  I’m an educator.  So for a time as Education Director of the Arkansas Gay and Lesbian Task Force and for a time as Heartlands Regional Coordinator of the PFLAG Transgender Special Outreach Network, but mostly on my own, I have educated.

Here we are, 17 years later.  I teach now at a predominately black college in New Jersey, with a sizable minority of hispanic students.  I still believe in working for equal rights, for whoever needs them.  Some of you may have noticed my more recent efforts, which have been here and at Daily Kos.

In those 17 years, what I have mostly learned is that we win very few battles…depending a bit on the definition of “we”…and that each victory required a very painful fight   And try as I might not to get my hopes up, sometimes they do…and most of the time they are trampled on by the foes of equality, who believe that people like me having equal rights somehow infringes on their own rights.  They call whatever rights I can scrounge up “special”, but when those same rights belong to them, they are called “natural”.

Recently, for the first time ever, congress passed and the president signed an act which benefited transgendered people.  The only times we have even been mentioned before was in acts which specifically were denied application to us.  And the Shepard/Byrd Act even has people on our side of the gulf speaking against it, even though it applies to everyone in this country.  I guess it was the expansion of “everyone” to include us that really irked some people.  At least that’s what it feels like.

Tuesday night brought more bad news.  I had listened to reports from Maine on the marriage equality referendum and allowed my hopes to breathe air, once again.  And they were dashed.  Yes, there was some success:  we could get a domestic partnership in Washington now (though we already had one of those in New Jersey, which we traded in for a civil union) and use a bathroom in Kalamazoo, MI without fear of being arrested.  Anyone who has never been arrested for using a bathroom will never know how humiliating that experience is.

And I hear this:  Real Progress:  Transgendered people get protections in Tampa.  Except it is not yet final and I have had my hopes dashed too often by now.

And now people are moving on with their lives, going about their business of other issues in other places.  Almost unnoticed in the aftermath of Tuesday was this story from yesterday:   Trans-inclusive ENDA gets a hearing.

Another chance at equality.  Another evocation of hope.  Now, I have a job.  I managed, with the help from the fact that I can be very obstinate, to keep my job…until I didn’t want it anymore.  And I managed, with some difficulty, to find another.  True, I had to learn a whole new subject to teach, but after 9 years of teaching programming, it appears that powers that be are finally going to let me return to teaching my beloved mathematics.

But I am atypical.  Here’s a bit from an article in The Hill:

transgender people experience unemployment at double the rate of the general population

–Dr. Jaime Grant, Policy Institute Director, NGLTF

And double is a minimum estimate.  Unemployment may be as high as 25% among us.  And many of us who are employed do not have jobs in the fields in which we were educated and/or trained.

There was even someone from the administration who spoke at the hearing, who said this bill was “a high priority.”  There go those hopes again.

We have come too far in our struggle for equal justice under the law to remain silent or stoic when our LGBT brothers and sisters are still being mistreated and ostracized for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their skills or abilities, and everything to do with myths, stereotypes, fear of the unknown and prejudice.

–Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, DOJ

No republican member of the committee was in attendance at the hearing.  Not one.

No transgender people were invited to testify at the hearing.  Not one.

So I shall try to rein my hopes back in.

And for you on the front lines of the battle for health care reform, please don’t let the republicans add this amendment to it:

None of the funds authorized or appropriated under this act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be used to cover any part or portion of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of any sex or gender reassignment procedure, surgery related to such a sex change, hormone therapy for a sex change or pre- and post-operation treatments for a sex change.

–proposed amendment to any Health Care Reform bill

It’s hard enough to get a doctor to treat us and insurers to cover us without giving them an escape clause.  Medical treatment should not be codified into law but be a matter decided between oneself and one’s doctor.  I’m over 15 years post-op.  If insurers had their way every health concern I have would be considered “post-operation treatments for a sex change.”

I have tried to keep this as rational an essay as I can.  My emotions wanted me to write something far different.

My emotions want to know, for instance, why when I had my penis removed in 1994, they also removed my right to marry a woman.  Nobody yet has given me a good explanation as to why I could be married to a woman from 1969 to 1993, but I cannot marry a woman now.

Nobody has yet explained to me how, when I had a vagina created in 1994, my civil rights should have been taken away from me.

Rational thought and logic have their limits.

I am old and I am tired.  I don’t want people telling me, “Just wait until all the old folks retire.  Then gay people can have equal rights!”

Really?  Wait until after I die?

That makes me even more tired.  And it makes me remember Chief Joseph’s words, which I learned so young, and ask myself at what point they will be my words as well:

Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired.  My heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Things which shall not touch