Category: GLBT

Honestly I can’t understand the resistance to gay people living their lives how they see fit.  I would hope that none of us can.  But what you and I understand that most people in this nation apparently don’t is that it doesn’t fucking matter what your neighbor does unless he is doing it to you…..

Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen — Barack Obama is about to fulfill yet another campaign promise!

(Pregnant pause, whilst heralds blow trumpets and Obamatons fall over themselves in rapture)

White House Green Lights Repeal (of DADT)

Let the minstrels sing.  Let church bells be rung throughout the land!

In the letter, Orszag wrote that “ideally” the Pentagon’s review of implementation would be completed before Congress takes legislative action, but adds, “the Administration understands that Congress has chosen to move forward with legislation now…”

Wait….wait  Is that an actually an admission that the Obama administration never wanted, nor intended, to repeal DADT this year?  That Barack Obama always intended to break his solemn word to the honorably serving GLBT soldiers and the rest of GLBT America?

But, never fear, Obama will keep his promise.

The language would not include a automatic nondiscrimination policy but rather will return authority of the regulations for open service by gays and lesbians to the Pentagon.

Ok, in the words of Margaret Cho, “That’s not what I meant!”.  You mean, returning control of how and why gay people are drummed out of military to the very organization that has been witch hunting gays for 40 years?!

Earlier this week, Caractacus ventured into the world of Michel Foucault.  It’s a world which with, although I am not a philosopher, I have become quite familiar.

We people of the trans variety have often had to deal with the concept of normativity, a concept which Foucault wrote about rather extensively.

If you have not read any Foucault, you probably should, though I should warn you that there will be heavy lifting.  After all, in 2007, Foucault was classified as the most cited intellectual in the humanities.

First off, let’s try to get a grip on the word “normativity”.  

In philosophy, normative statements affirm how things ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, which actions are right or wrong.  Normative is usually contrasted with positive…  Positive statements are factual statements that attempt to describe reality.

The ACLU, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, The Transgender Law Center, and Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund have joined in the drafting of a letter (pdf) in support of the national standards for the prevention, detection, response, and monitoring of sexual abuse as recommended (pdf) by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission.  Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people are at heightened risk of being abused when in detention, both at the hands of other inmates and at the hands of facility staff.

Twelve days ago, I encountered the following comment by a well-known member of Daily Kos.

What exactly is the medical condition that is treated by transgender surgery? Is it vanity? Something is not right about drastic alteration of a healthy body. I feel the same way about plastic surgery, by the way.

Transgender is an acquired condition, a choice, unlike homosexuality, and I don’t think it deserves the same protections.

I’ve let it steep and marinate, trying to come up with a way to address the comment.  And during that time, I’ve wondered how many people of like mind inhabit DK.  Given the number of anti-trans bigots that respond to general news story blogs in regards to stories about people who are trans, I’m willing to bet the commenter who made that comment is not flying solo.

So how should I approach it?  I decided that a trip back in time might fit the bill.

Have you ever worried that you might be fired if you gave any inclination that you might be straight?  You can be…with impunity…in any state which does not give equal employment protection based on sexual orientation.

It’s true that it rarely happens that someone would be fired for being straight, but it has happened.

To my knowledge, nobody has every been fired for being cisgender (i.e non-transgender).  But there is no reason, in most states, why it couldn’t happen.

The examples of people being fired for being transgender are too numerous to include.

That’s the thing about laws protecting gender-identity or sexual orientation.  They are for the protection of everybody, not just GLBT people.

You have to love George Takei.  Not only is he an excellent actor, he has what one might call “personality”.  He also has an Arkansas link to me, and this sort of exposes the foul underbelly of racial prejudice.

He was born in 1937 of American and Japanese ancestry, putting him well into the Social Security crowd now.  I really like the new adverts that he does for the TeeVee manufacturer.  He is looking more youthful now than he has for several years.

Cross Posted from SumofChange.com

Also from the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit (paprogressivesummit.com), I’d like to bring you a few videos form a panel simply entitled ‘Marriage Equality’.  On this panel, the speakers discussed the benefits, issues, and consequences or allowing homosexual couples marriage rights equal to those of heterosexual ones.  The panelists and approached the topic from a variety of angles.  Some spoke about the legal issues equality, both in the PA state legislature and in the constitution, others talked about the religious aspects, especially from the Christian and Jewish traditions, and others talked about the moral and human rights aspect of the debate.

The clips below go into many of the arguments against marriage equality and gay marriage and why most of them struggle for validity.  The first video, PA state senator Daylin Leach, who sponsored a bill in the PA state legislature in support on marriage equality, goes into many of the arguments against gay marriage that he has heard while debating the bill.  As he says, no one has debated him twice, because no one has presented him an argument with any validity.  The second video looks at many of the religious issues brought up by the marriage equality debate.  Many think that religion has no part of the legal debate over gay marriage and often when religion is invoked, it is done so incorrectly.  Finally, the last clip discusses why marriage equality supporters should want legalized gay marriage and not civil unions.  Civil unions seem like an acceptable compromise, but really they are impractical and still discriminatory.

For more videos from the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit, go to SumofChange.com/paprog

For more info on the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit and it’s organizer, Keystone progress, please go to paprogressivesummit.org and keystoneprogress.org

What causes transsexuality?  How do people know they are transsexual?  These are two very different questions…and quite difficult to answer, but I am willing to take them on today.

We humans seem to want either a scientific or religious answer to everything.  Especially when it comes to anything involving sex or gender-related behavior, if their is no known scientific cause, then there must be something morally wrong.

Why is that?  Scientific curiosity I can understand.  But it certainly should be disentangled from moral essentialism.

Do people really think that if there is no known scientific cause to a phenomenon, then it must be the work of…or evidence of…dark forces?

Justice for bank fraudsters: Throw them in Guantanamo and sort it out later (speaking of the crooks at J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, etc., etc.) Just like they do with “terrorists”.

If a military tribunal is good enough for Osama Bin Laden’s driver, it’s good enough for the bank fraudsters…and a firing squad at the end.

Justice for Karl Rove: Extraordinarily rendition him to Afghanistan, paradrop him into Kandahar wearing a sandwichboard saying “I Love Salmon Rushdie” on one side and “Death to Islam” on the other.

Justice for opponents of repealing DADT:  Fire them from their jobs and then enlist them in an organization that makes referencing, justifying or speaking anything in reference to Christianity or religion a court martial offense.  Assert that they have “freedom of speech” despite this but they have no rights in this organization.  Give them no privacy, forbid them heterosexual relationships and make them serve their country, only at the end to kick them out because they’re “immoral” and tell them their existence is “contrary to good order and discipline”.

Justice for Teabaggers.  Send them the full bill for their sewer, water, police and fire department protection.  If they object, call them dirty socialists.

Justice for opponents of granting GLBT couples full marriage rights and repealing DOMA:

First, dissolve their marriages and tell them they don’t have the right to use that word in regard to their relationships.  Then put them in a state that has “civil unions”.  Tell them these civil unions are the equivalent of heterosexual marriage and they ought to be happy with that.

Wait until said people get old with their unmarried but civilly unioned partners.  During this period, they have to file federal income taxes separately and cannot move to any other state while keeping their supposed “rights” intact.  

Then, when old, take one partner to the hospital, refuse to let the other partner see the first or make medical decisions on his or her behalf, then sell their belongings on EBay.  Let the first partner die in the hospital, confine the other to a nursing home and then tell him or her you don’t know what s/he is whining about, because s/he has “equal rights”.

Then tell them that Obama feels their pain.

I’ve been observing some of the commentary, not just in the blogs, but also in the world at large, and have been debating with myself about whether it is time to start over, with a brand new education campaign, rather than just continuing the old one.

Some people just aren’t up to speed…like the right-wingers who keep referring to us transpeople as being “gender confused”.  Nobody here is confused, except the people who can’t grasp the concept of the separation between sex and gender…or the fact that DNA is not a life sentence, but rather a suggestion.

The thing is that we transpeople have done the deep digging into who we are and have come up with an answer that some people don’t like.  And those people think we deserve to be punished for acting on what we discovered about ourselves.

Sprinkled amongst the words in my essay is music supplied by some talented transfolk.  I apologize in advance for finding nothing actually by Wendy Carlos at Youtube (but a lot of stuff “in the style of”).

It should now be apparent by those who are aware of the recent and not so recent sweep of history that a few facts have been coming into focus.  And if it is not, it should be.

Both major political parties of the United States use GLBT people.  It’s not that they ignore us, it’s not that they regard us as an inconvenience.  No, they actively use us to achieve the only thing that is important to them: achieving and maintaining political power, which power is used to enhance the wealth and status of selected groups in our society.

And if you look at the flow and ebb of political power, and what is done with this power with respect to not just GLBT issues, but women’s issues, immigration issues and all manner of social issues is this: Both parties have an interest in keeping the political game going.

It is well established among GLBT folks that the Republican Party has been and continues to be hostile to the well being and first class citizenship of our people; this is not and has not been in dispute for a long, long time.  They are hardly blameless in the game of American social values football, while they tend to be neglected because their position is and has been so clear for so long.  Nonetheless, the interest is in not so much oppressing GLBT people as using them.  Using our existence for fundraising, for demagoguery and for all manner of pandering in order to win elections; to keep and hold power.

Nonetheless, this leads to extremes of social discourse that tend to slide under the perceptual range of the average American; there are things we notice and pay attention to that average people who are not so much interested in GLBT issues tend to ignore, less those that spend inordinate amount of time on liberal political radio and so-called “liberal” blogs and websites.

Extremes such as this.

If you asked me, I would agree with a few propositions, were they brought to me by my GLBT friends and gay allies:

1.  Yes, there are people who genuinely hate and/or fear GLBT people, even people who occupy political office, and that for those people, this is not a game, given the opportunity, they would destroy us, and possibly have all of us killed.

2.  Yes, those people (who want to destroy us) tend to be concentrated on the far right, and that those people in the political center, or to the left of center, where anti-gay, tend to want more to use us and keep us from advancing, than they want to “destroy” us.

What is not so clear, however, to the average politically unengaged American, is the degree to which prominent Democrats, and the Democratic Party, also use GLBT people to their political ends, all of which makes the tolerance among Democrats to far right extremes doubly disgusting in that these extremes of hate and fear might not exist but for the fact that Democrats use this debate to keep and enhance their power.  

Remember, my proposition is the Democrats and the Democratic Party in general are using us despite full knowledge of the degree of damage this hate does to the social discourse.  And that this is a political game played out among Democrats and Republicans, not to settle the social debate on one side or another, but to keep the debate going, to serve their political ends.

This may be somewhat obvious to the average poster on Docudharma, but I would point things out that might not be so obvious to the average American.