Well, Of Course NCTE Doesn’t Want to Talk About Hate Crimes

From Queer Channel Media:

In December 2018, the National Center for Transgender Equality, located in a downtown D.C. office building, received three threats in less than 24 hours, including one promising to “rid the earth of scum and garbage like you.”

NCTE media relations manager Gillian Branstetter told the Blade this week that the group decided not to publicly disclose the incident. Branstetter said the group reported the incident to police and the Post found out about it by obtaining the police report.

“While I recognize the relative newsworthiness of threats against a national organization, we are far more concerned – and would urge reporters to be far more concerned – with the epidemic of violence impacting transgender people who do not have the privilege of a public profile and institutional capacity,” Branstetter said.

Or – and I’m just taking a wild, but educated, guess here….

perhaps The Quisling and her minions don’t want to discuss hate crimes.

Why?

Glad you asked.

Any such discussion will cause people who understand that (1) no hate crime law has ever prevented any hate crime; (2) no hate crime law ever will; and (3) employment discrimination laws do not stop all bigots from discriminating but are known to stop some people from discriminating who otherwise would to ask why NCTE sold out not just trans people but ALL LGBT people by rolling over and accepting a hate crime law (and gay-only military ban repeal) in 2009 instead of the trans-inclusive ENDA that trans people not named Mara Keisling and who are not wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Human Right Scampaign fought for at great personal and professional cost.

The Human Right Scampaign Gets the TERF it Always Wanted

The Washington Blade is passing off as journalism a pathetic, sycophantic press release about the Human Right Scampaign’s latest manufactured millionaire-to-be, Alphonso David.  What the body count will be among those who drown in the slobber while attempting to read it is anybody’s guess.

All that trans people really need to take away from the thing is this quote from David:

The lesbian community may have very different concerns than the transgender community and we need to make sure that all of those concerns are being represented equally.

One person remarked to me that this sounded like code.

I disagree.

It doesn’t sound like code at all.

It is naked TERFism.

Sarah McBride and the other trans tokens of Rhode Island Avenue who think Gay, Inc. has accepted them now have a choice to make: Do they continue drinking the kool-aid while getting rich off of their own people’s blood? Or do they do the right thing?

Always remember: There are few sure bets, but you can bet anything and everything every time that HRC and everyone infected by its professionalized transphobia will always do the wrong thing.

I Am More Likely to Vote for a Straight Republican than for a Gay Republican

Seriously.

I’m still trans and I’m still liberal as ever. But I do mean what I say in the title to this piece.

By now I’m sure we’ve all heard what we all could have predicted: that the Log Cabin Republicans would come up with some rationale – written in skunk urine on parchment made from Terry Dolan’s rotting corpse – for them to endorse Donald Trump for re-election.

What fewer people (at least outside of Texas) may have heard is that a gay Republican who maintains his wealth by accepting money from LGBTQ Texans – you know, a group from whom, collectively, the Trump Administration is trying to strip all civil rights – via his ownership of a San Antonio gay bar is going to one-up that self-hating Trump-endorsement by running for Congress…

as a Republican of course.

Now, the likelihood of my voting for any Republican is slim to none, but even I’ll concede there are a handful of sane people out there who still want to hold on to their Republican Party.

The problem is: Those who were in office aren’t any more; and when they were they either didn’t or couldn’t exercise any control over the radical christianists who controlled the legislative bodies they served in.  (As for other positions?  The judge I clerked for and the Republican governor who appointed him have both long since retired.)

But, again, there once were a handful of such folks.  I went to great pains to call as many out – positively – as I could in my doctoral dissertation on transgender legal history.

And sometimes the past isn’t so far in the past.

Bruce Rauner, the hetero Republican, now-former governor of Illinois, signed a very positive transgender birth certificate bill into law in 2017 – at great political risk to himself. A christofascist tried to primary him last year – using the birth certificate law as a weapon against him – and damn near succeeded.  (He then lost the general election to the Democratic candidate.)

The problem was that Rauner had enough of the usual GOP baggage (he was a vicious union buster – among other things – who essentially bought the governorship in 2014; think Scott Walker with the big personal bankroll that Walker did not have but without the rabid Republican legislature that Walker did have in Wisconsin) that I could not in good conscience vote for him even though his signing the trans bill was a very, very good thing, something I’d be willing to genuinely thank him for should the chance ever arise.

I don’t believe for one second a cis gay male Republican would have signed that bill. And I’m even less willing to believe a cis lesbian Republican would have.

And that should expose the Log Cabin Con to anyone who is paying attention.

For decades now, Log Cabin-oids have been whining about how LGBTQ people who live in the real world won’t support them. Log Cabin-oids assert that only Log Cabin-oids can change the Republican party – to make it less toxic for LGBTQ people.

Therefore, we LGBTQ people who live in the real world owe them our votes.

But look at them – and what gay Republicans actually stand for.

They’re not better than moderate/sane straight Republicans.

They’re not even better than the christofascists.

At the end of the day, they’re worse.

There is no anti-LGBTQ policy that gay Republicans will not either support or be an apologist for – either directly or indirectly.  The endorsement of Donald Trump for re-election in 2020 by itself proves the accuracy of the previous sentence – but there are decades and decades of self-loathing and selling-out that preceded it.

When someone takes great pains to tell you what they are by demonstrating what they are, believe them.

Anyone running as a Republican now is telling you that they are, by extension, Donald Trump.

Believe them.

Any gay person running as a Republican now is telling you they will sell you out for personal gain; that they will trade your ability to work and even your very life for a tax cut.

Believe them.

Vote accordingly.

And spend your money accordingly.

The Next Cis Lesbian to be ‘Erased’ by Trans Women Will be the First

From Carrie Lyell at The Independent:

Yes, lesbians are marginalised within the LGBT+ movement, but this has nothing to do with trans people. These tactics are nothing but scaremongering designed to divide us….

…

Let’s be clear: in my personal life, and as editor of the world’s leading magazine for queer women, I know a lot of trans people. Not one of them has ever tried to recruit me or even asked me if I’ve ever thought about transitioning. Not one has “pressured” me to “accept them as sexual partners”. This is scaremongering, designed to divide us. But believe me: it’s not a thing.

Yes, it is scaremongering.

But there is another term for it: exterminationist bigotry.

There is a reason that #TERFIsNotASlur.  And a significant portion of it involves the fact that almost all of the voices fraudulently asserting that TERFs are being ‘silenced’ by trans women are allowed to use said voices in forums such as editorial column inches in major publications and – my favorite – tenured positions in academia that trans women are excluded from ever being considered for (often by the very TERF academics who claim that they are being silenced.)

#TERFIsNotASlur.

Never has been, never will be.

The Washington Post Goes All-In on the Kinder, Gentler TERFism

It is emblazoned with a deceptive title: “Pass the Equality Act, but don’t abandon Title IX.”

Just as friendly and inviting as “Don’t Panic,” eh?

The authors profess to believe “The Equality Act’s provisions are much needed and long overdue.”

But, of course, that quoted sentence ends with the following: “with one caveat.”

The Washington Post should have displayed a modicum of integrity and demanded that the title read: “Pass the Equality Act, but ensure that it embraces a reboot of Plessy v. Ferguson‘s ‘separate but equal.'”

Janice Raymond’s 1979 The Transsexual Empire was the full-on TERF analogue to Mein Kampf.  What Doriane Coleman, Martina Navratilova and Sanya Richards-Ross have been permitted to place in the Post‘s pages is the kinder, gentler – and far more media-friendly – call to exterminate trans women.

Think of it as The Transsexual Empire with Lee Atwater’s ghost as an unlisted co-author.

Don’t use the buzzwords. Claim that you want to tolerate their existence.  But then make sure they’re never allowed to actually do anything – wink, wink! They’ll die and go to minimum-wage hell just the same!

I refuse to link to this obscenity.

Martina Navratilova’s journey into TERFism has been underway for some time, so her involvement in this really should come as no surprise (ditto for the Washington Post‘s, in light of its continued employment of Jonathan Capehart, the presumed author of the transphobic ‘incremental progress’ screed during the ENDA Crisis of 2007). As for Richards-Ross?  Well, NBC is Rachel Maddow’s employer, right?

But what of Doriane Coleman?

Coleman is privileged with a position in legal academia – a venue which is currently as free of trans women as she wants women’s athletics to be.

Yes, we know that certain high-ranking politicos who have law degrees can parachute from political lives (especially ones plagued with scandal) to law school gigs quicker than Samantha can twitch her nose or Jeannie can blink.  But the majority of law school teaching gigs are decided to some degree by hiring committees.

And I’ll reiterate: At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, no law school in the United States permits any trans woman – even ones with scholarly publication records longer than any of their tenured faculty – to be privileged with the level of ivory tower perch from which Coleman is allowed to spew her neo-Plessy v. Ferguson-ism.  (It is possible that there is currently a trans woman adjunct or two as there have been at tiny times in the past – and a few years ago even I was able to teach undergrad sections of a University of Iowa law school course offered to undergrads as well as law school students – but the real doors of the real academy remain closed to us.)

Why should we believe that any TERF‘s espousal of separate-but-equal-ism stops at one particular aspect of life?  Follow any TERF list or TERF Twitter thread. The separate-but-equal-ism does not stop with athletics because the bigotry does not stop with athletics.

Why should anyone believe that Coleman, when involved – formally or informally – in deciding who the Duke University School of Law hires, would treat a trans woman applicant equally-and-non-separately?

No One Dared Call ‘The Final Solution’ ‘The Final Solution’ Until It Was Well Underway

With that in mind, I offer up a Tweet thread by Brynn Tannehill about what is going on under our noses while those who should care are going wall-to-wall about Joe Biden’s nose.

Twenty years ago I asserted that if Gay, Inc. did not then and there substantively include trans people and demand that Barney Frank modify ENDA to include trans people that there would be no federal anti-discrimination legislation in my working lifetime.

Of course there was no chance for trans-inclusive ENDA to pass in 1999 – though not because trans people were ‘too much too soon’.  We all know – and knew – the reason why: Because there also was no chance for Barney Frank’s and HRC’s gay-only ENDA to pass in 1999.

Barney Frank and HRC knew what game they were playing back then – and it was NOT ‘incremental progress.’

For I also asserted twenty years ago that the same people within the same Gay, Inc. organizations that were then systematically excluding us from consideration from gainful employment within said organizations and who were not merely speaking ‘incremental progress’-speak on ENDA but who were actively working against trans equality (while cashing paychecks funded by donations intended to support civil rights) were setting the stage – some unwittingly but some very purposely – for the extermination of trans people.

I was pish-poshed on all of those points by LGBs who either lived in jurisdictions that protected their jobs or who had jobs with entities with non-discrimination policies – gay-only non-discrimination policies of course.

I was also pish-poshed on all of those points by that certain rare brand of trans person – the handful who either had already sold out the community in favor of gay marriage (for some reason I’m looking west as I type) or who was in the process of selling out the community in favor of some combination of good, old-fashioned money and the aspiration of being to HRC what Samuel L. Jackson’s character was to Leonardo Di Caprio’s in Django Unchained (and for some reason I felt the need to look east while typing that.)

We’re all going up against the wall now – and I do mean all: Ts as well as LGBs.

The only thing I care about now is holding out long enough to see some, if not all, of those who thought that they could cash out by forcefully putting their boots on our necks to gain personal financial traction enjoy the wall before I do.

Is it a far, far better thing I do today than I’ve ever done before?

No.

But none of you ever cared about the better things that we were capable of.  All you ever cared about was convincing yourselves that you were not merely better than the christianist right, but also better than us.

As Negan recently said: “No one ever thinks that they’re the evil one.”

It takes the victims of that evil to point it out.

I won’t stop pointing it out until I actually am up against that wall.

Of Course, When You Really Think About It…

Joe Solmonese actually is the perfect person to be the head of a political party’s national convention that is being held in the state of Wisconsin.

After all, Wisconsin is the ONLY remaining state with a gay rights law that does not include trans people along with LGBs.

I guess the only surprise is that Elizabeth Birch, Winnie Stachelberg and Liz Seaton weren’t also announced as his official posse.

Democratic National Committee to Trans People: Drop Dead!

That should be the title to any news item announcing this development:

Joe Solmonese, a former head of the Human Rights Campaign, has been named chief executive for the 2020 Democratic National Convention Committee in Milwaukee.

But, of course, it won’t be.

And, of course, just like the Washington Blade item from which I took that sentence, it is ever so unlikely that any media outlet that has a history of dutifully acting as a scrivener for organs of Gay, Inc., will bother reminding people – particularly the young, cutesy, telegenic trans people that the Human Right Scampaign now employs to con other trans people into forgetting that it was and always will be the most transphobic entity in the nation – that Solmonese committed criminal fraud in 2007 when he told Southern Comfort’s attendees that his organization would oppose any non-inclusive version of ENDA, knowing full well (1) that his organization had no intention of opposing a non-inclusive ENDA and (2) that his patently false claim would entice at least some trans people and trans rights supporters who otherwise would never have joined HRC and/or donated money to the Scampaign to join it and/or donate money to it.

Oh…

And let us not forget all of the ever-so-creative ways that Appletini Joe (and Queen Elizabeth III before him) utilized to con all who would listen into believing that HRC had over a half-million ‘members.’

When Paul Manafort finally enters federal prison to serve his time for fraud, Joe Solmonese should be there to welcome him there as his cellmate.

Instead, he’s living the cushy life he earned by helping to ensure that there will never be federal LGBT employment anti-discrimination during my working lifetime.

But rest assured, Joe.  You’re not at the top of my list of thoroughly disgusting transphobes who have never paid a price for their thoroughly disgusting transphobia.

That position is reserved for whoever made the decision to insult trans people by opening the door to your political casket to give you yet another undeserved opportunity that no trans person was ever considered for.

Is Cosmopolitan UK Going to Remove This Example of Group Libel Now That The Source Admits It Is False?

UK ‘journalism‘…

Murderer Ian Huntley wants to change gender so he can live in a women’s prison

…certainly seems to be TERF-infected.

The now-proven-false story of that particular male inmate allegedly desiring to transition was not merely false, not merely inflammatory against that particular inmate but instead an act of group libel against all trans people everywhere – created, perpetrated and propagated with the sole intent of driving negative publicity against all trans people everywhere, but particularly against trans women.

A Trans Rights Activist’s Trans Rights Activist

Word has come that Texas trans activist Sarah DePalma is not doing very well.

While rummaging through photos looking for a good one of her, I happened across this one – which I’d forgotten about.  Even more than any of the ones which will be out there of her marching in parades, I think this one is as good of a representation of Sarah the serious-as-a-heart-attack activist as you’ll find.

What I know for sure about the photo is as follows:

(1) I took it.

(2) I used B&W film.

(3) It was taken in January 1999 – during 1999 Texas Trans Lobby Day (which, though not pre-planned, ended up coinciding with the date of George W. Bush’s State of the State address – and if I’ve got the date of that correct, it would be January 27.)

(4) The location was the Capitol office of State Rep. Debra Danburg, an ally of the trans community if there ever was one.

What I don’t remember is who is in the photo along with Sarah.

So, while Sarah is the person you should be keeping in your thoughts at the moment, if you happen to recognize either or both of the other people in the photo, don’t hesitate to pass the info along in a comment.