Somewhere in the vicinity of Houston, Texas – in the fall of 1989.
Donations (Needed and Appreciated)
Another Named Monster: HRC
Kelli Busey relays a message from C.D. Kirven re: HRC’s act of aggression against those tho don’t drink either the purple-n-yellow or red kool-aid:
The flag belong[ed] to Alex Rangel of Get Equal who brought the trans flag at the
rally. Brian was waving the flag for Alex as I waved the Bi Pride flag. When HRC
asked Brian to remove the flag an argument ensued then another woman walked up to Brian stating she was going to burn the flag while I was having words with
the first women then Brian dropped the flag on the ground and ran off
crying. I tried to console him but he kept crying. I grabbed the Trans Pride flag and
dared either one to say anything to me. The HRC didn’t want the Trans pride flag
behind the speakers bc they did not want to explain what it meant to the press.
As a matter of fact, the lady from HRC told Brian ” This is about marriage
equality not the Trans community.” At this point, we got into a cursing match
which I am not proud of & don’t want repeated.…
I was forced like the undocumented queer activist to change my speech. Everyone
knows I was mistreated the same way he was and since the stories have been
released I have told them again but I’m a black lesbian so no one cared! HRC
claiming my wording was too aggressive and dark!
AstroTurf by Any Other Name is Just as Plastic and Lifeless
…not to mention toxic if swallowed.
Among the comments to Jerame Davis’s piece at Shillerico setting out Davis’s witnessing of the HRC anti-T-flag incident, a rather good question re: ‘Human Rights Campaign’:
What does one expect from an organization that counts as ‘members’ people – whether currently alive or dead – who might never in any way, shape or form have made any conscious attempt or had any desire to ‘join’ HRC but instead just, at some point in their lives, for some reason caused $1.00 or more to leave their pockets and go into the HRC coffers?
The Biggest Problem…
…actually isn’t the removal request per se, but that someone who is allowed to earn a living in Gay, Inc., had to ask that representation question.
Now, here’s another question.
Its a question that I asked well over a decade ago in the Texas Triangle – a question that HRC has yet to answer:
Has HRC ever, at any time, accepted any aid or contribution (monetary or otherwise) the donation of which was conditioned in any way, shape or form, upon excluding transgendered people from HRC-supported national sexual orientation-based anti-discrimination protection legislation or upon excluding transgendered people from HRC’s mission statement?
The deafening silence then meant that there was only one possible answer, leaving the only question after that to be whether or not HRC was, in 2000, still being funded by money with anti-trans strings attached.
Considering HRC’s conduct – and near-genocidal record of employment discrimination against trans people in HRC’s own hiring practices (and, lets face it, when even Gay, Inc. tools such as Dana Beyer and Bil Browning notice it and say something about it, its not just a pet peeve of mine) – over the past 13 years, the question, sadly, still needs to be asked.
All of this continued (specifically financed?) transphobia from HRC is actually a wee bit ironic given that it is in the process of its own gender transition.
How so?
Well, the flag incident itself – and the fact that someone allowed to earn a living at HRC was sufficiently clueless about trans issues so as to have to ask the flag question – indicate that HRC is currently Karl Rove.
How so?
Well, this is not simply equating chunks o’ disreputability (though HRC’s history clearly qualifies “HRC” as a synonym for “disreputable”) but rather pointing out that HRC has become Karl Rove – not the evil-yet-intelligent Karl Rove who stole two presidential elections and engineered numerous other dirty Republican victories but Karl Rove as he was on election night 2012: babbling ‘Romney can win’ nonsense despite being told even by everyone else at Fox ‘News’ that there was no chance for Romney to pull out a victory.
That’s HRC today – epitomized by the cluelessness of this week – a product of years and years of intellectual inbreeding and political echochambering.
The woman pictured above – as well as the rest of HRC’s permanently-employed, detached-from-reality elites – probably actually believe not only that the organization has no history of discriminating against trans people but that the organization currently has no trans problem about which anyone has any place to complain…
which is why HRC is in the process of a gender transition.
This is the image you will be assaulted by if you go to the front page of HRC’s website:
Right now, HRC is Karl Rove, ca. Nov. 6, 2012.
It is seconds away from becoming Sarah Palin, ca. CPAC 2013.
If HRC is, institutionally, as smart as it protrays itself to be (a stretch I know, but follow me nevertheless), it will immediately begin making some job offers – not to militarists and/or preachers with no relevant political or advocacy experience (though, of course, I do suspect that Brynn Tannehill will be transformed into the next Allyson Robinson within a week, if the transformation hasn’t been accomplished already) but to the trans people who, a decade ago, forced HRC to begin acknowledging that trans people actually exist (after we proved that HRC was lying when it claimed that it was actually working positively on trans issues.) Absent a legitimate, substantial and non-token presence of more than one trans person at a time at HRC, the organization will remain an echo chamber of multiple, overlapping copies of the same soundbites – and, on trans issues, those soundbites will continue to be 1975 echoes of HRC founder Steve Endean railing against trans-inclusion in the Minnesota Human Rights Act….
and the organization will remain a cesspool of clueless elites who continue to act as surprised as ever when next trans people have to point out the reality of just how transphobic HRC remains.
Don’t Bet On It
From Maribel Hermosillo at Policymic:
How the Human Rights Campaign Has Failed Minorities
…
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has taken a lead role in campaigning for marriage equality. They have had many marriage equality victories such as in Maine, Washington, and Maryland. The HRC has also prevented constitutional bans that would have stopped further dialogue about marriage equality in Minnesota. While they have been successful in pushing the conversation of marriage equality, what exactly is their messaging?
To anyone who’s paying attention there’s only one answer to that question: lies packaged as truth.
HRC has a very white-only community oriented messaging that is problematic to their stance on diversity. As a progressive organization, they need to learn how to be inclusive to communities who are typically alienated from mainstream politics.
Seriously Maribel…
I wouldn’t bet on that happening.
“What’s the world coming to when you take money from a worldwide known bigot to vote against a measure which has ZERO impact against your constituents,constituents who overwhelmingly contact you in support of the measure?”
Seen receently on Facebook via Jenna Fischetti re: the bought-and-paid-for Maryland state Sen. Jim Brochin.
Calling Upon the Seattle University School of Law to Replace Dean Spade With a Trans Legal Academic Who Would Not Say Something This Moronic
Like, oh…I dunnow, any of the trans women attorneys who have wasted money going through the AALS process over the last five years and who never even received as much as a peep from Seattle U?
Remember this?
“I don’t imagine there will be negative legal consequences for [the Beaties] personally,” says Dean Spade, a lawyer who specializes in transgender rights. After all, the couple is legally married and therefore has all the parental rights a marriage provides. “The idea of someone challenging this doesn’t make sense. The biological tie is generally respected in court.” Spade adds that Beatie’s legal gender can’t be questioned….
That was five years ago.
We all – yes, all – knew what was eventually going to happen; I damn sure did. It was just a matter of when and where.
No, I don’t mean the total and complete implosion of the Beaties’ attempt to make money off of themselves and it having a buttload of legal consequences not just for the Beaties’ but for any trans people who are unlucky enough to live in the same jurisdiction where the Beaties’ nonsense implodes (okay, I mean that as well, but on down a paragraph or two.)
Rather, I mean someone making as ridiculous (not to mention worthy of a legal malpractice action had he given it as formal legal advice) of a statement as Spade made ending up with a position in academia; he’s FTM after all and, clearly, all it takes for a trans person to be eligible for employment within Gay, Inc. and the world of legal academia that it feeds is to not be a trans woman (there’s a reason, after all, that the Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool couldn’t trot out a trans token to spew its sub-Nixonian glob o’ propagandgoo in response to the most recent visible evidence of its ongoing institutional transphobia – one actually witnessed and attested to by some who usually defend Gay, Inc.)
Now, here’s what we have today:
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge has denied a divorce to “Pregnant Man” Thomas Beatie on grounds that the transgender tabloid celebrity did not prove that his Hawaiian marriage was not a same-sex marriage.
Beatie, 39, touted himself on TV talk shows as “The Pregnant Man” in 2008 with his first pregnancy. He subsequently had two more children with his wife Nancy, whom he married in 2003.
The couple filed for divorce in March 2012.
In December, Beatie told The Arizona Republic, “I’m clearly a man: socially, legally, psychologically, physically — the whole ball of wax.”
Perhaps he should have said ‘spade of wax,’ eh? (Or ‘ball of spade’? Nah – ‘spade of wax’ is probably better.)
In a ruling last June, [Judge Douglas Gerlach] noted that the “marriage was between a female … and a person capable of giving birth, who later did so.”
…
Now [Thomas] wants a divorce so that he can marry his new girlfriend.
Gerlach denied that request on Friday.
Memo to Dean Spade: Thomas Beatie’s legal gender has, kinda sorta, just been questioned. And I, in turn, am questioning your standing to hold a law professorship.
This was what I had to say five years ago:
“I don’t imagine there will be negative legal consequences for [the Beaties] personally,” says Dean Spade, a lawyer who specializes in transgender rights. After all, the couple is legally married and therefore has all the parental rights a marriage provides. “The idea of someone challenging this doesn’t make sense. The biological tie is generally respected in court.” Spade adds that Beatie’s legal gender can’t be questioned, and because this is a marriage between a legal man and woman, he doesn’t see how the story could have any impact on heterosexual marriage laws in Oregon.
No negative legal consequences?
Legal gender can’t be questioned?
Doesn’t see how the story could have any impact?
Now…
Should there be consequnces? Should Beatie’s gender be questioned? Should it have any legal impact?
Those are different questions.
But, if Spade really believes there are no possible legal consequences (does he really think some enterprisng political opportunist – even in Oregon or, perhaps, with the feds – won’t try?), and if Spade really believes that Beatie’s legal gender can’t be questioned (it won’t even take an opportunist to arrange some venue in which Beatie’s post-transition-to-male pregnancy will yield a de novo examination of not just Beatie himself but of all statements, documents, etc., that went into getting his gender legally changed in the first instance). and if Spade really believes the story will have no legal impact on heterosexual marriage (as in whether or not an FTM can marry a woman, and whether or not an MTF can marry a man) in Oregon (yeh – I can see all that gay money and energy to fight against legislative action ‘clarifying’ that marriages such as the Beaties’ are invalid same-sex relationships flowing into Oregon right now…NOT), then Spade has abdicated any and all right that he may have ever had to speak for anyone on trans issues – in court or anywhere else.
And it wasn’t just the mean old trans woman who has the nerve to challenge Gay, Inc’s preferential treatment of FTMs who had a bad feeling. One FTM offered this in response to that ENDABlog Classic piece:
I hate how most FTMs are acting like this is going to have no effect on anyone. This sucks a ton for me, because I haven’t had chest surgery or anything yet, so the tightening requirements (which is what I forsee) could impact me in a major way. I think this could very easily fundamentally change the way that government agencies treat us.
Funny that the Beaties’ B.S. found its way to Arizona, eh?
Land o’ papers-to-pee law?
It does give one pause to wonder if either one or both of them were in no way what they were portraying themselves to be. Radphlegms couldn’t have arranged such a confluence if they tried…
could they?
The bigger question, however, goes to Seattle University: Will there be any consequences for Dean Spade having made such a ridiculous claim five years ago?
I have my bet down as to what it will or won’t do.
Sadly, I’ll probably collect.
I Keep Hearing About the ‘Good, Well-Intentioned HRC Employees’…
So why don’t those good, well-intentioned non-trans employees of HRC do something useful and quit en masse to protest HRC’s near-genocidal discriminatory hiring practices against trans people (particularly trans women)?
