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 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?

It Is As If Chris Crain Never Left the Washington Blade

And so, of course, the Blade ran a story about the Congressional hearing on the Equality Act – in which the christian theocracy party (sometimes still d/b/a the GOP) demonstrated the degree to which the christian theocracy party (sometimes still d/b/a the GOP) and lesbian TERFs (an acronym which even TERFs know is not a slur) are in bed together.

Then came the comments.

One in particular:

That screen snap was taken on the morning of April 11, 2019, around 10:20 CDT.  So, the ‘4 days ago’ refers back to April 7th.

For four days, the Washington Blade, which bills itself as:

has been willing to permit a genocidally transphobic rant to persist in polluting the comments section of one of its news items.

Your move, Blade.

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.

Believe Like Its 2007!

Again I Ask: Was Barney Frank Ever Right About Anything?

Almost two years prior to the Dec. 15, 1976 issue of The Advocate in which St. Barney promised that the Massachusetts state gay rights bills would pass in 1977, he had this to say about the 1975 session.

No link, of course, but that is from page 5 of the March 12, 1975 edition of The Advocate.  In case the image is fuzzy, this is the money shot (paragraph spilling over from the bottom left column to the top right):

Rep. Frank has stated that because of the new and important differences between the 1974 and 1975 local political climates here, the general anti-discrimination measure’s chances of passage are “pretty good” this year.  Frank, who did not think the bills would pass during 1974, is considered one of the most astute political observers in Massachusetts.

I wonder what happened between 1974 and 1975.

Did the Democrats get 15-20 more seats?  Because we all know that that will guarantee passage of even a trans-inclusive anti-discrimination bill (and we all know that St. Barney did not even pretend to support one of those until 2007 – and we all know how little he really supported it.)

#sarcasm (but not as to The Advocate excerpt; that’s totally real.)

Was Barney Frank Ever Right About Anything?

From the Dec. 15, 1976 issue of The Advocate (page 8), please note the quote at the beginning of the paragraph halfway down the third column:

For those who can’t make it out:

The bills will pass in ’77.
– St. Barney

For those not keeping score, Massachusetts did not pass a gay rights bill until 1989.  By then, St. Barney had been in Congress for eight years (though he was spending 1989 calling in every political favor, marker and chit he could unearth in order to avoid getting kicked out of Congress.  Google ‘Steven Gobie.’  Just sayin’….)

Thirty years after his declaration of what would happen in 1977 he bullied the LGBT community – trans people most pointedly – with what he *knew* was capable of passing and not passing.  And then he professed to know for certain that 15-20 more Democrats would make a legitimate (read: trans-inclusive) ENDA a sure thing.

Between the Massachusetts Legislature and Congress, St. Barney drew a legislative salary for forty years.

In all of that time, was he ever right about anything?

A Suggestion for Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton

Dear Gov. Dayton,

You probably don’t remember me.  I bumped into you at the Minnesota State Fair in 2001 while you were a senator.  I mentioned that I had voted for you in 2000 and I asked you to ensure that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was trans-inclusive.

You weren’t able to do that, but I’ve always thought highly of your response when I explained why the bill was not then trans-inclusive and, as of 2001, never had been.

“Shame on Barney.”

Straight (no pun intended) to the point.  I like that.

I’ve respected you ever since.

I have an idea for how you can ensure that your political legacy is even more positive than it currently stands to be. Due to circumstances beyond your control, you have the power to cause future-senator Roy Moore to have an aneurysm (politically if not physically) before ever being elected next Tuesday.

How?

Appoint Minneapolis Councilmember-elect Andrea Jenkins to fill Al Franken’s soon-to-be vacant Senate seat.

Its just an idea – but I hope you will consider it.

Sincerely,

That Still-Underemployed Transsexual Lawyer You Impressed Back in 2001