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?
April 30, 2019
Categories: ENDA Politics, Erasure, Exterminationists, Fake inclusion, gay transphobia, History, Lying Liars, Radphlegms, The Aristocrats, The Cape(hart)ed Crusader . . Author: Katrina Rose . Comments: Leave a comment