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.

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.

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!

The Next “Silenced” TERF Academic Will Be The First

If your trans-exterminationistic cries of having been “silenced” are emanating from a tenured position in academia that equally- and/or better-qualified trans women were never even considered for, then you just might be an over-privileged bigot.

The Party that Prays Together Preys Together

#GOPervs

 

The Latest Anti-Trans Hate Crime

If the federal hate crime law that the overpaid, underworked elitists at HRC decided trans people needed more than ENDA isn’t applicable to copyright law violations, then it should be amended to be so.

From IndieWire:

Netflix debuted “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” on Oct. 6, but filmmaker Reina Gossett claims that the documentary’s director, David France, appropriated her idea and research for the project.

“David got inspired to make this film from a grant application video that Sasha [Wortzel] and I made and sent to Kalamazoo/Arcus Foundation social justice center while he was visiting,” Gossett wrote in a statement, shared today on Twitter by author and activist Janet Mock. “He told the people who worked there — I shit you not — that he should be the one to do this film.”

She then alleged that to make his film and secure a grant from the Sundance Institute and the Arcus Foundation, France pilfered her contacts as well as her work on advocacy group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Additionally, Gossett wrote that France convinced Vimeo to take down a video she’d uploaded of a stirring speech by Johnson’s good friend, Sylvia Rivera. “This kind of extraction/excavation of black life, disabled life, poor life, trans life is so old and so deeply connected to the violence Marsha had to deal with throughout her life,” wrote Gossett. “I feel so much rage and grief over all of this.”

Kinda like what I felt when I saw NGLTF make the decision to have a non-trans woman “be the one” to be their trans expert while everyone in the generation that made NGLTF see the need to address trans issues was starving.

Some of us still are.

Today is the Tenth Anniversary of Black Wednesday

If you are a trans person, ten years ago today you were handed proof positive of what Barney Frank and the Human Right Scampaign think of you (and St. Barney had yet to give his “Oz” speech!)

A month earlier, the (talking) head of HRC, Joe Solmonese, went before the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta and committed an act of criminal fraud.  He told trans people that not only would HRC not support an ENDA that did not include trans people, HRC would actively oppose any such bill.  There is no reason to believe that HRC never profited financially from what we now know to have been a lie; some people either joined HRC or donated to HRC based on what Solmonese himself knew, as he was saying it, was not true.

HRC never had any intention of actively opposing what happened ten years ago today: The first-ever trans-inclusive ENDA was thrown in the garbage and replaced by what was then just the latest in a long line of bills that, had it passed, would have established a federal right for lesbians, gays and bisexuals to discriminate against trans people in the employment arena.

The back of the program book that SCC attendees who saw Solmonese’s criminal act contained an image of an African-American trans person and a text blurb.

The image snap of it I have is not very high quality…

…but TransAdvocate addressed the SolmoneseScam.  That image?

It reads:

I Am HRC

NOTE: At the time of the 2007 SCC (and of Black Wednesday for that matter), NO trans people were being permitted to be gainfully employed at HRC. A handful of token trans men had (including one double-token) and immediately after the ENDA Crisis of 2007, HRC hastily found a trans woman with no connection whatsoever to trans activism (but plenty to the worlds of religion and militarism) to be its first token trans woman employee.  But at the time of the 2007 SCC and of Black Wednesday, the organization that self-described as it did in the paragraph below had NEVER – in what was then 27 years of existence – been able to lower itself to hire a trans woman for any position doing anything.  (The Pipeline Report was a revelation to no one who has been paying attention; it was just a pustule of truth left momentarily uncovered by all artifacts of designer clothing.  And, BTW…has the Washington Blade ever run an item on it?)

The Human Rights Campaign and its grassroots force of 700,000 members and supporters are working every day to achieve our vision of a fair and equal country. By working with Americans of all race, classes and backgrounds, we are committed to improving the lives of all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

The Human Rights Campaign salutes the 2007 Southern Comfort Conference!

Joe Solmonese thanked Mara Keisling of The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) for the work she’s done. Mara’s received much of the credit for the progress that the transgender community has accomplished. If transgender people are written out of ENDA or the Matthew Shepard Act, I really have to call into question what push NCTE has. How far have we come?

I’ll ask again. are we one community? If we are removed from either the Matthew Shepard Act or ENDA and HRC does not lobby AGAINST PASSAGE of either bill without inclusion, we are not one community. HRC, NCTE, and others have acted, signaled, and said we are one. Now is crunch time. Am I really HRC? We shall see.

We saw.

Solmonese’s successor, Chad Griffin, gave a vague apology at SCC in 2014.

But until HRC pays reparations for the damage that it had done to the trans community in general – and, more specifically, for the blacklisting of trans activists who have refused to accept HRC’s revealed wisdom – the organization is just one more unpunished corporate criminal.

Its 2017.

HRC has bestowed gainful employment upon a handful more trans people – including some trans women – since 2007.  But until reparations and real apologies for specific acts of aggression are made, trans people who allow themselves to be part of HRC in any way are not advocates for their own people.

They’re collaborators.

Has the Future Already Been Forgotten? A Post-2007 Transgender Legal History Told Through the Eyes of the Late, (Rarely) Great Employment Non-Discrimination Act

The article is now available on the website of the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law.  Please read before all of the pro-HRC revisionist crap is shoveled into officially-approved discourse this fall.

Remember 2007: The Bait-and-Switch Began Early

On the day that H.R. 2015 was introduced:

First, Solmonese repeated the lie that the Human Right Scampaign was, in 2007, “the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy organization.”  (Remember, at that time it had NO trans employees, had NEVER employed a trans woman in any capacity, had just recently been proven to be fraudulently inflating its membership numbers and – of course – was not really advocating for trans rights.)

Then, he immediately referenced the first federal gay rights bill – which was a GAY-ONLY rights bill – yet he immediately followed that with a sentence utilizing “GLBT.” (Tell me that that was not fully calculated to confuse the issue.  And, also, lets not forget that the bill he referenced, not only was not trans-inclusive, but it also was not employment-inclusive! Bella Abzug’s first bill was comprehensive – as to all areas of civil rights law other than employment.)

After his usage of “GLBT” he whips back around to mixing and matching in ways that he can later mold to mean anything he wants:

nearly 90 percent of Americans believe that gays and lesbians should have equal employment opportunities. Furthermore, a healthy majority of Americans support congressional action to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Which ENDA is he referring to?

The one that was then just introduced?

Or one that would only cover gays and lesbians?

Yeh, yeh…

We know how the story ends.  But follow along.  Maybe you can convince yourselves that the Solmonese Scampaign really gave a damn about whether we lived or died.

Appletinis for all!