Visible Man
Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion,
advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the
FTM community.
Meet the (Gay) Press
Last month I had the honor of participating on a panel of executive
directors of most of the big GLBT organizations in the U.S., at the
National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association conference in San
Francisco. Well over 200 journalists attended the plenary session,
where 13 reps of the GLBT world's most prestigious activist and
community development groups discussed how we thought the gay press
was doing and what we felt they should be covering. I was the only
transperson on the panel. And there were only two transpeople in the
audience, both members of NLGJA. Though I enjoyed the experience, and
I especially enjoyed meeting many journalists and some organization
leaders I hadn't met before, I was ultimately frustrated. By the time
it was all over, I was downright angry. I'll tell you why.
The other panelists were all wonderful, highly accomplished people:
Gwenn Baldwin, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian
Center; Martin Delaney, founding director of Project Inform (focusing
on AIDS-related issues); Tony Esoldo, political director of the Gay
and Lesbian Victory Fund; Joan Garry, executive director of GLAAD;
Kevin Jennings, founder and executive director of GLSEN; Kate Kendell,
executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights; Vera
Martin, director of media and information for Old Lesbians Organized
for Change (OLOC); Maureen S. O'Leary, executive director of the Gay
and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA); Terry Stone, executive director
of the Northwest AIDS Foundation; Rich Tafel, executive director of the
Log Cabin Republicans; Elizabeth Toledo, executive director of the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and Evan Wolfson, an attorney with
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. And then there was me,
representing Gender
Education & Advocacy, Inc.
Speaking in alphabetical order, each panelist had three minutes to say
what our organization's focus was and how well we felt the press was
doing with respect to getting our community's message out. I started
by acknowledging how amazed I am that the T has been so quickly added
to GLB and that I'm grateful for that. I also said that Gender Education
& Advocacy is a national organization that is focused on providing
education for transgendered and non-transgendered people, and is
especially dedicated to empowering transpeople to advocate for
themselves. Then I said that the press needs to realize a few things:
Transgender is not a monolithic movement; transpeople are not all alike.
The press needs to stop stereotyping us, stop exploiting us, stop making
jokes out of our suffering, our marginalization, our differences, the
violence against us, and the personal triumphs that we are able to
realize. We can speak for ourselves -- ask us. Take the time, make the
effort to get to know more than one of us! Don't tokenize us. There is
not one way to be a transperson. Transpeople take this movement out of
the bedroom, where homophobia has forced GLB people to live in a slightly
larger closet, because transpeople don't do their transness only in the
privacy of our bedrooms. None of what I said is anything that gay,
lesbian, and bisexual people don't already know, if they would only think
about their experience as marginalized people before they found that
there was a gay community.
Joan Garry, Kevin Jennings, Kate Kendell, and Elizabeth Toledo were the
most positive and proactive about gender and trans inclusion in their
remarks. Many other panelists never even said the B or T words; apparently
our issues are simply not part of their concern.
The first question from the audience addressed the fact that our
collective movement has very few spokespeople of color. The questioner
wondered why the executive directors weren't doing more to put people of
color in visible positions. A number of us wanted to respond to this
question, but because of time constraints, our able moderator, Barbara
Raab of NBC, did not permit us all to respond. And this was when my
frustration began. I wanted to say that there are several known and able
spokespeople of color within the trans community, but for the most part
all members of the trans community are engaged in everyday survival
issues and don't have the time or energy to engage in activism, and if you
want to see more people of color why don't you do a story on the victims
of anti-trans violence? Those victims are all too frequently transwomen
of color.
As the questions and discussion proceeded, raising medical, legal, and
legislative issues; AIDS; safety in the schools; media coverage;
etc., our moderator called upon panelists to respond according to their
specialties, and until a question was specifically asked of me I did not
have an opportunity to put the trans spin on any of the issues.
Sitting there listening, I realized that I was probably the only person
on the panel who is not paid to do the community work I do. I realized
that each of these other panelists had the luxury of focus on their
particular area of interest, while I and many other trans organizational
leaders have had to become knowledgeable in each of these fields,
not just one.
It is appalling to me that there are only two national-level trans
organizations that can afford to pay any staff members: the
International
Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) and GenderPAC, and GenderPAC is
apparently trying to distance itself from the trans community. Even
worse, the number of paid transactivists working for national GLBT
organizations in positions of authority or leadership is probably fewer
than ten.
So the attending members of the gay press didn't get to have the dots
connected for them. When AIDS was mentioned, the AIDS experts didn't
mention transpeople with AIDS, let alone transpeople with AIDS who are
in prison. When the marriage issue was raised, no one spoke about the
Christie Littleton case or the trans marriages that took place last month
in Texas. Kate Kendell mentioned immigration issues, but no one mentioned
the landmark U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Federal decision of August
24th in which gender expression was declared an innate characteristic so
fundamental to a person that it cannot be changed by force, nor should a
person be required to change it.
Joan Garry and Elizabeth Toledo both said that they believe issues of
gender identity will become very critical in the near future. It will
behoove the gay press and more GLB leaders to become conversant with the
transgender community, so they can understand what those issues really
mean. If Norah Vincent's attitudes (see her "Last Word" column in the
Advocate, June 20, 2000; my letter in response is sixth in the long line
of response letters published on www.theadvocate.com) reflect
what many other lesbians or gay men think, we trans people are in for a
long fight.
Don't get me wrong -- I was glad to have been invited to the NLGJA
conference, and honored to appear on this particular plenary. It wasn't
as bad as my Millennium March experience, but it was yet another example
of how far we have to go before T is really integrated into GLB.
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