About-Face at Health Department
By Paul Schindler
Gay City News
12.07.2006

In a move that occasioned the city health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden,
to acknowledge “we were at fault,” the Board of Health Tuesday abruptly pulled
back from a proposal that would have allowed New York City-born transgendered
individuals who have not undergone sex-reassignment surgery but nonetheless
provide significant medical certification of their transition to change the
gender designation on their birth certificate.

Instead, the board adopted a far narrower measure that will allow those who do
undergo such surgery to change their designation from M to F or vice versa.
Until now, they could merely remove their original gender marker but not
substitute the other, leaving the category blank on the revised birth
certificate.

In an interview with Gay City News, Frieden declined to comment on whether the
change in course reflected any input from the police department, city
corrections officials, or the federal Department of Homeland Security regarding
the tightening of official standards for personal identification in the wake of
the 9/11 attacks.

The climate of increased security concerns, however, makes the birth certificate
issue even more critical for individuals who have completed a gender transition
and need to receive basic personal identification such as a driver’s license or
a passport.

The original proposal put forward by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
was the result of a lengthy task force process that included city officials,
medical practitioners, and transgender advocates, and received overwhelmingly
positive response during a public comment period that concluded with a hearing
on October 30. In 139 pages of input published on the health department Web
site, all but seven pages endorsed the approach, often in significant detail,
even though many urged that even greater flexibility be incorporated into the
regulation change.

The negative comments on the Web site were largely brief e-mail correspondences,
most with harshly transphobic comments. “Are you guys losing all sense of moral
values?” read one. “Modern day Sodom and Gomorra-May God forgive you.”

“If I wish to call myself a dog, I suppose you people would allow that too?” was
the comment from another correspondent. “I am befuddled and wonder if the
inmates are now running the asylum,” read a third.

In explaining its reversal in direction, Frieden’s department, in a written
release, said, “After reviewing that plan and input received during the public
comments period, the health department concluded that the proposal would have
broader societal ramifications than anticipated. Besides being a key element of
identity, gender has important implications for many societal institutions that
need to segregate people by sex. These include hospitals, schools, and jails, as
well as some workplaces.”

Citing those issues-which have been central to the debate over transgender
rights for years-raised more questions than it answered.

First, it left largely unexplained how the department could have put forward a
proposal, received nearly unanimous public comment essentially saying it
reflected a good start but that more needed to be done, and then settled on a
final plan well short of what it originally put on the table.

“Citing unspecified ‘ramifications’ of the proposed policy, the Board
of Health has missed an opportunity to help transgender people move from the
margins to the mainstream,” said Michael Silverman, executive director of the
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, in a written statement. “For many
transgender people, sex-reassignment surgery is a financial impossibility. For
others, it’s medically inappropriate. And still others choose not to undergo
surgery for a variety of personal reasons.”

“I’m extremely disappointed that the Board rejected the widely supported
recommendations in such a cursory manner,” said Paisley Currah, director of the
Transgender Law & Policy Institute. “The recommendations were the work product
of a dedicated advisory committee and were proposed after two years research and
consideration. It’s simply indefensible that nonsensical reasons blamed on
identity security were cited as the key reason for rejecting the
recommendations.”

“I’m surprised and very disappointed,” said Bonnie Scott Jones, a
staff attorney at Lambda Legal, who had offered a detailed response, urging
greater flexibility regarding medical and mental health certification of a
gender transition, during the public comment period.

Asked whether transgender advocates were justified in feeling as though the
ground rules for public comment and negotiation of a solution had been changed
on them, Frieden said, “That’s a perception that could well be out there.” He
insisted, however, that the Board of Health was in fact considering two
proposals – one to allow for a switch in gender designation on the birth
certificate and the other
to modify the criteria for what constituted a gender change. The proposal
considered at the October 30 hearing would have modified the requirement that
sex reassignment be completed to a less prescriptive formula that relied on a
medical doctor and a mental health professional certifying that unspecified
medical and psychotherapeutic
treatments have been undergone as part of a gender transition.

While acknowledging the clear preferences uncovered in the public hearing
process and lauding the work of those who advised the department in developing
the original proposal, Frieden said, “We were at fault” for not consulting with
other parties such as law enforcement, hospital administrators, and schools that
have
requirements for sex-segregated facilities, including cells, patient wards and
rooms, and showers.

“The advisors we had we were wonderful but we received input from a fairly
narrow range of interests,” he said. Asked why the health department – regarding
the sensitive sex-segregation issues that concerned it – could not look to the
guidelines established by the city’s Human Rights Commission when it adopted a
code for enforcing the 2002 amendment to city law outlawing gender identity or
expression-based discrimination, Frieden said, “A certificate and human rights
law are very different and should not be conflated.”

Pressed to clarify what that meant, the commissioner said, “In the city law,
whatever gender you consider yourself to be you are.” He did not specifically
address how the lack of a changed birth certificate might limit the ability of
transgendered individuals to access the protections guaranteed under the 2002
law, except to say that their rights are not defined by their birth
documentation.

The concerns about sex-segregated facilities – bathrooms and showers in
particular – have consistantly percolated at the surface of the debate, both
about trans rights and the effort by then-President Bill Clinton to allow open
service by gays and lesbian soldiers prior to falling back on the Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell policy. In a number of recent controversies, trans people have been
arrested for using public
bathrooms, including those at Grand Central Terminal, intended for persons of
their post-transition gender.

Yet, Frieden could not explain why the health department came to this concern so
late in the game, after several years of discussion.

“Hindsight is always easier,” he said.

In addition to the concerns cited over sex segregation, the department’s press
release also alluded to “forthcoming federal regulations which are anticipated
in 2007 and which are anticipated to include provisions on birth-certificate
security, death-birth matching, and verification of driver’s license
applications with
birth certificates.” An internal health department memorandum, provided to Gay
City News by the city, made specific mention of draft regulations due under the
Real ID Act of 2005, and the importance of birth certificates to the federal
government signaled by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of
2004.

Asked whether the health department had received input on the earlier proposal
after the October 30 hearing from the NYPD, city corrections officials, or the
U.S. Homeland Security Department (but which had not been entered into the
public record), Frieden momentarily conferred with aides with him at the time of
the telephone interview and then said, “No comment.”

Despite the reversal this week, trans activists vowed to keep pressing for
change and voiced optimism about eventually prevailing.

“We are certainly not giving up,” said Z Gabriel Arkles, a staff attorney at the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which does advocacy work on behalf of the transgender
community. “We believe the department is taking us seriously and it’s possible
to get a victory in this area.”

Pauline Park, chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,
said, “NYAGRA is more eager than ever to meet with the department of health.”

In fact, Park and Transgender Legal Defense’s Silverman were at best lukewarm
about the proposal considered in October, feeling that it embodied a medicalized
perspective of gender variance that assumes that it is a pathology and was at
odds with the gender self-definition and expression assumptions of the 2002
transgender rights law. Silverman, in his release this week, said that the
proposal that had been rejected included “race and class disparities,” a reflection of his view that many would be unable to access the medical certification required.

“On balance, adoption of the policy as written was not a significant advance for
the community,” Park said, suggesting that if advocates are able to reopen
discussion of the issue with health officials, she for one will be pushing for
far more than the city ever contemplated. City Council Speaker Christine sent
the Board of Health a statement supporting the proposal originally put forward,
with provision for some greater flexibility.

In a written reply to a Gay City News query, Quinn said, “I am very disappointed
at the Board of Health’s decision to withdraw its transgender proposal, and have
begun conversations with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to better
understand their rationale.” She added she hoped “to move this issue forward.”

This article originally appeared in Gay City News on 7 December 2006.

Pauline Park
Vassar College
18 April 2012

I feel honored to be speaking here at Vassar College again only a year after my last appearance here.

I’d like to begin by thanking the Vassar College Feminist Alliance and TransMission for inviting me to speak today.  I’d especially like to thank Faren Tang and Rachel Ritter, the co-presidents of the Feminist Alliance, and Tristan Feldman, president of TransMission, for arranging my appearance here.

Given that it was the Feminist Alliance and TransMission, I would like to engage in a feminist analysis of the politics of identity from my perspective as a transgendered woman of color who was born in Korea and raised here in the United States. I would like to focus on the claim made in a speech in 2000 that the transgender community needs to move beyond identity politics to a ’post-identity’ politics model of organizing.

Introduction: GenderPAC’s Organizational History and Background

Riki Anne Wilchins was the executive director of GenderPAC for the entire 14 years of its organizational life, from 1995 until 2009; in that capacity, she called for the creation of “a post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans.” By way of a critique of that call, I will argue here that the discourse of a post-identity politics movement – far from providing a unifying philosophy and political strategy – is intellectually incoherent and politically counterproductive. It is my aim here to articulate what I see as the racial politics implicit in the discourse and to offer an alternative conception of identity formation and transgender movement politics based on notions of community.

GenderPAC was founded in November 1996 to be the national voice of the transgender community. A number of different individuals and organizations came together to establish the organization in order to educate society on transgender issues and to advance a legislative agenda in Congress. Wilchins, a white post-operative male-to-female transsexual woman, took the organization in a very different direction. By the end of 1999, Wilchins shifted GenderPAC from the original vision of its founders to a very different organization with a very different mission. With Gina Reiss as managing director, Wilchins then went public with her intention to reject the original conception of a transgender advocacy organization in favor of a vague, rather inchoate concept of a ‘gender rights’ organization.

Wilchins’ rejection of GenderPAC’s original mission as a national voice for the transgender movement is symptomatic of the inherent problems of attempting to create a movement while denying the existence of a community upon which it is based. I would argue that community is a necessary component of any movement politics. Organizational accountability to the community is not only the analogue, but also the concomitant, to – individual accountability to a board of directors. Any refusal to acknowledge community as the basis of movement politics ultimately represents an attempt to evade responsibility to a larger collective. Wilchins’ decision to reject the notion of transgender community organizing had profound implications for the community and the movement that GenderPAC once claimed to represent. In 2000, Wilchins gave a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving National Donor Conference entitled “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights” in which she asserted that she was:

“…building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place… And so it’s not so much a question of including transgender, as of recognizing that gender has always been a part of a gay agenda and always will be… GenderPAC is a ‘post-identity’ organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us…  In a post-identity movement, who we are is not a pre-condition for working together – our identification as gender activists comes out of the work we do.  And so identity becomes not a cause of our politics, but an effect — not a wall to be defended and debated but something mobile, personal, and flexible that changes and grows with us as our understanding of ourselves changes and grows.  And all these confusing, even threatening new identities are not barbarians at the gate but a doorway out. Their messiness is not the problem, it’s the solution — a tactic, even an essential political goal… We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences… A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender… What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do…”  (Riki Anne Wilchins, “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference).

The Gill speech was perhaps the clearest articulation of the discourse of the ‘post-identity politics’ gender rights movement that Wilchins ever gave, a discourse that I will simply call ‘the post-identity politics paradigm’ (or ‘PPP’ for short). But even the most cursory glance at that speech will reveal a number of significant problems of the ‘new paradigm’ that Wilchins ostensibly articulated in it. First, there is the problem of the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression. Second, there is the problem of the practical application of Wilchins’ notions in the legislative arena. Third, there is the problem raised by Wilchins’ conception of identity formation, as it might be applied to race. Fourth, there is the parallel problem as applied to gender. And fifth, there is the problem of the apparent contradiction of ‘post-modernism’ and liberal rights discourse in Wilchins’ thinking.  I will take each of these in turn.

The Conflation of Homosexuality and Transgender

At its heart, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is based on a misconception about the nature of individual identity and the relationship of sexual orientation to gender identity and expression. Wilchins’ analysis of the sex/gender binary is reductive, attempting to reduce one form of oppression to the other, rather than recognizing them as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression.  One cannot fully understand homophobia or genderphobia unless one maintains the conceptual distinction between homophobia and genderphobia.  Hence, in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins makes it impossible to successfully explain either.  In her Gill speech (quoted above), Wilchins declared,

“And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.  And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.”

In fact, it is not at all self-evident that “the mainspring of homophobia is gender.”  Not all gay people are gender-variant, with the ‘butch’ gay man and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ exemplifying the gender-conventional; the oppression they face could not therefore be attributed to their outward gender expression.  There are many cases of conventionally gendered lesbians and gay men facing discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation alone. Relatively ‘butch’ gay men, for example, have been attacked leaving gay bars despite— and one is almost tempted to hypothesize because of – their gender conventionality.  In fact, the very assertion of a self-conscious masculinity on the part of gay men in the 1970s may have provoked even more intense hostility on the part of some homophobic men who may have perceived those masculine gay men to be all the more threatening because of their relative masculinity; in other words, in the logic of a homophobe, if a relatively manly man can be gay, a manly man like me could be gay.

A more conceptually sophisticated analysis would recognize homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression, one in which neither is fully reducible to the other, though interrelated.  One could draw an analogy with explanations of racism based in class prejudice. Clearly, race cannot be reduced to class, because racial discrimination cannot be fully explained as class discrimination.  Similarly, discrimination and oppression based on sexual orientation cannot be fully reduced to oppression based on gender expression, especially in cases involving conventionally gendered LGBs.   But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins implicitly dismisses the distinct forms of oppression faced by conventionally gendered LGBs.

Clearly, gender variance is relative; but it is equally clear that the kind of oppression faced by relatively more gender-variant LGBs is likely to be more intense than that faced by more conventionally gendered LGBs; they are, in any case, different and distinct.  Collapsing homophobia into genderphobia provides Wilchins with a rationale for jettisoning the concept of ‘transgender,’ which she finds hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.  But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins is left without a conceptual framework for distinguishing between gender-based and non-gender-based homophobia. Hence, Wilchins’ conceptual framework does not allow her to recognize the greater potential for discrimination and violence faced by gender-variant LGBs. Ironically enough, then, Wilchins’ desire to focus on what she sees to be the gender-based roots of homophobia leads her inadvertently to minimize or trivialize the oppression that gender-variant LGBs face specifically because of their gender variance, as opposed to their sexual orientation alone.

While the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity leads to conceptual confusion, it also provides an opportunity for Wilchins to try to bridge what she perceives to be a gap between traditional ‘gay’ politics and the newer politics of transgender.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that GenderPAC’s philosophy and strategy were premised on a conflation of sexual orientation and gender, and that conflation allowed Wilchins to position herself as the leader of a ‘post-transgender’ organization, one which was guided by an ostensibly sophisticated conception of gender that was ‘hip,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘post-identity politics.’

Wilchins thus cast herself as the avatar of a new age in which GenderPAC would lead a gender rights movement that would supercede both the old gay and lesbian rights movement and the newer transgender rights movement.  What this all-inclusive ‘national gender rights movement’ ended up looking like, in practice, was an organization whose primary constituency would appear to be non-transsexual transgendered youth who were uncomfortable with any fixed gender identity and who reject the classic transsexual transition narrative. GenderPAC’s membership was especially heavy with college students, mostly of female birth sex, who were intrigued by Wilchins’ use of Butlerian terms such as ‘gender performativity’ and notions of gender fluidity that seemed to apply so well to their own personal experiences at that stage of their lives.  Since many of these individuals identified as lesbians at some point but seemed dissatisfied with the inability of that term to adequately describe or encompass the gender-transgressive component of their identities, they were especially attracted to the way in which Wilchins seemed to be able to bring the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity together.

Praxis Makes Perfect: Applying the Paradigm in the ‘Real World’

The faults of Wilchins’ approach can be observed by applying it to a current political battle engaged by the movement.  The focus of national efforts for many years has been passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the federal LGBT rights bill still pending in Congress many years after its introduction.

In Wilchins’ view, the gay movement does not understand that gender oppression is at the root of homophobia and therefore seeks to exclude transgendered people in a futile attempt to appropriate heteronormativity; but the transgender movement too narrowly circumscribes the concept of gender because it is rooted in the medical model of transsexuality and therefore excludes non-surgical ‘gender queers.’

The equivalent of Wilchins’ desiradatum – ‘a national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ – would be a ‘national sexual freedom civil rights movement for all Americans’ that would remove ‘identity politics’ labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay.’  It is unlikely that LGBT organizations would remove ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ from their mission statements and their literature and jettison the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ in favor of some broader but vaguer notion of ‘sexual freedom for all,’ and if that scenario seems extremely far-fetched, it is because such a move would represent a rejection of the fundamental principles around which lesbian and gay groups have been organized heretofore.

But Wilchins stakes out a much bigger territory than even a movement that covers both the transgender movement and the lesbian and gay movement. One can probably best understand Wilchins’ call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ as part of a marketing strategy under which GenderPAC was marketed as being ‘more’ than just a transgender organization, because it (ostensibly) had a broader conception of gender; broader than any lesbian and gay rights organization because it included a focus on gender issues; and broader than any women’s organization because it included transgendered and gender-variant people who were not part of the traditional mission of organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW).

But for all that she claimed to be engaged in a critique of binary thinking, Wilchins ironically constructed her own binary opposition, implicitly pitting a ‘transgender’ movement against a broader and more inclusive ‘gender’ movement. This is a false dichotomy.  Wilchins offered no evidence that a self-styled transgender movement cannot include both non-transgendered gender-variant individuals as well as issues faced by such individuals.  Clearly, there is no ‘either/or’ here.  There is no reason to jettison the concept of transgender simply because it is not all-inclusive; nor is there any reason to believe that a transgender movement cannot be based on a conception of gender oppression that recognizes all forms of oppression based on gender identity or gender expression.

Race, Gender, Identity Formation and the Politics of Community

The third difficulty with Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm lies in the way in which Wilchins misconstrues the nature of gender identity formation and political movements rooted in communities organized around such identities. Underlying the discourse of a post-identity politics gender rights movement as Wilchins articulated it in her Gill speech is the assumption that any exclusion is bad – both illegitimate and politically problematic – coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion.

The rationale implicit in this discourse would seem to be something like this: gender-variant people (transgendered people, genderqueers, etc.) have been excluded from the lesbian and gay movement, and that is a bad thing. Transgendered people (including male-to-female transsexuals) have been excluded from the women’s movement, and that is a bad thing.  The underlying assumption would seem to be that any movement that excludes anyone is morally suspect and politically questionable.  But the fundamental error is the failure to take account of the asymmetry of power between privileged and marginalized groups in American society.

A case in point is Wilchins’ reaction to an invitation to attend TransWorld in October 1998. Co-sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the New York City Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center) and the Audre Lorde Project, TransWorld I (which took place at ALP in Brooklyn) was the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color (TGPOCs). The organizing committee for TransWorld I made the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters, though the conference was open to everyone whether white or of color, transgendered or not. As one of the members of the planning committee, I voted for that decision because I felt that it was necessary to ensure that the conference provide an opportunity for TGPOCs to speak for themselves. Previous conferences in the series sponsored by the Center’s GIP (of which TransWorld I was the fourth) had featured largely conventionally gendered white men literally and figuratively talking down to transgendered people from the dais. This conference would be different: it would feature transgendered and gender-variant people of color speaking from personal experience of oppression and marginalization as well as from expertise in health care, social services, and advocacy.

Wilchins’ reaction to the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters was to denounce the conference as ‘racist’ because it ‘excluded’ white people.  Her response to the invitation to attend TransWorld was not merely an expression of her personal pique at not having been invited to speak at the conference.  The rejection of TransWorld I and limited-membership formations – based on the assumption of a symmetry of ‘exclusion’ – demonstrates a failure to understand the difference between the power of a white elite vs. the power of marginalized communities, as well as a failure to understand the nature of institutionalized racism in this society.

The ‘exclusion’ of whites from the dais at TransWorld I cannot be equated with the historic exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in society, because those white service providers – whether physicians (such as surgeons and endocrinologists), psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers, or other ‘gender professionals’ – are in positions of power relative to the transgendered people of color who are their clients (or ‘patients’ or ‘consumers,’ however one may wish to describe them). Such white gender professionals – most of whom are not themselves transgender-identified – exercise power over their clients as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of affording (or denying) access to hormones, sex reassignment surgery, psychological evaluation, legal change of sex, and other crucial aspects of transsexual transition. Those professionals have access to resources – financial, legal, and organizational –that their clients largely lack, and the institutional power that they command therefore belies any ‘moral equivalency’ between their ‘exclusion’ from the dais at this one event and the exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in a white-dominant society brought about by pervasive discrimination based on race and/or gender identity that TGPOCs face.

The decision of the TransWorld I organizing committee to limit panels to people of color only was understood by committee members as an attempt to provide transgendered people of color themselves with a forum in which they could speak unhindered by service providers who had dominated the previous three ‘health empowerment’ conferences sponsored by the GIP.  That decision was informed by a recognition of the multiple oppressions – oppressions based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status (among others) as well as gender identity and expression – faced by transgendered people of color.

It is important to understand, however, that such oppressions are not merely additive in nature; in other words, it is not simply that a transgendered African American faces transgenderphobia in one context and racism in another; rather, these oppressions are interactive and mutually reinforcing.    For example, a transgendered African American woman may find no support as a person of color at a white-dominated center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities; but she may also find no support as a transgendered person at a community center or social service provider in her community of origin.

Related to oppressions based on race and ethnicity are those based on nationality and citizenship status. Many TGPOCs are immigrants and face the same challenges as their non-transgendered compatriots, but without access to social services in their communities, because many immigrant service providers will not serve openly transgendered people. Even in those instances where social service agencies may welcome them, transgendered people may be reluctant to come forward for fear of discrimination. While LGBT community centers are springing up across the country, very few have any means of ensuring linguistic access for those who are not native speakers of English or cultural competency for those who are immigrants and/or people of color.

Those TGPOCs who are not US citizens do not have even the minimal legal rights that transgendered citizens enjoy; if they are undocumented, they are easily deportable; and while they live here in the United States, undocumented transpeople face exploitation because of their lack of legal status.  Hence GenderPAC’s call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans’ begged the question as to just who constitutes an ‘American.’ To define the category of ‘all Americans’ by way of citizenship would leave out the undocumented, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation.  But to include the undocumented would raise the question of whether or not GenderPAC is serious about working on behalf of this population.

While transgendered people of color certainly need legal protections from discrimination and violence, they do not have the luxury to regard legal rights as the sum total of the movement’s goals.  Juridical rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the liberation of transgendered people of color. A movement that limits its focus to legal rights will not be able to satisfy the need for social justice that transgendered people feel deeply.  That movement, in order to serve transgendered people of color, must also address issues of race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status, as well as class, (dis)ability, environment, and every other form of oppression suffered by TGPOCs.  Hence, a broad social justice movement is desperately needed, and an organization that embodies those values is a necessary component of that movement.

The complexity of the transgender community and the variability of gender oppression across different transgender populations and different transgendered and gender-variant people provides the rationale for the use of ‘transgender’ by an organization or a movement.  Deployed strategically and with intellectual and political sophistication, ‘transgender’ becomes a useful organizing principle for a community under construction that is attempting to create a political movement.

As I have already argued, it was GenderPAC’s failure to connect to community that led to its failure as an organization. Indeed, the discourse of a ‘post-identity politics’ movement as articulated by Wilchins in her Gill speech would seem to have no role for communities of any kind. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is all about ‘doing your own thing,’ as the phrase popular in the 1960s and 1970s would have it; and that may account for GenderPAC’s appeal to genderqueer youth, especially female-bodied youth who do not relate to terms such as ‘transsexual or even ‘transgender.’  Wilchins apparently believes that gender is primarily or perhaps even solely a matter of self-expression; what she does not understand is that gender identities are constructed by individuals in the context of larger communities, including the broad national community that we call ‘society.’ Public fora and conferences such as TransWorld that have a circumscribed focus are necessary precisely because transgendered and gender-variant people do not exist solely as atomized individuals; they live in communities – even if some are profoundly alienated from communities, including communities of origin and communities of color.

At root, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is premised on an atomized individualism that does not recognize the social context in which gender identities are formed. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm reduces the problem of gender oppression to a simple society-wide oppression of genderqueers attempting to express their individual gender identities. But the lack of conceptual sophistication regarding the variegation of gender oppression across different cultures and communities is not the only conceptual flaw in the discourse of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’ A reading of American history will show that the very notion of a ‘post-identity politics’ is fundamentally ahistorical, as it fails to acknowledge the identity politics of Jeffersonian liberalism, which was premised on an identity politics that excluded some from power because of their identity.  Identity politics did not begin in the 1960s; rather, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the African American civil rights movement were simply a different form of identity politics. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is rooted in an individual rights discourse of Enlightenment provenance that ironically enough – and fatally for its intellectual coherence – is at odds with Wilchins’ ostensible ‘post-modernism.’

Wilchins’ rather superficial critique of ‘post-identity politics’ really speaks only to the excesses of an exclusionary version of identity politics and does not acknowledge the origin of identity politics, much less address the issues raised by white skin privilege. GenderPAC’s call for a post-identity gender politics is analogous to Ward Connerly’s call for a color-blind society. The discourse of a color-blind society – promoted by conservatives who aim to eliminate affirmative action – fails to recognize the specificity of racial and ethnic oppression and therefore renders impossible any effort to address it. In a certain profound sense, the call for a post-identity gender rights movement represented a ‘whitewashing’ of gender and transgender politics. Implicit in Wilchins’ critique of identity politics was an assumption that identities are somehow fixed and exclusive. In her Gill speech, Wilchins implies that identifying as ‘gay’ somehow precludes identifying as ‘transgendered’ or that identifying as ‘transgendered’ somehow precludes one from identifying as ‘genderqueer.’ But identities need not be mutually exclusive; rather, they are more like Venn diagrams – overlapping and not always strictly definable.

‘Transgender’ is an identity formation that offers the same kind of advantages by bringing together a loose collection of individuals – crossdressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender-variant individuals – who may have many differences but who can achieve greater political agency through coalition-building, which is precisely what the construction of a ‘transgender community’ represents when brought to bear on the creation of a transgender political movement. Transgender offers the additional advantage of moving beyond the pathologizing medical model of transsexuality. The fact that ‘transgender’ does not include everyone who might be identified as gender-variant, much less the total human population does not invalidate it as a construct.

The term ‘transgender’ can be deployed strategically in order to bring legal rights to individuals who face pervasive discrimination, as the example of the successful campaign for the New York City transgender rights law shows (Int. No. 24, introduced in 2000, was enacted by the City Council in 2002). Similarly, terms such as ‘gender-variant’ or (if you prefer) ‘genderqueer’ can be deployed as well.  These are all clearly social constructions, and the one to be used in any given context depends on the particulars of that context.

Because of personal experiences of being excluded, transgendered and gender-variant people have become sensitive to the notion of exclusion of any kind. Perhaps some of this sentiment is behind Wilchins’ insistence that a gender rights movement, to be legitimate, must include everyone.But if the African American rights movement does not include everyone, does that invalidate it in some way? Certainly, white people (including many Jewish Americans) have played an important role in the movement, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal whites in the South and from the North participated in Freedom Summer and other civil rights campaigns. But the focus was clearly on dismantling Jim Crow, which directly affected African Americans in the South, even if it had an indirect impact on whites, especially those who supported the black aspiration for civil rights.  Was the African American civil rights movement ‘exclusionary’ because it did not specifically seek to include Latinos or Native Americans? Or was it rather more effective because it chose to focus on the specificity of oppression faced by African Americans, which was distinct from that of other people of color?

Wilchins simply fails to understand the variegation of gender oppression by race and ethnicity. And to suggest that it is illegitimate to organize around identity formations is to suggest that those identities are illegitimate. Indeed, such a suggestion represents nothing less than an attempt to invalidate efforts to address racial and ethnic oppression itself.

All that being said, we must also acknowledge that an ‘identity politics’ model can be limiting, and nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of electoral politics. There is considerable pressure within the LGBT community — just as there is in communities of color — when the prospect opens up for electing the first openly gay person or the first person of color to an office at the local, state or national level, the most spectacular case in point being the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008. There were also many women — Gloria Steinem most prominent among them — who championed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2008 because she would have been the first woman elected president, had her candidacy succeeded.

David Paterson became New York’s first African American governor upon the abrupt resignation of his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, in 2008. Hiram Monserrate became the first Latino elected to office in Queens County when he was elected to the New York City Council in 2001, and John Liu became the first Asian American elected to office in the state in same year when he was elected to the City Council. Paterson decided not to run for re-election as governor in 2010 after a series of scandals tainted his administration, and Liu — now City Comptroller — is facing possible criminal indictment in a campaign finance scandal. Monserrate was actually convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2009. All of which to say that the crudest model of identity politics — that we have to support ‘one of our own’ just because that person shares our identity category or categories — is just as absurd as rejecting identity politics altogether. When it comes to elected officials, at the very least, there is an obligation to hold members of one’s community or communities accountable even when there are compelling reasons to support them. Identity politics is rather like nationalism in having a more positive face of community empowerment and a negative valence that can at its most extreme even lead to genocide.

From my personal experience working in the legislative arena, the best example that comes to mind of work that moves beyond the limitations of identity politics is the campaign for the Dignity for All Students Act (NYS DASA), an anti-bullying law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2011. This safe schools law protects students in public schools across the state from bias-based harassment based on a comprehensive list of characteristics — including sexual orientation and gender defined to include gender identity and expression — as well as race, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

Importantly, while the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity bill — in which I represented the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) — included a number of LGBT-specific organizations, it also included many non-LGBT organizations. The coalition that advanced enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA) by the New York City Council in 2004 was perhaps an even better example of a legislative coalition based in identifiable communities but able to work in a way that moved that work beyond the limitations of identity politics. Asian American organizations played a particularly important role in the NYC DASA Coalition, including the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Sikh Coalition and the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF).

My experience as an activist leads me to conclude that we need to work within recognizable communities because of the continued oppression that members of those communities experience, while at the same time moving beyond those communities to work together across identity categories to pursue a common goal of social justice and social change; it is not an ‘either/or,’ but rather, a ‘both.’

‘Paradigm-Shattering’ and the Disjuncture of the Liberal and the Post-Modern

Pretensions to the contrary, Wilchins’ argument is not consistently or rigorously ‘post-modern,’ and it is not so much ‘insubordinate’ as simply incoherent. There is in fact a fundamental disjuncture at the heart of Wilchins’ thought, between the rights discourse of a ‘national gender rights movement’ and the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ thinking of post-structuralist theory that is superficially applied to the problem of gender-based oppression. Liberal rights discourse is premised on the very unicity of the unified subject as well as the specific identity of that subject (in demographic and (sub)national terms) that Derridean deconstruction would render impossible. Rights appertain to individuals, and individuals with individual identities, not to gender expression itself – to acts, to gestures, or to performances. And rights presuppose at the very least the possibility of an objective moral order. One need only cite a few passages from her Gill speech to demonstrate how little Wilchins understands the conceptual problems posed by this disjuncture. Post-structuralist thought renders problematic if not impossible the ground of rights discourse that enables the articulation of positive assertions of normative right of the sort that Wilchins would like to make. To many post-structuralist theorists, there is no such thing as objective moral obligation; given the inherently arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, there cannot be. For at root, ‘post-modernism’ represents a challenge to the fixity of meaning. For post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, the relationship between ‘signifier’ (e.g., word) and ‘signified’ (thing or concept) is inherently unstable and arbitrary.  If this is the case, there can be no conceptual ‘fundament’ to liberal rights discourse, because the meaning of the term ‘right’ itself cannot be fixed, any more than ‘individual’ can be:

“If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.  This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions…” (Jacques Derrida, “Writing and Difference,” trans. Alan Bass, 1978, p. 289).

Liberal rights philosophy is precisely the kind of ‘totalizing’ discourse of which Jacques Derrida speaks in this passage. Traditional philosophy – including the normative political philosophy of Locke and the liberal Enlightenment – is undermined by a deconstruction of the relationship between word (logos) and concept. For the post-modernist, a normative project such as the construction of a ‘national gender civil rights movement’ is not only hopelessly old-fashioned, it is an impossibility, because the deconstruction of the unified subject and the relationship between word and concept makes it so. Wilchins does not seem to understand that the central core of post-structuralism is the disjuncture between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ But if one were to take Derrida (by way of Judith Butler) seriously, then there can be no unified subject ‘I’ and therefore no unambiguous collective ‘we’ or ‘us.’ Unfortunately, Wilchins herself has never given any indication of how, from the post-modern ethos she would embrace, she would find a middle ground between the Enlightenment concept of the self and the deconstructive reduction of identity to textual device, or how she would create a conceptual foundation for positive moral statements such as the ones that she makes in her Gill speech.

In short, the notion of a post-modern ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ is inherently contradictory and intellectually incoherent. Poststructuralist theory of the Derridean sort that informs the work of Judith Butler – which Wilchins in turn takes as the conceptual fundament for her own thought – challenges not only identity formations of the sort that Wilchins labels ‘identity politics,’ but also undermines the very possibility of affirmative statements about individual and collective human needs and human rights that were at the heart of the GenderPAC strategy and philosophy that she labeled her ‘post-identity politics paradigm.’ That Wilchins does not recognize this problem, let acknowledge it, demonstrates the superficiality of her use of terms such as ‘post-modern’ and the bankruptcy of her notion of a ‘post-identity politics.’

Conclusion

It is no accident that GenderPAC failed to spearhead a new ‘national gender rights movement’ just as it failed to connect to the transgender community out of which it initially emerged. Wilchins reconfigured GenderPAC as a ‘post-transgender’ organization that would create and lead a ‘post-identity politics’ movement. GenderPAC’s rejection of a clear link with the transgender community left the organization unmoored from its tethering, and it is emblematic of GenderPAC’s failure that hardly anyone even noticed when Wilchins shut down the organization in 2009, by which point GenderPAC had become a bloated irrelevance.

Failing to take account of (let alone effectively address) the multiple oppressions of transgendered and gender-variant people of color, Wilchins’ GenderPAC instead offered slogans such as ‘gender, racial and affectional equality.’ Nor did her call for “a national gender rights movement for all Americans” address issues of race, ethnicity, national origin, or citizenship status in any meaningful way. An organization or a movement that purports to include everyone includes no one, because it does not speak to the specificity of particular forms of oppression, which must be named in order to be addressed.

Wilchins’ discourse is not truly liberational, because it fails to take into account the totality of individual human experience. A crucial part of our humanity is the experience of community – admittedly ambivalent and complex for many transgendered and gender-variant people – but a sine qua non for human existence as well as a necessary element of any successful political movement.

What the ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ does not recognize is how identity formations – such as ‘transgender’ as well as ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘people of color’ – can be strategically deployed to form community, which is the basis of any successful social or political movement.

Finally, Wilchins fails to recognize – let alone address – the inherent contradiction of a rights movement that is ostensibly ‘post-modern.’ Any attempt to try to construct a ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ that is rigorously poststructuralist is bound to failure, because of the fundamental disjuncture between a liberal rights discourse that depends on the unified subject as its fundament and a theoretical framework that denies the very possibility of a unified subject who is the ostensible bearer of those rights. If the hallmark of the ‘post-modern’ is a rejection of ‘logos’ and the very notion of a stable and unambiguous relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ then no truly ‘post-modern’ political movement is possible, because post-modernism rejects the possibility of affirmative normative statements that are the requisite for an objective moral philosophy upon which ‘rights’ movements must of necessity be based.

In the end, for all of Wilchins’ ability to market herself and her organization to funders and members, GenderPAC shut down operations in 2009, with Wilchins continuing some of its work through a new organization, True Child, ostensibly focusing on “programs and policies that address reproductive health, partner violence and gender-based bullying, and educational achievement integrate a strong, specific focus on gender norms.” Wilchins’ role as executive director of True Child suggests that it is a reformulation of the same marketing strategy that she used to build GenderPAC, but with a focus on youth. Why Wilchins closed GenderPAC’s doors remains a bit of a mystery, as she never explained the decision to shutter GenderPAC, despite having built a very impressive financial base for the organization. Allow me to speculate and suggest that Wilchins shut down GenderPAC because it became clear to her that it was not and would never be the vanguard of a ‘new gender movement.’ GenderPAC was a useful platform for Riki Wilchins herself, but because she rejected the very concept of a community, and because other organizations — most prominently, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) — took up the work that GenderPAC was originally created to do, GenderPAC lacked a foundation in any recognizable community. Hence Wilchins’ quixotic attempt to cast herself as the Martin Luther King of her own movement failed because she failed to understand that a movement must have a connection to a recognizable community or communities in order to succeed in advancing a real agenda of social justice and social change.

This speech is based on an essay entitled “GenderPAC, the Transgender Rights Movement and the Perils of a Post-Identity Politics Paradigm” that was published in “Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality?,” a compendium of presentations  given at the 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality (27 February 2002).

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York (www.nyagra.com), which she co-founded in June 1998. She also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF). Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines – adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 – for implementation of the new statute.

Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation introduced in that body. She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Der Spiegel, the leading news magazine in Germany, is renowned for the quality of its investigative reporting. On 8 April 2012, the magazine posted to its website an extremely misguided op-ed entitled, ”Es ist besser, du stirbst” (“It is better that you die”) under the heading ‘Homosexualität in Palästina’ (Homosexuality in Palestine) by Gil Yaron of Tel Aviv.

In his op-ed, Yaron describes Tel Aviv as a ‘paradise’ and an ‘absolute freedom’ for gay Palestinians; Yaron’s op-ed is a classic piece of ‘pinkwashing’ — constructing a binary opposition between a supposedly monolithic and absolutely homophobic Palestinian society and an ostensibly liberal Israeli society with Tel Aviv as a haven and refuge for gay Palestinians. While I’ve studied German and have some limited speaking and reading competence, with the help of an on-line translation service, I was able to respond in German to Yaron’s op-ed on the Spiegel website; this is my response, in the original English and the German translation via the on-line translation service:

Neither Tel Aviv nor Israel is paradise or absolute freedom for Palestinians

As a member of the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, I can assure you that Israel is no haven for LGBT/queer Palestinians. First, there is no such thing in Israeli law as a non-Jewish refugee, so unless the queer Palesinians are Jewish (and I don’t know any who are), they would not be recognized as refugees. Second, there is no such thing in Israeli law as a gay or queer refugee. Third, Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza need special permission from the Israeli government to travel to Israel, and if they do not have that permission and are found in Israel, they will be deported. So neither Tel Aviv nor Israel is ‘paradise’ or ‘absolute freedom’ for Palestinians who are queer; that is an absolute fiction. All Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, queer or not, are subjected to the daily brutalities and humiliations and the oppressive conditions of the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. An end to the immoral Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is therefore a necessary condition for the liberation of LGBT/queer Palestinians.

Weder Tel Aviv noch Israel ist Paradies oder absolute Freiheit für Palästinenser

Als Mitglied des ersten US-LGBTQ Delegation nach Palästina, kann ich Ihnen versichern, dass Israel kein Zufluchtsort für LGBT /queer Palästinenser ist. Erstens gibt es keine solche Sache in das israelische Gesetz als nicht-jüdischen Flüchtling, so sei denn, die queer Palesinians jüdisch sind (und ich kenne keinen, der sind), würden sie nicht als Flüchtlinge anerkannt werden. Zweitens gibt es so etwas in israelischem Recht als Homosexuell oder queerFlüchtling. Drittens, Palästinenser aus dem Westjordanland oder im Gazastreifen brauchen besondere Erlaubnis der israelischen Regierung nach Israel zu reisen, und wenn sie nicht über diese Berechtigung und sind in Israel gefunden, werden sie abgeschoben werden. Also weder Tel Aviv noch Israel ist ”Paradies” oder” absolute Freiheit” für die Palästinenser, die queer sind, das ist eine absolute Fiktion. Alle Palästinenser in den besetzten Gebieten, queer oder nicht, sind auf die täglichen Demütigungen und Brutalitäten und den repressiven Bedingungen der illegalenisraelischen Besatzung der palästinensischen Gebiete unterzogen. Ein Ende der unmoralischen israelischen Besetzung derpalästinensischen Gebiete ist daher eine notwendige Bedingung für die Befreiung der LGBT / queer Palästinenser.

# # # #

Day 1: Saturday, Jan. 7: Ramallah: political briefing with Leila Farsakh

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: Qalandia checkpoint

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: Qalandia checkpoint

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: Qalandia checkpoint

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: Qalandia checkpoint

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: East Jerusalem: Sheikh Jarrah

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: East Jerusalem: a tower in the ‘separation wall’

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: East Jerusalem:

Day 2: Sunday, Jan. 8: East Jerusalem:

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Hebron (Al Khalil): market grille

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Hebron (Al Khalil)

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Hebron (Al Khalil): IDS security watchtower

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Hebron (Al Khalil): settler ‘revenge’ graffiti

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Al Walejeh: Sherine Araj

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Al Walejeh: Pauline Park at the ‘separation wall’

Day 3: Monday, Jan. 9: Al Walejeh

Day 4: Tuesday, Jan. 10: Bethlehem: Deheisheh refugee camp

Day 4: Tuesday, Jan. 10: Mas-ha: Pauline Park with Abu Nidal

Day 4: Tuesday, Jan. 10: Mas-ha: Abu Nidal with his son at the gate to their property

Day 4: Tuesday, Jan. 10: Mas-ha: Israeli settler house next to Abu Nidal’s house

 Day 5: Wednesday, Jan. 11: Lyd (Led/Lod) slum

Day 5: Wednesday, Jan. 11: Lyd (Led/Lod) slum

Day 5: Wednesday, Jan. 11: Um al Fahm: Sa’ed Adel Atshan with Abu Hussam

Day 5: Wednesday, Jan. 11: the delegation standing in the ruins of Lajjun

Day 6: Thursday, Jan. 12: Tel Aviv from Jaffa (Yafa/Yafo)

Day 6: Thursday, Jan. 12: Jaffa: Andromeda Hill complex

Day 6: Thursday, Jan. 12: Tel Aviv

Day 7: Friday, Jan. 13: Nabi Saleh

Day 7: Friday, Jan. 13: Nabi Saleh: Manal Tamimi is the sister of Mustafa Tamimi, a 28-year-old Palestinian, who was shot in the head, and critically injured, with a tear gas canister fired by an Israeli soldier at very close range, on 9 December 2011. Manal explained to delegates the circumstances of Mustafa’s tragic death at the hands of the IDS.

Monday, Jan. 16: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: Pauline Park

Monday, Jan. 13: King David Hotel in Jerusalem

Tuesday, Jan. 14: Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv

March 3: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) demonstration at the NYC LGBT Community Center in Manhattan

March 3: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) demonstration at the NYC LGBT Community Center in Manhattan

March 3: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) demonstration at the NYC LGBT Community Center in Manhattan

March 3: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) demonstration at the NYC LGBT Community Center in Manhattan

# # # #

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas), and no one at the time could have predicted what an extraordinary impact it would have. I was living in London in 1982, and as shocked as anyone by the turn of events, including Margaret Thatcher’s decision to send the British navy to retake the islands, which I opposed.

The news media in the United States played the whole affair as a comic Gilbert & Sullivan operetta and a bit of a farce, but the war was anything but “HMS Pinafore” for the British and Argentine soldiers who fought it or for the political leaders who had gambled first on the invasion — Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, the unelected president of the Argentine Republic and the head of the junta that ran the military dictatorship — and Thatcher, elected in 1979 and the first (and so far, only) woman to serve as British prime minister.

The enormous distance between Britain and the Falklands, and the relative proximity of Las Malvinas to Argentina, gave that country a considerable military advantage. But on May 2, the British torpedoed and sank the General Belgrano, an Argentine warship; even many in the United Kingdom who supported the war effort (which I did not) were shocked and horrified by the loss of 323 Argentinian lives, many of them young men in their teens or twenties. The Reagan administration may have provided direct intelligence support in the targeting of the Belgrano (Julian Borger, “US feared Falklands war would be ‘close-run thing,’ documents reveal,” Guardian, 4.1.12).

The final British military victory against great odds was rather improbable, but when it came, it made Thatcher into the Iron Lady and saved her political career (as Simon Jenkins notes in “Falklands war 30 years on and how it turned Thatcher into a world celebrity,” Guardian, 4.2.12) rescuing her from deep unpopularity and helping her lead the Conservative Party to victory in 1983 (which I witnessed first-hand) and 1987 (which I observed from back in the US). The result was another nine years of aggressively right-wing anti-labor, anti-gay policies from a prime minister unconstrained by separation of powers or virtually any other institution in British government or society — especially given the support of the British press, largely controlled by the right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

At the same time, the Argentine defeat led to the fall of the military junta and the establishment of democracy in Argentina, which was an outcome unanticipated by both Thatcher and Galtieri; certainly, there was nothing in Thatcher’s thinking or public statements that indicated that the establishment of democracy in Argentina played any role in her political calculations.

So the British military victory had largely negative consequences for the United Kingdom in terms of Thatcherism unbounded and a rise of British jingoism of the worst sort, but positive consequences for Argentina because of the collapse of support for the military dictatorship, which led to the ouster of the junta and the emergence of democracy there. History is like that: actions taken having entirely unintended but potentially enormous consequences…

Tsipi Erann is a queer progressive Israeli friend I first met in Tel Aviv in January 2012.  This is the story of how she got blocked by Facebook:

Israel’s campaign of ‘pinkwashing’ — a campaign to use Israel’s supposedly good record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights to try to justify the brutal and illegal  Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories — has now enlisted the support of Mark Segal, the publisher of Philadelphia Gay News. PGN published an editorial (“Israel, the gays and Equality Forum,” 3.15.12) written by Segal in the newspaper this week that justifies Israel’s continued massive human rights abuses against the Palestinian people — LGBT and non-LGBT — based on the unsubstantiated claim that Palestinian society is monolithically homophobic and the entirely false claim that Israel is a haven for gay refugees from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Troy Masters is publisher of Gay City News and was one of 16 members of  the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, which I also joined, in January. Masters challenged Mark Segal on his editorial, to which Segal responded by e-mail on March 16, writing,

“In the 1970 & 80′s LGBT delegations visited Cuba and began to support the Cuban Government.  What they did not know at the time was that gay people were being beaten, harassed and jailed on a regular basis, and in the 80′s AIDS concentration camps… For such a ‘high level’ group, the group seems very misinformed,” said Segal about the first LGBT/queer delegation from the United States to Palestine, which Masters and I were a  part of in January.

Troy Masters with a Palestinian woman whose family’s house in East Jerusalem is under siege by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military

Masters responded to Segal, writing,

“Mark, nothing the Israelis are doing inside the internationally recognized Palestinian lands or to the Palestinians who live there can be defended. As for homophobia, Palestinians are much More open than you suggest in comparing them with Cubans of the 1980s.  Writing us off as academics is silliness. Israel is 1940s Missisippi at best. And the worst homophobia I ever encountered was in Jerusalem at the wailing wall where I saw a rabbi push a transgender woman away and spit in her to the delight of dozens…and I was there alone. The much despised supreme court decision allowing for recognition of gay marriages performed elsewhere is in sharp contrast to how Israel refuses to recognize marriage of Israelis who marry Palestinans.  Even children of such marriages are toxic level guests of Israel until they are forced to return to the lands israel wants the world to believe does not exist. You know this yet you don’t address it…”

Segal is a major power player in the LGBT community in Philadelphia and has used his position as the publisher of the only weekly newspaper in the city to advance his own position of considerable power within the political class of Pennsylvania’s largest city. Segal’s defense of the designation of Israel as ‘featured nation’ of Equality Forum 2012 is itself indefensible. Malcolm Lazin, the millionaire founder and executive director of the Equality Forum and another major power player in the state’s LGBT community, is using this year’s event and the opportunity to showcase Israel to bring in major donations from big-money donors and big-money interests while at the same time cozying up to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the most right-wing prime minister in Israel’s history.

There is no indication in the editorial as to whether Segal has ever even been to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip or has any real understanding of the daily humiliations and brutality that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli settlers subject Palestinians to. But  the PGN editorial is yet one more indication that the Israeli government is becoming increasingly concerned about the rising tide of international disapprobation of the apartheid regime that the State of Israel is in the process of constructing, a regime that a single misguided and misinformed editorial in a gay newspaper in Philadelphia cannot obscure. In the end, the truth will out, and the dirty little secret about Israeli apartheid will come out no matter how sophisticated a pinkwashing campaign the Israeli government mounts within the LGBT community and outside it.

Queers Against Israel Apartheid (QAIA)
speech at the Center (3.3.12)

Pauline Park
speaking at the
Queers Against Israel Apartheid (QAIA) action
at the LGBT Community Center
3 March 2012

I’m Pauline Park and I’m proud to say that I’m a co-founding member of both Queers Against Israel Apartheid (QAIA) and Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC) as well as the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA). And as a transgendered woman of color, I was honored to have been invited to participate in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, which took place last month. As someone who was born in a country that suffered 40 years of a brutal foreign military occupation,  I feel a deep sense of empathy with the Palestinian people. Let me tell you about some of the things I saw on the tour.

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, I saw Palestinians shopkeepers, villagers and farmers under siege by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, begin dispossessed of their land and deprived of their dignity and their basic human rights by an occupying power that doesn’t stop to ask the sexual orientation or the gender identity of the occupied. This is an occupation supported by the United States and subsidizing by US tax dollars, and it outrages me that my tax dollars are being used to oppress the Palestinian people but I have no say in how those funds are used.

Our delegation met with both LGBT and non-LGBT Palestinians, including members of three queer Palestinian organizations — alQaws, Aswat (an organization for queer women) and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (PQBDS). What should be clear is that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories affects all Palestinians, queer or non-queer, and makes it more difficult for LGBT Palestinians to advocate for themselves within Palestinian society.

And Israel is no haven for LGBT Palestinians; in fact, Israel does not recognize non-Jewish refugees, so the discourse of ‘pinkwashing’ which attempts to create the impression that Israel is such a have is entirely false. Actually, Israel is no gay paradise even for LGBT Israelis, except maybe for gay white men in Tel Aviv who are Israeli citizens and have money; for everyone else, Israel is anything but a gay paradise.

After the tour ended, I spoke to a group of queer Israelis in Tel Aviv  – mostly transgendered; they were a group of progressive Israelis who were all anti-occupation.  In Tel Aviv, transgendered people, especially transgendered women, face pervasive police harassment and brutality from the Tel Aviv police, regardless of whether or not they’re engaged in sex work.

While I was in Tel Aviv, a queer Israeli woman whom I met there showed me Levinsky Park in South Tel Aviv. There are hundreds of African immigrants living in a tent city in Levinsky Park, many of them undocumented, most of whom work as day laborers in construction in Tel Aviv; they are constantly harassed by the Tel Aviv police, and for them, Israel is no paradise; because Israel does not recognize non-Jewish refugees, they are not eligible for refugee status.

As a founding member of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (an LGBT community center in the borough of Queens), I’d like to point out that a community center can provide social services as well as providing a safe space for discussion of controversial issues — including the issue of Palestine. A community center can and should provide services at the same time as providing a space for community organizing, including organizing to support the rights of marginalized communities and peoples such as the Palestinian people. Queens Pride House does both, and there is no contradiction between the two.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to sign our mailing list and get involved with QAIA and QFOLC as we challenge the Center to end the ban on Palestine solidarity organizing here. Thank you.

Pauline Park is a co-founding member of both Queers Against Israel Apartheid (QAIA) and Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC) as well as chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

This is a speech given at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan on 3 March 2012; it is not a verbatim text of the actually speech given there, but rather a write-up of that speech reconstructed from notes a day later.

The issue of transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been debated within the community for over a decade now. Up until last week, the battle lines drawn seemed to be between transgender activists on the one hand and U.S. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) — the lead sponsor of ENDA in the House — on the other.  The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is the largest, wealthiest, and by all accounts, the most influential LGBT rights organization in the country, and for years, HRC supported the transgenderphobic Barney Frank in his insistence on limiting ENDA to protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. But in 2004, HRC changed its tune and came out openly in support of adding gender identity and expression in order to protect transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination in employment as well.

But although Frank introduced a transgender-inclusive ENDA in April 2007, he stunned LGBT activists when he announced last week that he would be introducing a non-inclusive version of the bill. On Sept. 28, the Speaker of the House announced that she had scheduled an Oct. 2 committee ‘mark-up’ of the ‘new’ (i.e., the old) ENDA with only sexual orientation. In the Speaker’s statement, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared: “…While I personally favor legislation that would include gender identity, the new ENDA legislation proposed by Congressman Frank has the best prospects for success on the House floor…” The Sept. 28 statement from the Speaker’s office touched off a firestorm of protest from a host of national LGBT organizations and virtually every statewide organization, who strongly opposed the effort to strip gender identity and expression from the ENDA bill. The Speaker’s decision to delay the committee mark-up of the ‘trans-free’ ENDA bill, came about after several days of frenzied activity on the part of several organizations, including the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, the National Stonewall Democrats, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Equality Federation, and Pride At Work, among others. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy is a member of the Equality Federation and that, as chair, I represent NYAGRA in the Federation. I’m also a member of Pride At Work, though I did not take part in the PAW organizing around this issue. PAW and the Transgender Law Center organized a vigil outside Nancy Pelosi’s district office in San Francisco, which apparently played a significant role in the Speaker’s decision on Monday to reverse herself. Two letters to the Speaker’s office played a crucial role in the decision. One letter from the Task Force, calling on the House leadership to scrap the non-inclusive ENDA bill, was co-signed by more than 90 national, state and local organizations, from Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG) to BiNet USA to Equality Texas Center to Center Advocates of Milwaukee. The other, a letter from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the coalition leading the campaign for the federal hate crimes bill, called on the House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller to cancel the mark-up scheduled for today (Tuesday). The LCCR letter was signed by 20 of its member organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Momentum, People For the American Way, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and — crucially — the Human Rights Campaign, the largest, wealthiest, and most influential LGBT rights organization in the country. The loose ad hoc coalition of organizations opposing the move to strip transgender language from ENDA generated a flood of phone calls to the Capitol. At the same time, NCTE, NCLR, the Task Force, and other leading organizations involved in the effort met with Barney Frank and met and spoke with people in the Speaker’s office as well as with staff to Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, the other half of the LGBT caucus in the House. At 5:43 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 1, Speaker Pelosi and U.S. Reps. George Miller (chair of the House Education and Labor Committee), Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin (D.-Wis.) issued the following statement: “After discussions with congressional leaders and organizations supporting passage of ENDA, we have agreed to schedule mark-up of the bill in the Committee on Education and Labor later this month, followed by a vote in the full House. This schedule will allow proponents of the legislation to continue their discussions with Members in the interest of passing the broadest possible bill.” Despite intense pressure on Baldwin to join Frank in the effort to strip gender identity and expression from ENDA, the first (and so far only) ‘out’ lesbian elected to Congress refused to cave in and her resolute support for full transgender inclusion in the non-discrimination bill played a significant role in the House leadership’s decision to reverse itself. On the evening of Monday, Oct. 1, the HRC board of directors voted to support an inclusive ENDA. On Tuesday morning, Joe Solmonese, HRC’s executive director, declared, “…we are not able to support, nor will we encourage Members of Congress to vote against, the newly introduced sexual orientation only bill. ” HRC’s board vote and public statement reaffirming support for only a trans-inclusive ENDA should add additional weight to the consensus of the LGBT advocacy organizations on this issue. The significance of the Speaker’s decision must be understood: the House leadership has not agreed to ditch the strategy of a ‘trans-free’ ENDA; rather, the leadership has given LGBT rights organizations two or three more weeks to ‘educate’ members of the House Education and Labor Committee — and members of the House more generally — on the issue of discrimination based on gender identity and expression. It is now up to those who support transgender rights to generate as much support among House members for a fully transgender-inclusive ENDA bill. If you would like to join in the effort to enact an inclusive non-discrimination law, find your House member on the House website.

I can tell you from personal experience with legislators that e-mail is probably the least effective way to communicate with them. I would suggest availing yourself of that ancient method of communication, the letter, sent by snail mail. Letters from constituents are the most valuable and hand-written letters (if they are legible, of course) from constituents are the most carefully read of all. Phone calls are also helpful, once again, especially if they come from constituents. I sincerely hope that we can generate enough support for H.R. 2015 (the transgender-inclusive version of ENDA). But I am buoyed by the enormous wave of support for transgender inclusion in legislation voiced by the more than 100 organizations (both LGBT and non-LGBT) in the letters from the Task Force and LCCR. It seems to me that the events of the last week forefront what may be one of the most important developments in the LGBT community in the United States in the last decade. Over the last week, we saw the LGBT community mobilize to challenge our closest allies in Congress — including the openly gay Democrat who until now has been regarded as the ‘gatekeeper’ on LGBT issues by his colleagues. And just as importantly, the House leadership listened; that would not have happened ten years ago, or even five. And that suggests to me that the LGBT community has matured to the point that the idea of excluding transgendered people from non-discrimination is now unacceptable to any ‘mainstream’ LGBT advocacy organization.

This blog post originally appeared on BigQueer.com on 4 October 2007.

Wir sind die neunundneunzig Prozent. (German)

Nous sommes le quatre-vingt-dix-neuf pour cent. (French)

Noi siamo il novantanove per cento. (Italian)

Somos el ciento noventa y nueve porciento. (Spanish)

Vi er nittini prosent. (Norwegian)

Vi är de nittionio procent. (Swedish)

Við erum þá níutíu og níu prósent. (Icelandic)

Yr ydym yn y cant 99. (Welsh Gaelic)

Tá muid ar an gcéad nócha is naoi. (Irish Gaelic)

우리는 구십구 퍼센트 입니다~. (U-ri-neun a-heu-na-hop it-seeum-ni-da.) (Korean)

Kami adalah sembilan puluh sembilan persen. (Bahasa Indonesia)

Donec eget nonaginta novem. (Latin)