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)

As president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, I’m happy that we are hosting a transgender day of remembrance event for the very first time, and I’d like to begin by thanking Michelle Abdus-Shakur and Silvia Dutchevici and everyone else who helped put this event together.

I might add that Queens Pride House is the only LGBT community center in this city or this state that has an openly transgendered president of the board of directors or, for that matter, a board president of Asian descent; Pride House is also the only LGBT community center in this city with a person of color as board president.

In my capacity as chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), I’m working as part of a broad coalition of organizations seeking to advance enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), which would prohibit discrimination throughout the state based on gender identity or gender expression. And I represent NYAGRA on a task force that is working on guidelines for implementation of the New York State Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), enacted last year by the state legislature to prohibit discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state. Dignity includes a comprehensive list of categories and characteristics, including gender defined to include gender identity and expression — the first statute enacted by the New York state legislature that includes transgender-specific language. And school bullying is one of the most common forms of harassment or violence directed towards those who are transgendered and gender-variant.

Trans-Form the Occupation

Pauline Park

at

Occupy Wall Street

13 November 2011

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here. I’m Pauline Park, chair of NYAGRA, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, an LGBT community center in the borough of Queens.

I’m honored by the invitation to speak here at Occupy Wall Street, which I think is one of the most exciting recent developments in American politics. People are finally standing up to corporate greed and the powers that be. And that includes transgendered people. I’m a transgendered woman who was born in Korea. I’ve lived in New York since 1995 and I’d like to talk about the people who make up my community.

1) The diversity of the transgender community.

We need to recognize the full diversity of the transgender community. There are as many different ways of being transgendered as there are transgendered people. Do not assume that sex reassignment is the end point for every transgender transition; most transgendered people do not want sex reassignment surgery, and most people who do never get it.

2) ‘Transgender’ as an umbrella term.

There are literally hundreds of descriptors and self-descriptors that people use to identify or self-identify. But don’t confuse the label with the person. ‘Transgender’ is an ‘umbrella’ term that is widely used to bring together a wide variety of different subgroups within the community, including transsexuals, crossdressers and genderqueers. The term ‘transgender’ can be used in three different ways: as a term of self-identification, as an analytic term, or as a political term. There are many people who don’t identify with the term ‘transgender,’ including a lot of immigrants and transgendered people of color.

3) Sexual orientation vs. gender identity.

It’s important to understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation refers to who you’re attracted to; gender identity refers to how you identify and express your gender. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity per se. There are transgendered people who identify as heterosexual as well as those who identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual. Don’t assume someone’s sexual orientation from their gender identity or presentation. What do you know about someone’s sexual orientation if you know that they’re transgendered? Nothing~!

4) Discrimination.

In this society, transgendered and gender-variant people face pervasive discrimination, harassment, abuse & violence. Even with a transgender rights law in place since 2002, transgendered people regularly report discrimination in this city. Fortunately, the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, education and credit. If you experience discrimination, contact NYAGRA through nyagra.com or the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund through the TLDEF website at transgenderlegal.org.

5) Bullying, harassment & violence.

Transgendered and gender-variant youth face pervasive bullying and bias-based harassment in our public schools; and the rate of teen suicide among trans and genderqueer youth is astronomically high. Many trans and genderqueer youth drop out of school because of such bullying; and without even a high school diploma, the chances of finding a well-paying job are very slim. Last year, the New York state legislature enacted the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), which prohibits bullying and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state.

6) Housing & homelessness; health care.

Many transgendered people find themselves homeless because of discrimination and abuse, including domestic and intimate partner violence. Many are forced into sex work, with heightened risk of HIV infection, police brutality, and street violence. Many transgendered people lack health insurance and even access to basic health care.

7) GID.

Many transgendered people access hormones and surgery through the diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID). But the GID diagnosis pathologizes everyone who is gender-variant as a gender deviant. As I like to say, I do not have a gender identity disorder; it is society that has a gender identity disorder. We need to eliminate the pathologizing of transgender and gender variance.

We need to create a society in which no one is denied employment or housing or health care because of their gender identity or expression. We need to recognize the multiple oppressions that face transgendered people of color, including immigrants of color. We need to recognize that the root of our oppression as transgendered and gender-variant people is the sex/gender binary — the policing of rigid gender norms by the police and public authorities, corporations and other employers, and conventionally gendered people in our society. We need to bring feminist consciousness to the project of challenging, deconstructing and dismantling the sex/gender binary.

We need to create a society characterized by social and economic justice, not governed by rigid gender norms and corporate profits. And as a step towards that goal, we need to make sure that this space is safe for everyone, including our transgendered brothers and sisters. As the Mahatma Gandhi said, we need to be the change that we want to see in the world.

Thank you.

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/trans-form-the-occupation-occupy-wall-street-11-13-11/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/lgbt-api-community-how-to-organize-it-u-of-florida-11-9-11/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/lgbt-api-community-how-to-organize-it-u-of-florida-11-9-11/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:18:00 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=2931

LGBT API Community & How to Organize It
Pauline Park
chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

LGBT Stories: Queer in Asian America
Asian Kaleidoscope Month
University of Florida
Gainesville
9 November 2011

I’d like to begin by thanking the organizers of Asian Kaleidoscope Month for inviting me to speak here at the University of Florida. It’s my first visit to Gainesville and I’m really enjoying the opportunity to see the university and meet all of the wonderful people who have been working so hard to put together this panel and the entire month of events. Id especially like to thank Tresson Canley and Hoang Vi Ho for making my appearance here possible.

I’ve been asked to talk about what the LGBT API community is and how to organize it. To begin with, defining the community requires recognizing that it is an extraordinarily diverse group of people. Not only are there members of the community who trace their origins to every Asian and Pacific Islander (API) society, there are members of the community who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) from every country in the Asia/Pacific region.

In addition to such extraordinary diversity in national origin and ethnicity as well as sexual orientation and gender identity, the LGBT/queer API community is characterized by a far greater range of socioeconomic status than the ‘model minority myth’ would admit: there are APIs and of course LGBt/queer APIs from every class and social stratum, from the wealthiest one percent of American society to the poorest and most marginalized. While there are a lot of APIs with Ph.D.s, there are also enough APIs who never have the opportunity to go to college.

Within the LGBT community, there is a dizzying array of identities as well; even the ‘T’ actually represents a host of gender identities, from those who identify as transsexuals and crossdressers to those who identify as transgendered or genderqueer. And of course, because so many transgendered API immigrants bring with them their culture of origin, some may also self identify in terms of identity categories from their cultures of origin, with such terms as ‘bakla’ or ‘kathooey’ or ‘waria.’

If the LGBT/queer API community is as diverse as the larger API community, that very diversity represents a challenge for activists and advocates attempting to organize it. So the first step for such activists is to recognize the social construction of all identity labels. We as human beings are naturally taxonomic creatures and generate endless categories with which to describe ourselves and others. If we can recognize how ultimately artificial and arbitrary these labels and categories are, we can then reach the fundament of truth that underlies LGBT and API community organizing, which is that members of such communities need to come together because they face oppression based either on race and ethnicity and/or sexual orientation and/or gender identity or gender expression.

In the light of such an insight, ‘organizing’ takes on something that can and should go beyond organizing purely along lines of identity. The point is not simply to bring together people who share a common identity of some kind — as useful as such a project may be — but to bring them together around a common purpose. Hence the task is to use the constructions articulated by identitarian politics to reach beyond the limits of identity formations.

What does that mean in practical terms? Let me give you an example from my own experience as an activist, and that is the work that we did in two different coalitions to get the New York City Council enact the Dignity in All Schools Act in 2004 and the New York state legislature to enact the Dignity for All Students Act in 2010. Both the New York City and New York State DASA statutes prohibit bullying and bias-based harassment based on a comprehensive list of characteristics, including race, ethnicity, religion and national origin as well as sexual orientation and gender defined to include gender identity and gender expression — language that is crucial in including and  protecting transgendered and gender-variant people. What’s interesting here is that while both bills were viewed as ‘gay bills’ while pending legislation, they enlisted the support of both LGBT and non-LGBT organizations, including non-LGBT-specific Asian American organizations. The NYC DASA Coalition in particular engaged the active participation of API groups, including the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF) and the Sikh Coalition — reflecting the fact that so much of the bullying in New York City public schools is directed towards API students as well as LGBT students, or those perceived to be queer.

So the question of how to organize becomes a question of ‘how to organize what?’ and ‘how to organize for what?’ It is the objective of the campaign that must drive its organization; and if we are talking about a movement, it must be a ‘purpose-driven movement,’ to coin a phrase. The strategy and tactics of the movement or organization must flow from its purpose, and if that objective or set of objectives is clear, then the organizing techniques will become readily apparent.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. Park also co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999, as well as the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC.org), the first political club by and for LGBT people of color in New York City, which she co-founded in 2001, serving as co-president of the club from 2007-2010. And she co-founded the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) in July 2002, serving as vice-president from 2002-2004.

Park currently serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (transgenderlegal.org).

.

Empowering the Transgender Tribe
Pauline Park
Chair,
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

keynote speech
Empowering the Tribe
LGBTI Symposium
John Jay College
3 November 2011

I would like to begin by thanking Silvia Dapia and Raul Romero and their colleagues at John Jay College for organizing Empowering the Tribe and for inviting me to speak at this symposium. I’ve been asked to talk about transgender legal issues, and I would like to touch briefly on developments at the national level as well as at the local level in New York City and spend the bulk of my time looking at the current situation at the state level here in New York.

On the theme of ‘Empowering the Transgender Tribe, there is both good news and bad. At the national level, the good news is that the debate over inclusion of gender identity in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) currently pending in Congress came to a definitive conclusion in favor of inclusion; the bad news is that the inclusive version of the bill has stalled. But it is worthwhile spending just a few minutes examining the course of events in 2007 when the great ENDA crisis erupted.

As many if not most of you may know, it took over a decade to persuade the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) — the lead sponsor of the ENDA bill in the House of Representatives — to support transgender inclusion in that legislation, and in April 2007, Frank introduced the gender identity-inclusive version of the bill in the House. But without consultation with any of the LGBT advocacy organizations involved with the campaign for ENDA, Frank withdrew the inclusive bill in September 2007 and re-introduced the sexual orientation-only bill with the full support of U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Speaker of the House. Based on a whip count — the count of House members in favor of the bill — Frank and Pelosi claimed that they did not have the votes to pass the inclusive bill; but the results of that whip count were never released, and I myself could not help but suspect that there were politics afoot that had little if anything to do with the merits of the legislation.

My guess is that Pelosi and Frank wanted to use ENDA as a stick to beat the Republicans with in the November 2008 Congressional elections and calculated that the inclusive bill would be harder to use for partisan political purposes precisely because acceptance of transgendered people is not as far along as acceptance of non-transgendered gay and lesbian people. According to this logic, Republicans could more plausibly claim that more education needed to be done on issues of gender identity than sexual orientation. Shockingly, not only had Pelosi and Frank betrayed their promise to the LGBT community, the Human Rights Campaign — the largest and wealthiest national LGBT organization in the United States — also betrayed an explicit promise by Joe Solmonese, its executive director, that HRC would not move forward without transgendered people.

But what Frank, Pelosi and HRC did not count on was the formation of United ENDA — a coalition of hundreds of national, state and local LGBT organizations who demanded nothing less than a fully inclusive bill. United ENDA — which includes NYAGRA, the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), the Empire State Pride Agenda, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and nearly 400 other organizations — declared its opposition to the sexual orientation-only bill, which Pelosi pushed through committee and to the floor of the House for a vote, but which failed to move forward in the Senate. Despite statements from the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), then lead sponsor of ENDA in the Senate, that he saw no reason not to move the bill in the Senate, the controversy over the gay-only ENDA bill had taken its toll, having divided Democrats in the House; no longer a useful partisan tool for the Democratic leadership in Congress, Pelosi and Frank apparently decided not to push the Senate majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada), to move the bill in the Senate.

Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund and other LGBT organizations pointed out to Frank that the inclusion of gender identity and expression language in ENDA would help enhance protections for non-transgendered lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people as well as being necessary to ensure protection from employment discrimination for transgendered and gender-variant people; to that extent, HRC’s decision to support the non-inclusive bill represented a disservice even to its non-transgendered LGB members. The apparent point behind the withdrawal of the inclusive bill — the attempt to use ENDA as a partisan tool against Republicans in the 2008 Congressional elections — was not only a shameful betrayal of the transgender community but of the LGBT community as a whole. But the ENDA crisis of 2007 proved two things to members of Congress: that neither Barney Frank nor HRC spoke for the LGBT community; and to that extent, I see the 2007 episode as being a defining moment in the history of the national LGBT community. Now, the challenge is to get the leadership in the House and the Senate to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. Unfortunately, neither House minority leader Nancy Pelosi nor Senate majority leader Harry Reid, nor President Barack Obama, have shown much real leadership in moving the inclusive ENDA bill forward this session, and Speaker John Boehner is unlikely to move the bill in the House, given that most of members of the Republican caucus oppose ENDA. I have heard it said that the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress took it on faith that HRC was right in insisting that repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was the LGBT community’s top legislative priority; and while I strongly supported elimination of institutionalized discrimination in the military, enactment of ENDA would have positively affected many more people than repeal of DADT has; the bigger mistake was setting up the binary opposition of DADT repeal vs. ENDA passage; it was a false dichotomy, and the president and Congressional leaders should never have accepted the notion that they could only focus on one LGBT rights bill at one time. But the sad reality is that ENDA has little if any chance of passage in the House before the November 2012 election, and passage of ENDA in the new session will depend to a considerable extent on which party controls the House, the Senate and the White House in January 2013.

If the ENDA crisis of 2007 constituted a defining moment regarding transgender inclusion in federal legislation as well as the national LGBT community and movement, a similarly defining moment came at the state level in December 2002, when the New York State Senate passed the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) without gender identity or expression. The decision to move forward with the non-inclusive SONDA bill came despite calls from transgender organizations such as NYAGRA and transgender-supportive activists for the introduction of inclusive legislation. A year before passage of the non-inclusive SONDA bill, I and several other transgender activists met with the chief of staff to the lead sponsor of SONDA in the Assembly, who informed us that he would not revise the bill without the explicit assent of the Empire State Pride Agenda, which refused to consider such a revision.

And so, when SONDA did ultimately pass the Senate in December 2002, the exclusion of gender identity and expression necessitated the introduction of new state legislation to prohibit discrimination against transgendered and gender-variant people in New York. That transgender rights legislation is the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), which was introduced in the New York state legislature shortly after enactment of SONDA.

One could say that the campaign for GENDA began the very day that the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) passed the Senate in December 2002 without gender identity or expression in the text of the bill. The 17th of December 2002 marked the low point of relations between the L&G portions of the LGBT community and the T segment — though in truth, there were quite a few transgender-supportive LGB people who supported inclusion in gender identity and expression in SONDA. Since then, the organized LGBT community has come together as one to support GENDA.

Unfortunately, the full weight of a unified LGBT community has not been enough to move the GENDA bill, which is currently stuck in committee in the Senate. In a body with 60 members, 32 votes are needed for a bill to pass the Senate. My colleagues at the Empire State Pride Agenda — which coordinates the GENDA Coalition — inform me that we have a solid 30 votes and a few more potential votes, but there is as yet no absolute majority as we go into the legislative session that starts in January and ends in late June. Sen. Thomas K. Duane (D-Chelsea) is the lead sponsor of the GENDA bill just as he was of the marriage equality legislation enacted last June as well as  and the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) enacted last September. But with Democrats once again in the minority in the Senate, the fate of the GENDA bill is once again in the hands of the Republican majority, which has never been in the vanguard of transgender rights.

Representing the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)  in the statewide transgender civil rights coalition, I am working for passage of GENDA, but I do not see the chances for passage of the bill in the new session starting in January as being particularly high, as 2012 is an election year, with the entire state legislature up for re-election — and legislators are even less likely to take risks in election years than in off-years. Transgendered and gender-variant people face pervasive discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations should not have to wait another year or more to secure full legal rights; but the sad reality is that the New York state legislature is the most dysfunctional of any of the 50, in the considered judgment of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. The conclusion of the 2006 report prised no one I know of and certainly no LGBT activist or progressive advocacy organization working in Albany.

It is not at all a trivial matter to note that gerrymandering through highly artificial re-districting is what helped ensured continued Republican control for nearly 70 years up until the November 2008 election contrary to the long-term trend towards Democratic affiliation or at least voting behavior across the state. There is in fact nothing in the state constitution that confers on the reigning Senate majority legal authority over re-districting; rather, it is the long-standing deal between the Democratic majority in the Assembly and the Republican majority that controlled the Senate until January 2009 that maintained Republican control over re-districting of Senate districts. But that deal is not only profoundly (small ‘D’) undemocratic but also directly contrary to the interests of the Democratic Party; so why has the Assembly Speaker not repudiated that deal? The Democrats have a 2-to-1 majority in the Assembly and not even the most optimistic Republican thinks that there’s any realistic chance of overturning that Democratic majority. In contrast, the Senate is much more closely divided and it is in fact power over re-districting that makes it a relatively level playing field — that, and the fact that prisoners incarcerated in prisons upstate — most of whom are from downstate — count as residents of the Senate districts in which they are being incarcerated for purposes of re-districting. Reform of that provision as well as removal of the Senate majority’s ability to gerrymander its own district lines — by reassigning that authority to an independent state commission — would almost certainly help elect more Democrats to the Senate and would contribute to a more representative, more small ‘D’ democratic as well as large ‘D’ Democratic as well as a more progressive Senate. And such a chamber would be more amenable to LGBT legislation such as GENDA. Our rights should not be dependent on the party affiliation of the state Senate majority; but the sad reality is that passage of GENDA is more likely if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in 2013, and gaining Republican co-sponsorship of GENDA will be crucial for securing passage of the bill.

It is important to note that the odds were stacked against us when in February 2000 NYAGRA — in partnership with the Pride Agenda — began the campaign for Int. No. 24, the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in April 2002. With the implacable opposition of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Speaker Peter F. Vallone, Sr., it was actually their removal from office at the end of December 2001 when term limits came into effect that gave us a new Council Speaker willing to push the bill through the Council and a new mayor willing to sign it into law.

Of course, the situation at the state level is different in some significant respects, but the good news is that we are very close to securing a majority in the Senate in favor of GENDA, which has passed the Assembly by overwhelming margins three times now. Once we do get GENDA enacted into law, it will be important to move onto the work of implementation and enforcement, which is just as important as enactment in protecting transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination in this state.

After enactment of Local Law 3 of 2002 by the City Council, the New York City Commission on Human Rights invited me and several other activists to form a working group to draft guidelines for implementation of the new law, ultimately adopted by the Commission in December 2004. But unfortunately, neither the Commission nor the government of the City of New York as a whole have committed sufficient resources to educate employers, landlords, and providers of public accommodations — not to mention members of the transgender community itself — on the provisions of the new law, in effect leaving it to small, underfunded transgender advocacy organizations such as NYAGRA to do that work of public education.

When we do eventually get GENDA through the state Senate and signed into law, the state legislature, state agencies, and the executive chamber of the governor must commit resources sufficient to carry out that task of public education so that every employer in this state, every landlord, every provider of public accommodations, education or credit understands that discrimination based on gender identity or expression is unacceptable in this state. So let us all commit to working for enactment of ENDA and of GENDA and full implementation of ENDA and GENDA as well as the local ordinances already enacted by city councils and county legislatures in this state that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression. Let us work to bringing about the day in which gender-based discrimination in New York and throughout this country is a thing of the past. Thank you.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in April 2002.

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/empowering-the-transgender-tribe-john-jay-college-11-3-11/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/transgender-health-care-10-simple-rules-for-providers-to-consider/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/11/transgender-health-care-10-simple-rules-for-providers-to-consider/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:19:49 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=2908 Transgender Health Care
10 Simple Rules for Providers to Consider

Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy
(NYAGRA)

Transgendered and gender-variant people face pervasive discrimination in attempting to access health care in the United States. Some of the impediments to accessing quality health care are obvious and some are not.

Based on my own experience as an activist, advocate and consumer of health care, here are a few simple rules that health care providers who are committed to full transgender inclusion in the provision of health care may wish to consider:

Rule #1: Effective health care provision requires the construction of a relationship of trust and confidence between the provider and the patient/client/’consumer.’ It is the responsibility of providers to educate themselves on issues of gender identity and gender expression in order to serve their patients, clients, and consumers sensitively and effectively. Conversely, it is also the responsibility of transgendered and gender-variant people to do what they can to educate and empower themselves and work with health care providers in order to obtain the best health care that they can.

Rule #2: Effective health care provision requires that providers take into account the diversity of the transgender community, which is extraordinarily diverse — in terms of gender identity and expression as well as race, ethnicity, religion, dis/ability, and sexual orientation. There are as many ways of being transgendered as there are transgendered people.

Rule #3: Health care providers need to understand that sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is not the end point for most gender transitions.  Most transgendered people do not want SRS and most who do never get it. There are as many ways of transitioning as there are transgendered people.

Rule #4: Transgendered and gender-variant people are denied care in many areas not directly or even indirectly related to their gender identity; any attempt to address health care provision for members of the community must address those areas not related to gender transition as well as those areas that are transition-related. Some transgendered people are denied coverage for treatments or procedures that relate to their anatomical or biological sex assigned at birth, such as prostate cancer for transgendered women or cervical or ovarian cancer for transmen. Only in a relationship of mutual trust and respect can physicians and other health care providers be sensitive and informed enough to provide effective care in such areas.

Rule #5: The impediments to health care access are both medical and non-medical and effective health care provision requires that providers take into account and address both sets of impediments. Transgender sensitivity training should focus primarily on the psychosocial aspects of the interaction between providers and consumers, and that training should extend to physicians and nurses as well as everyone in a health care facility.

Rule #6: Health care providers need to avoid pathologizing transgendered people through the false diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID) while at the same time understanding that such diagnoses are used by some transgendered people to access hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sex reassignment surgery (SRS) and other desired medical interventions.

Rule #7: Transgender sensitivity training needs to be mandatory for all staff in hospitals and health care-providing facilities, including technical people, security guards, and intake staff as well as medical and mental health professionals; physicians should undergo psychosocial sensitivity training, regardless of participation in ‘grand rounds’ and other cognate medical trainings and discussions. Transgender sensitivity trainings should be no less than two hours in duration and ideally should be four hours long. Real training involves an intensive interaction between the trainer and the trained. Webinars and handouts may be used to supplement such trainings but can be no substitute for trainings themselves. Trainings should be conducted by those who have specific expertise in transgender issues, not merely those who do general ‘diversity’ trainings or even those who do LGBT trainings but who lack expertise on transgender issues specifically. Given staff turnover, trainings must be conducted at regular intervals.

Rule #8: All health care providers and health care-providing facilities should adopt policies and protocols that specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression in the provision of health care, and such policies and protocols should be regularly and effectively communicated to all relevant constituencies.

Rule #9: Health care providers should participate in larger efforts to achieve legal and public policy change in order to provide effective and universal health care for all, including all transgendered and gender-variant people; providers need to understand that the denial of health care to transgendered and gender-variant people is part of a larger denial of health care access to and insurance coverage and payment for health care to LGBT people, low-income people, poor people, and people with disabilities in the United States.

Rule #10: There are no rules, only ‘best practices’ — or at least, better practices and worse practices; and such practices must be informed by the lived experiences of transgendered and gender-variant people.

* * * * *

Pauline Park, Ph.D. (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), and vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (transgenderlegal.org). Park named and helped create the Transgender Health Initiative of New York (THINY) and oversaw the creation and publication in July 2009 of the NYAGRA transgender health care provider directory, the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York City metropolitan area. She led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines for implementation of the statute.

The Moonlight Amid the Mountains

keynote speech
Gay-La
University of Utah
21 October 2011

Pauline Park
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

I’m honored by the invitation to speak here at the University of Utah Gay-La  and I’d like to thank the LGBT Resource Center for that invitation. And I’d especially like to thank Cathy Martinez, the director of the Resource Center, for organizing my appearance here. I am really impressed by the work that the Resource Center is doing here at the University of Utah to make the university a safer place for all students, including and especially those who identify as LGBT or queer.

In my keynote speech on Wednesday, I made some suggestions for how to make colleges and universities more transgender-supportive. And I would like us all to fully appreciate the significance of this event itself — something that was inconceivable when I graduated from college way back in the Dark Ages.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, there was no office of LGBT student services on any campus anywhere in the United States.  There was no LGBT studies program at any college or university, and queer theory had no place in the academy or academic discourse. There are now LGBT student services coordinators and resource centers of various sizes and configurations on colleges across the country, and even a professional association for such staff — the Consortium of Higher Education Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Resource Professionals.

When I had my first coming out way back in 1978 in my freshman year of college — as a gay-identified male, there was no LGBT student group of any kind at the University of Wisconsin. The only resource for students was what was then called ‘the Gay Center,’ which was staffed by volunteer peer counselors in a small room in the basement of the Presbyterian church on the edge of campus. Even when I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994 — just a few years before transitioning and coming out as an openly transgendered woman — UIUC offered nothing for LGBT students, until the establishment of the LGBT Resource Center a few years after I left campus. So I look around in wonder at the range of resources available for LGBT students on so many campuses around the country.

That being said, even at a university such as this one that recognizes the needs of LGBT students and supports them through the Resource Center, queer students may experience isolation, alienation, and humiliation, as was made so painfully obvious by the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi last September, provoking deep sorrow as well as anger within the LGBT community not only at Rutgers University but nationally. How terribly sad that Tyler felt so humiliated by the experience to which he was subjected by his roommate that he was driven to take his own life, just as he was preparing to debut as a soloist with the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra a few weeks later. I played violin in my junior high and high school orchestras and chamber orchestras, and perhaps for that reason as well as others, I felt a special connection with Tyler when I heard about his suicide and untimely death.

If any good has come out of that heart-rending tragedy, it is that Tyler’s death brought renewed attention to the issue of bullying and bias-based harassment, one of the foremost concerns of the organization that I chair,  the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy. We founded NYAGRA in June 1998 in order to address the pervasive discrimination, harassment, abuse and violence faced by transgendered and gender-variant people in this society.

NYAGRA launched the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and co-founded the coalition that is leading the campaign for the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) currently pending in the New York state legislature. NYAGRA also co-founded the coalitions that led the successful campaigns for enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in 2004 and the Dignity for All Students Act by the New York state legislature in 2010. Both of the ‘Dignity’ laws prohibit bullying and bias-based harassment in public schools based on a comprehensive list of characteristics, including race, ethnicity, religion and disability as well as sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. I now represent NYAGRA in the statewide task force convened last month to begin the task of drafting guidelines for implementation of the state Dignity for All Students Act.

While it is impossible to anticipate every possible situation of potential bullying, we can mandate sensitivity training and implement guidelines that greatly reduce the bias-based harassment that so many students face in schools — and sadly, even on college campuses — in New York, New Jersey, Utah and throughout the country.

Another priority for NYAGRA is to enhance access to  health care for members of the transgender community, which we do – working in partnership with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) and the Gender Identity Project of the LGBT Community Center of New York City — through the Transgender Health Initiative of New York, a project whose mission is to enhance access to health care for transgendered and gender-variant people.

In the 7 years since we started the Transgender Health Initiative, THINY (as we call it) and its members have worked tirelessly to try to open up health care to members of our community in New York, who face significant impediments to accessing quality health care, just as they do throughout the country. In July 2009, NYAGRA published the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in New York City and the metropolitan area, which is now available on nyagra.com. This was the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers for New York City and the metropolitan area ever published, and to my knowledge, it was the first such directory for any city published in a print edition anywhere in the United States. We are now updating it continuously as we identify more transgender-sensitive providers in the area.

And Queens Pride House, the LGBT community center that we founded in 1997, also works to enhance access to health care through Queer Links, a service that provides referrals to LGBT-sensitive health care providers in the borough of Queens.

It is through community-based organizations such as NYAGRA, TLDEF, and Queens Pride House that so much of the work of the LGBT community is done. And I would encourage you — whatever your field of study here at Rutgers was and whatever occupation or profession you pursue after graduating — to consider volunteering for an organization that serves the LGBT community. As Mohandas K. Gandhi so famously and so aptly put it, one discovers oneself through service to others.

The philosopher who most inspired the Mahatma was Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century New England transcendentalist philosopher. Thoreau might well have been thinking of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in “Brokeback Mountain” when he wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” While Thoreau’s “Walden” long predates Annie Proulx’s short story and the Ang Lee film based on it, Thoreau’s magnum opus remains as relevant today as was published in 1854. In “Walden,” Thoreau poses basic questions that we all face as human beings: What is life and how shall we live it? Thoreau offers this answer: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

What is that “moonlight amid the mountains” of which Thoreau speaks? It is the sheer exhilaration of the authentic life lived fully in the integrity of one’s own truest self. Ennis and Jack glimpse the literal moonlight amid the mountains when they live on Brokeback and later return to it on their periodic “fishing trips.” But only Jack can see the metaphorical moonlight of the authentic life that offers itself to them before they descend from the mountain into the dreary desperation of straight conformity and loveless marriage. Thoreau could well have been describing Jack in the passage in “Walden” in which he famously declared: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

The authentic life is there for the living, and the deepest tragedy of “Brokeback Mountain” is Ennis’s refusal to accept Jack’s invitation to live it. Regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, anyone seeking to live an authentic life need look no further than the conclusion from “Walden” for guidance:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,  and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Thank you.

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. Park currently serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund  (transgenderlegal.org).

Park named and helped create the Transgender Health Initiative of New York(THINY), a community organizing project established by TLDEF and NYAGRA to ensure that transgendered and gender non-conforming people can access health care in a safe, respectful and non-discriminatory manner. And as executive editor, she oversaw the creation and publication in July 2009 of the NYAGRA transgender health care provider directory, the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York City metropolitan area and the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers published in print format anywhere in the United States.

Park led the campaign for passage of Int. No. 24, the transgender rights ordinance enacted by the New York City Council 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 law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body, and she is a member of the statewide task force created to implement the statute. She also served 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 did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European Studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary about her life and work by documentarian Larry Tung that premiered at the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) in 2008.

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/10/the-moonlight-amid-the-mountains-u-of-utah-10-21-11/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/10/transgender-inclusion-in-academia-u-of-utah-10-19-11/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/10/transgender-inclusion-in-academia-u-of-utah-10-19-11/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:22:45 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=2869

Transgender Inclusion in Academia

Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

keynote speech

University of Utah
Pride Week
19 October 2011

I would like to begin by thanking Cathy Martinez, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) Resource Center for inviting me to speak at Pride Week here at the University of Utah. This is my first time in Utah, and I’m really excited to be here, especially for the pride week celebration at the university.

The oft-quoted slogan of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s was that “the personal is political,” and so I would like to commence by situating myself in the context of my own activism and academic background. After describing my current advocacy work in New York, I will then attempt to articulate a program by which we could advance transgender inclusion in the academy — what I will call ‘transgendering’ the academy.

I was born in Korea, adopted by European American parents and raised in the Midwest. A German Lutheran upbringing on the south side of Milwaukee is an unlikely background for an Asian American transgender activist working in New York, you might think; but there’s nearly half a century between the flight from Seoul on what was then known as ‘Northwest Orient Airlines’ (insert sound of gong here) to Chicago via Tokyo and Anchorage and the flight from LaGuardia to San Francisco International that brought me to this conference a few days ago.

In between, there have been struggles to come to terms with gender identity and intercountry adoptee identity — I often think I was born to have an identity complex — as well as experiences living in four different Midwestern cities and five different European cities, and working in three different careers in two distinctly different gender presentations. All of which would make for either a crowded and potentially confusing memoir or a novel with a highly implausible plot.

A career in public relations in Chicago and a career in academic political science have been followed by my current vocation as an activist — I do not say ‘career,’ because I see activism not as a career but rather a commitment, or a set of commitments. And I would not say that I chose to pursue activism so much as I would say that activism chose me. But if my first career (in public relations) has actually been far more useful to me as an activist than my second, my academic background has helped shape my thinking about activism. And in turn, my experiences doing advocacy work on behalf of a very marginalized community have helped me think about how actual experience with activism can inform academic theory construction just as theoretical work can be used to better inform activism and advocacy.

My activism

My activism began in 1994, when I joined six others to co-found Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC), but activism became a full-time pursuit in early 1997 when I co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY) — which I served as coordinator of from 1997-99 — and Queens Pride House, an LGBT community center in the borough of Queens. The organization with which I am most closely associated is the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which I co-founded in 1998. But I also participated in co-founding two political clubs: the Out People of Color Political Acition Club (OutPOCPAC) (2001) and the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (2002).

The accomplishment in which I take the most pride was my role in leading the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. And I have to say that three years of leading a major legislative campaign taught me more about politics than five and-a-half years of studying academic political science theory ever did.

But leading the campaign for Int. No. 24 — enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002 — was only the most prominent public role that I have had the honor of playing as an activist. Following enactment of the transgender rights law, the New York City Commission on Human Rights convened a working group of activists that drafted guidelines for implementation of the statute; ironically enough, my own discrimination case — involving an incident of discrimination that took place in the midst of the process of getting the Human Rights Commission to adopt those guidelines — ended up playing a small but significant role in the process, as well as providing crucial language that helped resolve an impasse that we had reached with the Commission over the provisions of those implementation guidelines.

NYAGRA is a co-founding member of the coalition seeking enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), the transgender rights bill currently pending in the New York state legislature. But long before the introduction of GENDA, NYAGRA worked with the Empire State Pride Agenda — the statewide LGBT advocacy organization — to co-found the coalition seeking enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), which would prohibit discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state of New York. Believe it or not, February 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of that coalition, and the bill is still pending in the state legislature ten full years after it was first introduced — evidence, if any were needed, that New York does indeed have the most dysfunctional legislature of any of the 50 states.

I also served on the steering committee seeking enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act, the local ‘DASA’ bill introduced in the New York City Council in 2002 and enacted by the Council in 2004. Unfortunately, despite the pervasive bullying and bias-based harassment that takes place in New York City schools, the Department of Education — under the direction of the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — has refused to implement the DASA statute, substituting instead some weak teacher training efforts that seem to amount to little more than window dressing.

I would like to emphasize safe schools legislation in the context of this discussion because the New York State and City DASA legislation both include comprehensive lists of ‘protected categories,’ including race, religion, ethnicity, and disability as well as sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. Safe schools legislation such as New York State and City DASA help move us out of a purely ‘identitarian’ conceptual framework, which can be limiting. Both the New York State and City DASA Coalitions are multiracial and multi-community, including a broad range of organizations; certainly, LGBT organizations are significantly represented in both coalitions — understandable, since LGBT students and those perceived to be queer are among those most frequently subjected to bullying and bias-based harassment in school.

But while the New York State DASA Coalition is led by the Empire State Pride Agenda, the Dignity in Action Coalition — which is the successor to the New York City DASA Coalition — is led by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and includes a number of prominent API organizations in its leadership, including the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF), and the Sikh Coalition. In fact, these three API organizations — AALDEF, CACF and the Sikh Coalition — have emerged as the most prominent and most visible member organizations in the coalition.

It should be obvious — but may not be to everyone — that making higher education more LGBT-inclusive must also mean tackling the problem of bullying and bias-based harassment in elementary and secondary schools, since so many LGBT students drop out of school because of such bullying and never make it to college; that is especially true of transgendered students, I would essay, based on anecdotal evidence (in the absence of any comprehensive study of the problem).

While I may be most closely associated with the work I do on behalf of NYAGRA in the legislative arena, one other important component of my work is training. Over the course of the last decade, I have conducted hundreds of transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations, ranging from one-hour workshops to full-day trainings. A small part of my training work has been with academic institutions, focused on issues related to transgender inclusion — including, for example, gender-neutral housing, which has become a major issue on many campuses.

A few years ago, my colleague, Michael Silverman (executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund) and I conducted the first transgender sensitivity training sessions for any major hospital in New York City. And in fact, Michael and I started the Transgender Health Initiative of New York (THINY) with colleagues from TLDEF and the Gender Identity Project of the LGBT Community Center of New York City to enhance access to health care for transgendered and gender-variant people in New York City and the metropolitan area. Last July, NYAGRA published the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York metropolitican area; and while directories of this kind have been posted on-line for cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the NYAGRA directory may well be the first such directory in the United States ever published in a print edition.

Transgender Inclusion: The Circles Diagram

So here is the question that I would like to address today: if our goal is to make higher education fully transgender-inclusive, how would we go about achieving that objective? The first step would have to be to gain a full understanding of just what ‘transgender’ means. Many in this audience will have a very good understanding of transgender identity, but for those for whom this is a relatively new topic, I would like to suggest that you imagine a diagram to illustrate the complexity of the community of which I myself am a member.

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. Park currently serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund  (transgenderlegal.org).

Park named and helped create the Transgender Health Initiative of New York(THINY), a community organizing project established by TLDEF and NYAGRA to ensure that transgendered and gender non-conforming people can access health care in a safe, respectful and non-discriminatory manner. And as executive editor, she oversaw the creation and publication in July 2009 of the NYAGRA transgender health care provider directory, the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York City metropolitan area and the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers published in print format anywhere in the United States.

Park led the campaign for passage of Int. No. 24, the transgender rights ordinance enacted by the New York City Council 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 law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body, and she is a member of the statewide task force created to implement the statute. She also served 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 did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European Studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary about her life and work by documentarian Larry Tung that premiered at the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) in 2008.

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/10/transgender-inclusion-in-academia-u-of-utah-10-19-11/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/09/who-do-you-think-you-are-genealogy/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/09/who-do-you-think-you-are-genealogy/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:05:44 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=2854

The extraordinary popularity of the BBC series, “Who Do You Think You Are?,” prompted actress Lisa Kudrow to produce a similar series for NBC.

Who Do You Think You Are?

(documentary series on genealogy)

Who Do You Think You Are? Zoe Wanamaker (1/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IzSFsSWAc

Who Do You Think You Are – Zoe Wanamaker (2/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3cJ9-ma6wg&feature=related

Who Do You Think You Are – Zoe Wanamaker (3/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbfIIJn8e7U&feature=related

Who Do You Think You Are – Zoe Wanamaker (4/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjRRCtiaEKA&feature=related

Who Do You Think You Are – Zoe Wanamaker (5/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zb944xzE&feature=related

Who Do You Think You Are – Zoe Wanamaker (6/6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on8PUYUPvC0&feature=related

It was with some shock that I discovered my name on a list of ‘LGBT anti-Israel hate organizations’ on a Facebook ’cause’ page called ‘Queer Support for Israel.’ First, I do not hate Israel — though I have serious issues with the brutal, illegal and immoral Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Second, I’ve been called many things in my life, but I’ve never been called an organization, nor am I one. Third, I couldn’t find any identifiers on the page to indicate who put me on this list of supposed ‘Israel haters.’

Only later did I discover the source of this ‘information’ about me: a ‘public relations professional since 1994′ named Scott Piro who advertises the professional services he provides as including social media, public relations and copywriting to “an eclectic range of clients” — including Caroline Kennedy, Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York, presumably), Merrill Lynch, and Tylenol, among others.

Tylenol is exactly what you’ll be reaching for when you read his blog post entitled, “Pinkwashing, Whitewashing, Brainwashing” (3 July  2011). ”What helped was realizing I was being bullied,”  Piro writes of anti-occupation activists. “I use my real name, while most of these bloggers & tweeters attack me anonymously,” he declares sanctimoniously.

I don’t think it’s at all hyperbole, then, to say that it is the height of hypocrisy for Scott Piro to put up an anonymous Facebook page with no identifiers that labels organizations — and in my case, a lone individual — as ‘LGBT anti-Israel hate organizations’ without any attempt to provide those organizations with an opportunity to respond.

As of this writing, there are 22 organizations listed as ‘LGBT anti-Israel hate organizations,’ plus ‘Pauline Park – gender rights advocate (US),’ with a link to paulinepark.com. I do not recall ever having met Scott Piro, and he has certainly made absolutely no attempt to contact me to confirm his suspicion that I’m an enemy of the State of Israel — all very Nixon-esque or even McCarthy-esque.

Also on Piro’s ‘enemies’ list are Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC), of which I’m a co-founding member, as well as the Toronto-based Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA); Piro hasn’t  yet gotten around to putting on the list the New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), of which I am also a co-founding member; but he does cite NYC QAIA in his blog post. While I do not wish to speak for anyone else, no one I know of in QFOLC or QAIA ‘hates’ Israel, and I can say with certainty that none of the members of either group is ‘anti-Semitic’ by any definition of the term. In fact, probably at least half of the members of QFOLC and QAIA are Jewish, as are probably half the members of the Siege Busters Working Group, which Piro calls the ‘catalyst’ for his ‘newfound pro-Israel activism.’

Piro tells us that the controversy swirling around the New York City LGBT Community Center — which I’ve documented in my own blog post (“Israeli/Palestinian conflict breaks out at the NYC LGBT Community Center“) (to date, the only comprehensive account of the affair) — prompted him to begin blogging and Facebook-ing about Israel/Palestine.

Piro gives an ostensibly comprehensive history of Israel/Palestine in under six paragraphs, confessing that “from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries AD, the area’s history becomes very confusing.” Perhaps the better term here would be ‘confused,’ at least as Piro tells that history, as he gets basic facts wrong and seems to deliberately distort others. Just to cite one such example, Piro declares that “There were both Jews and Muslims in Palestine during this whole 1200 year period, but there never was an Arab nation-state in the area; there was only ever a Jewish nation-state.” Well, of course, that’s true insofar as the modern Arab national states were the creation of the British and French colonialists who dismembered the Ottoman Empire after defeating it (along with Germany and Austria-Hungary) in World War I. What we know as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq — as well as the British-ruled Palestine (under a League of Nations Mandate until 1948) – were the result of lines drawn in the sand by the British and French in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 that they drew up before the end of the war to dismember the tottering Ottoman Empire after its subsequent defeat. But there certainly were Arab states that included the area now under Israeli control, including the Ummayad Caliphate (661-750) and the Abbasid Caliphate which succeeded it (both, like the Ottoman Empire, polyglot conglomerations).

After announcing the startling discovery that there was no state (in the modern sense) called ‘Palestine,’ Piro then concludes — based on the same rigorous historiographical methods and analysis – that “the LGBT pinkwashing phenomenon is the new anti-Semitism.” Piro’s evidence for this sweeping claim? A quote from the first “Scream” movie in which a character declares, “Well, you can only hear that ‘Richard Gere/gerbil story’ so many times before you *have* to start believing it.”

When it comes to the controversy surrounding the LGBT Community Center’s ban on the Siege Busters and QAIA, Piro demonstrates the same woeful ignorance of the facts as he does in recounting the history of  Israel and Palestine. In his blog post, Piro writes that he “followed the whole story [of the Center's expulsion of the Siege Busters and then of NYC QAIA] from Israel.” On that page, Piro includes a photo from Duncan Osborne’s report for Gay City News (“Critics of Israeli Occupation Occupy Center Lobby,” 6.8.11) of the June 8 NYC QAIA meeting/sit-in in the lobby of the Center. Piro includes a photo from GCN in his blog post, with the caption, “Pauline Park addresses an unauthorized meeting of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid held in the lobby of the LGBT Community Center on June 8.”

So the mystery is finally solved: Scott Piro labeled me an existential threat to the State of Israel based on one photo and accompanying photo caption in Gay City News. “The above image is from that sit-in, and it scares me,” Piro hyperventilates. “I see hate. I surmise my feelings are identical to the Jews of 1930s Germany, who saw demonstrations against them. This kind of speech — hate speech — isn’t protected. ‘Free Palestine’ is code for KILL THE JEWS,” Piro shrieks.

Had Scott Piro contacted me, I could have sent him the text of the statement that I was asked to read at that June 8 meeting, in which we demanded that the Center reverse the ban on QAIA and the Siege Busters and affirm the principle of freedom of speech — hardly what anyone would call ‘hate speech.’

But based on that one photo and news story — a rather slender reed of information to begin with — Piro concluded that I and my colleagues in NYC QAIA were hell-bent on the destruction of the State of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish race. Such weird paranoia is so ridiculous, of course, that one simply has to laugh, but such is the irrational hysteria that has gripped Zionists (LGBT and non-LGBT alike) in New York and throughout the United States as well as in Israel at the mere suggestion that Palestinians — including LGBT/queer Palestinians — deserve basic human rights. Had Piro bothered to contact me, I could have told him that I support the existence of the State of Israel; my opposition is to the brutal, illegal and immoral occupation of the Palestinian territories, a foreign occupation that contravenes every principle of human rights and international law of which I am aware. But such subtleties are beyond the comprehension of hysterical ultra-Zionists like Scott Piro; for them, the faintest criticism of Israeli government policy is tantamount to a declaration of “Kill the Jews~!” It is no wonder that the ‘peace process’ is all but dead, given the intense pressure on the Obama administration coming from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington — as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council and so many others. AIPAC, JCRC and their confederates in the Israel lobby label anyone with the slightest bit of concern for human rights as allies or dupes of Hamas and libel the courageous Jewish Americans and Jewish Israelis who stand up to the powerful Israel machine on Capitol Hill and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘self-hating Jews.’ In such circumstances, it is no wonder that the Obama administration timidly takes its direction on foreign policy from AIPAC.

Closer to home, I and my colleagues in NYC QAIA will continue to speak out against the human rights abuses committed on a daily basis by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and other organs of the state of Israel and I and other members of QFOLC will continue to advocate for an end to the unconscionable and unjustifiable ban on NYC QAIA and the Siege Busters Working Group.

Scott Piro, Michael Lucas, Stuart Applebaum, AIPAC, the JCRC, and their confederates may try to slander, silence and bully into submission anyone who stands up against human rights atrocities committed by and in the name of the State of Israel, but I for one will not be silenced. As a transgendered woman of color committed to social justice, I will continue to do the important work of bringing about peace and justice for all — including Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, and everyone who lives or hopes to live once again in the land between the Jordan River and the sea.