Hear hear! I could not agree more.
An unspoken subtext here, I think, is that large swathes of the public would like to deny equality and dignity to most members of gender and sexual minorities, particularly those who transgress gender norms, regardless of how they identify.
LGBTQ people are discriminated against and oppressed for fundamentally irrational reasons — primarily for being and being seen to be different, to be other.
Quentin, who was a friend of mine in the early 1990s, and Marsha Johnson, who I used to see around Greenwich Village, used the word gay for themselves because that’s the terminology they had. But their labels didn’t change who they were as people.
Even then, as Queer Nation and other more radical activists fought for diversity in equality, tension existed with a minority of more mainstream activists who pushed for something like assimilation.
At least in the United States, those assimilationist activist forces lost the fight in important ways. Transgender rights are included and fought for by almost every major LGBTQ advocacy organization in the US today.
But the underlying tension hasn’t gone away; lots of people wish that the more radical among us – the more obviously different or other–would disappear or at least sit down and be quiet.
But how quickly they forget what persecution is really based in. Throwing trans people out of gay advocacy would do nothing to help that sissy,nascent gay boy being picked on in third grade in Mississippi.
He would still be viciously targeted by people who would suppress his differences and figuratively beat him down until he erased a good and wholesome part of who he really is, until he set himself up for a life of misery.
The only way forward, the only way to a far better place for all of us, is to fight for values of true diversity, for the normalizing of diverse gender alignment and presentation.
That goes for gay, lesbian, and transgender people across the spectrum. It really should not be very hard to understand that.
To me it’s self-evident. But then, I was that nascent sissy gay boy in third grade. So I get it in my bones.
