ENDA Discussion Reaches New Heights

Blogging will be mostly intermittent while I'm on the road through next Monday but I could not resist calling readers attention to two articles about the ENDA mess that have reached the "main stream media."

In Friday's New York Times there is an article entitled "Liberal Base Proves Trying to Democrats" which puts the outrage by LGBT organizations (now at 280 groups and growing!) iat U.S. Representative Barney Frank's decision to jettison transgenders from coverage in the federal Employment Non Discrimination Act into a broader context of the pushback the new Democratic congressional majority has been receiving from it's liberal base which believes it is responsible for the favorable outcome of the 2006 midterm elections.

Mr. Frank, in an hourlong news conference on Thursday, defended himself and said he would press ahead with the bill knowing that by not including the transgender language he could attract enough votes to get it approved. But he also expressed frustration that the Democrats were hampering themselves.

“There is a tendency in American politics for the people who feel most passionately about an issue, particularly ones that focus on a single issue, to be unrealistic in what a democratic political system can deliver,” Mr. Frank said, “and that can be self-defeating.”

[...]

But many gay rights groups said they were truly angry and bewildered, especially because the compromise involves a bill unlikely to be signed by Mr. Bush. A coalition of some 280 groups sent Mr. Frank a letter urging him to include gender identity in the bill to be voted on soon. “What we are talking about is stripping out a part of our community for a symbolic vote, which in our opinion does not advance the struggle for civil rights for our people,” said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

“If the goal here is for the new majority to demonstrate that it is responding to a core constituency,” Mr. Foreman said, “passing a non-inclusive bill is not going to accomplish that.”

Kudos to Matt Foreman for getting quoted in the paper of record (on page one, no less)! But wait, there's more! Over at Salon Magazine, Simon Fraser University Women's Studies Professor Susan Stryker in an article entitled "Why the T in LGBT is here to stay" demolishes the arguments that bloggers Chris Crain (Citizen Chris)and John Aravosis (Americablog) and others have been making in favor of Barney Frank's trans-exclusive ENDA bill (HR 3685) while simultaneously questioning and ridiculing the inclusion of "T" in the LGBT community in general. Aravosis had an article in Salon magazine earlier in the week which Stryker is clearly responding to, and forcefully rebutting.

In my line of work -- teaching history and theory of sexuality and gender -- we've invented a polysyllabic technical term applicable to Aravosis & Co., which is homocentric, whose definition Aravosis supplies when he asserts, as he did in his recent essay, that gay is the term around which the GLBT universe revolves. By gay he means gay men like himself, to which is added (in descending order of importance), lesbian, bisexual and transgender, beyond which lies an even more obscure region of poorly understood and infrequently observed identities.

Aravosis isn't questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he's just concerned with properly marking the distinction between "enough like me" and "too different from me" to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies. His position is a bit like those kerfuffled astronomers not too long ago, scratching their noggins over how to define Pluto's place in the conceptual scheme of the solar system. Sure, we've been calling it a planet for a good number of years because it's round and orbits the sun just like our Earth, but now it appears that if we keep doing so we'll have to let a bunch of the bigger asteroids into the planet category, as well as some other weird faraway stuff we only recently learned about, which stretches the definition of "planet" into a name for things we don't really think of as being much like good ol' Earth, so let's just demote Pluto instead. In Aravosis' homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto.

[...]

Aravosis, not being one to mince words when it comes to mincing meat, wants to know what he, as a gay man, has "in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman." The answer is "gender." The last time I checked my dictionary, homosexuality had something to do with people of one gender tending to fall in love with people of the same gender. The meaning of homosexuality thus depends on the definition of gender. However much Aravosis might wish to cut the trannies away from the rest of his herd, thereby preserving a place free of gender trouble for just plain gay guys such as himself, that operation isn't conceptually possible. Gender and sexuality are like two lines intersecting on a graph, and trying to make them parallel undoes the very notion of homo-, hetero- or bisexuality.

Now here's the rub -- but it requires another of those fancy words my academic colleagues and I like to throw around: heteronormativity, the idea that whatever straight people do is really what's what, and that whatever anybody else does is deviant to some degree. To want to have sex with somebody of the same gender violates heteronormative expectations of gender behavior as much as it does heteronormative expectations of sexual behavior. Simply put: Real men don't suck cock. Nor do they use the word "fabulous" when describing a pair of women's shoes. Nor do they keep a picture of their husband pinned to the wall of their office cubicle. All of the above violates conventional or stereotypical expectations of proper masculine gender, and as Lambda Legal's preliminary analysis of ENDA makes clear, none would be protected under the rubric of sexual orientation alone. It's OK to be gay, in other words, just so long as you don't act like a fag.

Well-written and well-said!