Guest Post by Vanessa Edwards FosterCourtesy Trans Political blog
This will be a short blog post as I’m awaiting my riding buddy coming in from Dallas. Yes, a couple of tranny road warriors will be hitting I-10 shortly, heading east into the Big Easy to help protest the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Banquet. Who knows? Maybe we can draw out the riot squad replete with barricades and horseback crowd-control officers just like Houston?
At first I pondered whether to make a trip over to New Orleans, whose community has been decimated since Katrina and still remains mostly scattered to the four winds. Then my good friend and longtime trans activist, Courtney Sharp, sent the below advertisement for HRC’s New Orleans Entertainment Extravaganza!:
Note how their version of entertainment is having someone in the form of Bianca Del Rio caricaturize women and more particularly the image of gender transgression. Example: transgender! Yes, we trans people (who everyone in Congress and gay-elite-land knows are beyond help in the form of justice or rights) are the perfect fodder for humor for their little tete-a-tete. Yet another reminder how objectified we trans people really are in elite G&L America, and hooray for HRC for reminding us of that again!You gotta know we’re making gains when they’re back to remembering us in caricatured form again.
Since the HRC has already written off the lion’s share of transgender activists as people to avoid and circumvent, and added a nice little character assassination to top it off, why not make it a self-fulfilling prophecy for them? Certainly when you have nothing to have ever gained, there’s nothing to lose!
More pointedly, HRC in its contemporary version really has no clue what protesters and “loose cannons” are all about. They complain about this now! These folks really have no recollection or awareness of the old days, the Act-Up days, the Stonewall days. In short order after the next congressional session (and maybe sooner), they will. It’s time to give them what they want to portray us as and what they expect – protests and acrimony, venom and voices raised to a pique. Maybe it’s time to “give the people what they want” … so to speak.
So off to protest in the Big Easy with Kelli Busey and Courtney and the good folks hosting in New Orleans! Then time to hit the French Quarter too! (Hey, you’ve gotta have some diversion to get your mind off of the depression borne from the GLBT politic!)
TransGriot Note: Give 'em hell Ness, Kelly and Courtney! The protests continue. No ENDA No Peace!
Go you!
ReplyDeleteI wish I could come and protest with y'all, so much, but the plane tickets from Australia are just crippling.
True enough, though sadly there isn't much in the way of 'community' here.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, Brisbane, where I live, has a /very/ good free gender clinic with some amazing doctors in residence.
Good to hear. Keep me posted on whats happening Down Under
ReplyDeleteIt varies. Canberra, where I live, has got one transvestite male in an office 1 hour a week in the AIDS centre as the total support for all transgender, transsexual, and intersex issues.
ReplyDelete*SIGH*
I mean, it's only the capital city of Australia.
We do what we can. Lectures at Universities, submissions to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, that kind of thing. The stuff that the HRC should be doing but isn't.
Australia is generally trans-friendly, but there are conspicuous pockets that aren't. The Australian Passport Office is probably the worst.
Zoe,
ReplyDeletePassport issues sounds eerily familiar to us here in the States.
Sounds like your local idiots Down Under have been trading e-mails about anti-transgender tactics with ours.
As you probably noted on the blog, I've been doing education efforts ever since I transitioned and need to expand them to HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) campuses as well.
Thanks for everything you do to spread knowledge on these issues and make life better in Australia for your fellow transpeople.