Not An April Fool's Joke

Kat Rose of ENDAblog brought this to my attention.  It's a  response to a comment I left over at Pam's House Blend on one of the ongoing contentious Maryland HB 235 threads popping up on an TBLG blog near You.    Kat's post was entitled Sadly Not An April Fool's Joke  and was highlighting Autumn Sandeen's response to the one sentence one I'd left on Autumn's original PHB post. . 

Hey, I have love and respect for Autumn.   On this HB 235 issue, we're on opposite sides. .

And this was my PHB response to the comment.  Enjoy.

If we in the trans community and more specifically, white trans people in positions of influence in GL orgs keep accepting piss poor bills written by our so-called ‘allies’ because we’re desperate to have anything that covers trans people, what does that say about us as a community, Autumn?


Morgan Meneses-Sheets and EQ MD had the choice of either accepting a civil unions bill or same gender marriage. She and EQ MD chose ‘marriage or bust’.
We know how that worked out. But they chose the hard route. Why is that route NOT acceptable for trans legislation? Can somebody on the Yes for HB 235 side explain to me in a cogent manner why it’s okay for GL people to demand first class legislation and we trans people can’t?

Why is it a problem when transpeople, and especially trans people of color continually tell you and point out from our perspective and lived experience as lifelong marginalized people (not Johnny and Janie come latelies to minority status who grew up ensconced in white privilege) that incremental rights for transpeople is not an option?

If you give the haters a millimeter to discriminate with loophole filled legislation, they will take it and run with it.
The people that are taking the brunt of the anti-trans violence don’t look like the staff of EQ MD.

It is why I and others are insistent that trans rights bills be comprehensive, airtight and the best we can possibly write because we are not going to get many opportunities to pass trans specific legislation despite the spin coming from EQ MD and you HB 235 supporters.

2012 is an election year. How likely is any civil rights legislation going to get done when the legislators will be facing the voters that November?

So why waste those opportunities with piss poor bills that don’t FIX the problems that ail our community?