HUD Gender ID Equal Housing Rules Go Into Effect Today

Another 'crumb' from the Obama Administration takes effect today in terms of the equal housing rules for TBLG people.  Come on November 6 so I can reelect this man for another four year term as POTUS.

Transgender Or Not WHY MUST African-Americans Continually Justify Their Pride?

Guest post from Cheryl Courtney-Evans of the Abitchforjustice blog

Okay, so it's 2012, we've had the Civil Rights Act passed (1965), three or four actors/actresses win Academy Awards, a plethora of black and black-themed television shows with positive African American images over the airways, yada, yada, yada! One would say, "You've come a looong way baby!" And they'd be right...

BUT...we still have idiots like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona staging investigations of President Obama's birth certificate, claiming it to be a "fraud, and questioning his eligibility to be president", an asshole in Alaska filing suit against his presidency on the grounds of "questionable citizenship", and a FEDERAL Circuit Court judge, Richard Cebull, circulating a racially-charged email stating, "Obama's lucky he wasn't born a dog...". And we're expected to think the United States is "through with its racism"...REALLY???

And as the rest of society goes, so goes the LGBT community...yes, there is still some remnants of racism and attitudes of "white privilege" in the LGBT community, as much as some would deny it (I mean, this community is suppose to be one of the most acceptance and inclusion, right?).

What's got me talking like this, you may ask.

Well, recently an African American transwoman I greatly admire and respect, Ms. Monica Roberts, award-winning author of the TransGriot, an African American themed blog, was published in another African American themed internet publication, EBONY.com. This article was her "spotlight" of African American transpersons who have proven to be trailblazers in the transgender community; the transgender community being a segment of the African American community who have gotten little enough attention for positive things...we are readily given enough attention when it's regarding the negatives...prostitution, larceny and victims. So WHY is that this article was barely three days old when a person felt the need, via the HUFF Post 'comments' section, to question Monica's effort, calling it "just another effort to divide us racially"! If she (and I think she must be transgender by the use of the word "us") wasn't already thinking racially 'divisive', it seems to me she would have applauded Monica and thanked her for information about her African American transsistas that she didn't have before; hell, I wasn't aware of some of them myself!

WHY is it that we as an African American community, let alone the African American transgender community, always find the need to justify our pride in our heritage, accomplishments or attempts to do for ourselves to some folks?? After all, very often the struggles we face as transgender persons is compounded by our race. Why shouldn't we revel in the fact that we overcame an obstacle in spite of it?

LindaCON's comment reminds me of an incident here in Atlanta, where a group of us (multiracial, by the way) attempted to put together an organization aimed at helping transgenders here find jobs to reduce the number of commercial sex workers (there was a big broohaha about the number of them in Atlanta's Midtown area at the time). Because the predominant number of "working girls" at the time were black, we named the group the Transgender Persons Of Color worker's project (TPOC). As soon as TPOC got a little publicity in the local LBGT publication, the Southern Voice, a white transgender woman (mind you, this girl had already had a job that she'd gotten herself fired from) wrote a 'letter to the editor' questioning "why we weren't helping any white trans people?" AND SHE'D NEVER ATTEMPTED TO CONTACT US OR BE A PART OF TPOC's EFFORTS; she was merely going by the name. (NOTE: Do you think NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] means there are no whites involved in it? You would be mistaken.) I suppose it's okay if we were to just sit back and continue to be victims, and not try to do for self...

As God is my witness (and He knows my heart), I am as non-divisive as ANYONE; I get along with anyone that treats me with the respect that I give them, no matter what cultural background they come from, BUT I refuse to neglect, ignore or deny my heritage!  I applaud Monica Roberts for her continued effort with this respect, giving our young African American trans women & men the information, education and history, with pride in something they themselves can move forward with...and lest we forget, this same education can be of benefit to all other trans cultures who have the open-mindedness to see it as such...think about it.

The Story of Georgia Black

If people thought I was kidding about the point that I've repeatedly made about Black transpeople being integrated into the kente cloth lives of our people, it's time to take a trip back in time to 1951 and the town of Sanford, FL.

One of the town's beloved citizens, an African-American woman named Georgia Black has passed away in June.  She ran a boarding house, was married twice and had several boyfriends after those relationships ended.

Black also raised a son, did domestic work for many of the wealthy families in the town, was a devout church going woman who was the leader of the local Women's Missionary Society and after she passed away was buried at the Burton Cemetery in Sanford.   The town's baseball stadium once barred Jackie Robinson from entering it but she is mourned by all who knew her even in this era of virulent Jim Crow segregation. 

Dr. Orville Barks, the county physician doing the autopsy, is astonished to discover that the frail woman he is examining has male genitalia.

Georgia's story was covered in a transphobic, sensationalized manner by the EBONY reporter when he wrote about her in October 1951. I'm going to give it the dignity it deserved. 

Georgia Cantey was born in South Carolina in 1906 and at age 15, ran away from working on a farm in Galeyville, South Carolina and headed to Charleston.  It was while working as a house servant in the city that Cantey began living as a woman.  One of the unidentified members of the household staff supplied her with a feminine wardrobe and became her first boyfriend as she honed her feminine gender presentation. 

Eventually that first relationship soured, and she met in Winter Haven, FL the man that would become her first husband, Alonzo Sabbe.  He was quite ill at the time and after Cantey nursed him back to health Sabbe asked her to marry him.  Sabbe also had a child named Willie that he had been raising.   Willie was the child of Sabbe's cousin  who visited Florida and abandoned him when he was three months old.  Cantey adopted Willie and raised as her own child after the couple moved to Sanford, FL.     

Sabbe's health took another negative turn and he died shortly after the marriage, and Cantey got married to Muster Black at the home of Mrs. Joanna Moore, the principal of Sanford's Black elementary school.  Unfortunately, seven years after getting married for the second time in her life to Black, the World War I vet died and as his widow, the EBONY story notes she was the beneficiary of his Veteran's Administration pension.  .  

Georgia continued to live her life until she herself became ill and her story leaked out to the irate disbelief of the Black and White denizens of Sanford, FL.  

Roy Williams, the police chief of Sanford at the time launched an investigation, but ended it after finding no evidence of criminal activity.  Even Dr. Orville Barks was upset about his role in spilling Georgia's gender business.  She was not intersex, and Barks caught some flack about the reporting about it from some of the denizens of Sanford.

The local paper, the Sanford Herald ceased publishing the story after pastor James Murray of the Trinity Methodist Church phoned the editor and protested about it being placed on the front page.

According to the EBONY article, one wealthy person that Black worked for defiantly said," I don't care what Georgia Black was.  She nursed members of our family through birth, sickness and death.  Sh was one of the best citizens in town."

Georgia Black told her story to EBONY a month before her death.   She insisted that fate had intended her to be female and dismissed her male genitalia as 'growths'.  'The doctor says he didn't see how I could married, but I don't pay no 'tention to that doctor.  My husbands and me had a peaceful, lovely life "  

And your life Georgia was a fascinating one that African-descended transpeople following in your footsteps needed to hear about as well.  

Please Don't Tell Me, "I'm Color-Blind"!!

TransGriot Note:  I loved this creative piece Cheryl posted in a Facebook thread, and this one needed to be shared with the world.

Please Don't Tell Me, "I'm Color-Blind"!!
By Cheryl Courtney-Evans

PLEASE don't tell me, "I'm color-blind"!!
It doesn't make me believe you respect me,
To tell me you don't see color.
... I don't want to be invisible,
And black is a part of who I am.
Yes, I am a transgender woman,
But that's not all that I am.
I am a part of the African-origined diaspora
That descended from kings & queens in their blackness
Although some of my people may have been slaves there,
It was a different type of slavery experienced here.
But I don't want to ignore the richness of the lives
Born of the pain lived in a new home either.
It spawned the color we bring to our music, love & lives.
It is not to be ignored, and when someone tells me,
"I'm color-blind", they're telling me they want to ignore
The TOTALITY of my being.
So don't tell me this, let me know you SEE me,
Yet respect ALL of me, as I would respect YOU!

Not All Are Free From Discrimination...

Aimed at the rainbow community.   The trans end of it still struggles to overcome it as this cartoon emphatically demonstrates.

Voting Rights March Starts Today

Wish I could be in Alabama for this event, but unfortunately I can't.  

A voting rights march from Selma, AL to Montgomery is being held starting today and running for several days to not only commemorate the upcoming 47th anniversary of Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965) , but protest the Republifool attacks on the voting rights of African-Americans and others in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.

The 50 mile march from Selma to Montgomery helped galvanize support for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the nation and the world watched as the first march was halted by police wielding billy clubs and firing tear gas into the crowd after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

It's also why Rev Al Sharpton and several congressmembers led by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) are retracing the historic 1965 march from today until March 9 along US 80 to draw attention to the GOP Block the vote efforts   Rev. Al will also be doing his MSNBC PoliticsNation show from the road as well.

For those of you who can be a part of it, i urge you to do so, even if it's only for a day or at the rallies in Selma or Montgomery.  Alabama is one of the GOP controlled states that are pimping voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise voters and draconian SB 1070 style anti-immigration laws.

And frankly people, our democracy is at stake because the basic bedrock principles of it are under attack by a conservafool movement that wants to repeal the 20th century.  

That's how critical this November 6 election is, and I don't want to hear any excuses from anybody sharing my ancestry or who is a member of a marginalized community as to why they can't or won't vote.   You have time to register to vote and need to do so immediately.

As I have said more than a few times on this blog in terms of our trans human rights push, while we have had a decades long struggle in many cases to get trans human rights coverage enacted, passing the laws is the easy part.  The hard part is staying vigilant against the Forces of Intolerance and defending what you paid for in effort, sweat and in some cases blood to enact.

And when it comes to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it is under attack from the 1% who only want people like them voting, electing politicians that look like them, and enacting policies that benefit them.

They ain't happy that the hands that once picked cotton are now picking presidents.

As Dr. King said, "Now is not the time to to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.  Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."



And one of those promises of democracy is enshrined in the basic act of voting.

Damn, Let Some Black Transpeople Get Some Positive Ink

Thanks to everyone who has continued to give me major props for writing the post that appeared at EBONY.com and I hope I have the pleasure of doing more of those in the coming years. 

But as always, when you are trying to enjoy some blessings that have come your way, you always have some fool come along to hate on it.

In this case it came in the form of a HuffPo commenter calling themselves LindaCON.  

The Huffington Post linked to the piece from the EBONY.com website and couldn't resist their vanillacentric tendency to make it 'all about the 'white peepul' by adding a slide show at the bottom of the page that highlighted some 'trans pioneers of all ethnicities'.   It was a slide show by the way that was dominated by survey says, white transpeople.  

I'll riff on that in a moment, but first here's LindaCON's comment

Just another effort to divide us racially. Transgender is transgender. Genius is genius. Tall is tall.
There is no reason for transgender blacks or whites, genius blacks or whites, tall blacks or whites.  This is pushing the racial divide where it does not need to go. People are people and people of all race share many and varied characteristics. I'm so tired of the race card showing up everywhere in everything.

Really LindaCON?   Spoken like somebody full of vanillacentric privilege.   Transgender is NOT transgender when race and class are in the mix.   All you have to do is pay fracking attention, which you obviously didn't in terms of this article.   

As I said to LindaCON and will repeat here, we persons of color are tired of the racism aimed at us by people who think, look, act and share your heritage on an almost daily basis that makes articles like the one I wrote necessary in the first damn place.

I find it amazing but not surprising that I write an article in an iconic African-American magazine to celebrate African-American trans pioneers, and LindaCON in her vanillacentric arrogance and the unnamed person who posted the HuffPo piece still had a problem with positive ink being aimed at the African-American trans community.

The sad part was that article wasn't even up 48 hours before y'all had to make it about the 'white peepul'.

Race matters in the GLBT community as well. Deal with it.

White transpeople have been dominating the narrative of who is trans since 1953.  It's why I had to write the EBONY.com story in the first place because we have been whitewashed out of the trans community historical narrative.

It's past time we Black transfolks have our moments in the sun.   We want and need the opportunity to tell our stories, celebrate our heroes and sheroes, and talk about our history just as you have done for the last almost six decades without you peeps of Eurocentric heritage getting huffy about it when we do.  

We are more than just tragic transsexuals.  We have and are continuing to make and shape trans history.  Contrary to your vanillacentric opinions, it ain't always about you white transpeeps, and y'all need to deal with that.reality.  You have also had almost 60 years to toot your own trans horns and celebrate your icons and history. Can't we non-white transpeople get some ink and attention and proudly do the same? 

Seems like the answer to that question is no. 

TransGriot Note:  Photos are of Miss Major, model Tracy Africa Norman, and Tona Brown with President Obama

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