Our Concerns

I wrote about a month ago about the advocacy work I started doing in my town. This situation has blown up somewhat, and there is a lot that is and will happen with it, and I am caught right in the middle.

Today, I acted as an advocate during a meeting with a trans woman in my region and one of the local human rights commission chairpersons. My role was to ask the questions that she forgot to ask, to facilitate the discussion when there were problems, and to generally advocate on her behalf. I was mostly a fly on the wall at the meeting. It was a difficult role for me for three reasons.

An email about Beyond Marriage.org came across the Queer Studies listserv I'm on. The summary provides a very interesting vision for queer politics. The authors of this statement would like to see GLBT political groups (among others) focus on expanding the rights and recognition of a broader variety of kinship structures.

The spin possibilities include the LGB community discovering how few trans people actually feel comfortable in the queer community and using that to further distance the communities from each other. Furthermore, I can see the queer community using this information to legitimate ceasing to offer trans-educational, trans-inclusive, and trans-focused programming. In places where there are large trans populations, this may not be a huge problem, but in Indiana, it is my belief that the trans community needs allies as much as it needs to participate in trans-only activities. A community this small cannot be left to fend for itself.