Victories, Obstacles, and Contentions: The Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Act

BREAKING NEWS: HB 235, The Gender Identiy Anti-Discrimination Act, passed its third and final reading at the House of Delegates today, Saturday, March 26th, 2011, by a 86-52 favorable vote. The bill now moves to the Senate where it will be subjected to possible amendments. It will be voted on by midnight on Monday, March 28th, 2011.

The Legislation
House Bill 235, The Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Act cleared two major hurdles yesterday, Friday, March 25, 2011.  
In the morning, the bill passed its first reading. In the afternoon, it passed its second. The third and final reading is tentatively ordered to be printed for today, March 26, 2011. If the bill passes its final reading, it will move for debate to the Senate floor.
House Bill 235 aims to prohibit gender identity discrimination regarding areas of employment, housing, and credit.
Scheduled to be initially voted on Thursday, March 24, 2011, in Maryland House's Health and Government Operations Committee, the vote was stalled due to a “procedural hold” placed by Republican Del. Susan Krebs (Carroll County) the day prior.The conservative delegate proclaimed that she needed an approved definition, by Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (D), of the term “transgender” before she could vote on the bill.
The hold was lifted Friday morning. It is unclear whether or not the asserted question received clarification. Ultimately, Delegate Krebs voted against the measure.
Regardless of these strategic obstructions, The Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Act passed through committee  with a 15-8 favorable vote.
Split almost entirely along party lines, all but one Democrat voted in favor of the bill. All but one Republican voted against.
A relatively calm debate followed Friday afternoon, on the House of Delegates floor, for HB 235’s second reading.
Yusef Najafi, of Metro Weekly, reports that no amendments were made in the reading, as they were made in committee. The revisions appear to subtract particular language usages; such as, “expression” and “behavior”. Equality Maryland, Maryland’s largest civil rights’ organization that has worked tirelessly to advance the bill in this legislative session, deems these contractions “non-substantive” and “relatively inconsequential”. EQMD assures that they worked with the subcommittee and committee to ensure that gender identity protections are embedded in the bill, regardless of specific language. It is unclear how the protections are guaranteed without such specific language.
Amid the bill’s double readings’ passage and the final reading up on deck for today, hopes are high that HB 235 will make its way to the Senate on Monday, March 28, 2011.

The Controversy

One in five transgender individuals have lost their jobs due to their reality. Twelve percent of transgender individuals are homeless. With the recent loss of Tyra Trent, a 25 year-old transgender individual who was tragically murdered, the fight for equal rights and protections has become every more blatantly urgent.

Unsurprisingly, HB 235 is a far-cry from uncontroversial. However, while the conservative critique rings of the oft-heard diatribe of fear and bigotry  cast on instant replay, some of the largest opponents are those within, and close allies of, the transgender community. Trans Maryland, an advocacy group for transgender and transsexual individuals, has been painstakingly working to bring awareness toward what the bill excludes. In hopes to pass HB 235, a compromise was struck and the right to ‘public accommodations’ was dropped from the bill. This exclusion allows and legitimizes gender identity discrimination in crucial areas, such as public restrooms and shelters. Many opponents say that if this bill passes, then it will always be legal to discriminate against trans-folk, unless by chance they are at work in a facility that doesn’t provide public accommodations.
Equality Maryland states that even without ‘public accommodations’, HB 235 is still a crucial first step.They promise that they will try again next year for ‘public accommodations’ to gain the same  protections that, far more than a majority of citizens, take for granted.

Historically informed by a long legislative history of trans-rights lost in lesbian and gay strivings, trans-activists are organizing against the ever-reoccurring dilution for public palate. EQMD attests that they will utilize tactics a la California and fight for incremental rights.
Opponents quote numerous other states, such as :Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, as dire warnings against legislation in this format. In these states, bills working for incomplete LGBTQ rights were passed and the prior presumed follow-up legislation,  for all encompassing equality, was abandoned.
Accusations on both sides have been flying. Trans Maryland has accused Equality Maryland of not only dropping vital transgender rights in pandering fashion, but also for being unwilling to engage in dialogue with the concerned transgender community. The Trans Maryland website details that, after three weeks of transgender legislative workshops, EQMD canceled all further dialogue until the legislative session was over. EQMD’s Executive Director Morgan Meneses-Sheets said that the workshops were cancelled due to a “scheduling conflict”.
Much attention has also been paid to EQMD’s practice of deleting opposing posts from their facebook page, as well as blocking those who have,or they believe will frequently, voice/voiced public dissent.
This censorship, both in the very physical form of manually deleting public facebook comments that question EQMD’s tactics, as well as the silencing censorship caused by discontinuing dialogue with those EQMD professes to represent, has eventuated immensely intense outcries against EQMD and HB 235.
Imbued from anger, Trans Maryland has incorrectly publicly accused EQMD of being solely comprised of gay and lesbian advocates and hence being utterly unable to represent the ‘T’ equation in LGBTQ.
Transgender activists do  in fact work for EQMD. And, it is not only transgender EQMD employees that support this legislation, but a large, though not overwhelming, percentage of the trans-community agrees that incremental steps are better than nothing at all.

The division between the assimilationist sector of the LGBTQ has always rang divisively. Pitting communities in battles to obtain rights via legislation ultimately segregates, because the law is not manufactured to protect those it has historically discriminated against. By bending to an archaic system, we move backwards rather than forwards.
Organizations founded around legislation are cast with inscribed problematic inequalities and misrepresentations. When you continuously see statements made by groups of people, you are dually presenting a hard-hitting and presumably cooperatively agreed upon narrative. On the same token, you lose the human impact. Trans Maryland and Equality Maryland are comprised of individuals that have dealt with the ramifications of discrimination first hand. LGBTQ in-community fighting is subscribed with the tools of those who created the injustices against us. It is easy to invest wholeheartedly in your belief and bulldoze alternate voices on the way to some degree of achievement. These overlooking acts, within communities that should be standing together in efforts to fight against those who work to destabilize solidarities, are done out of desperation for inclusion and equality.
It is easy to direct your anger-fueled energy to those who stand in your exact or similar shoes, when you are witnessing the extreme deprivation of your rights. It is also easy to scream at those whose minds you think might change rather than shake-up the entrenched.
Equally easy is it ignore those who you believe will stand beside you in the end.
Yet, what is lost in in-community fighting? The dehumanization of each other? A united front?
Putting all of your fight into LGBTQ legal issues erases what should be striven towards- systemic revolution. There is much necessary in working towards everyday rights- the right to work, the right to have a house, the right to use a bathroom- but when you get lost in working for these legal protections through an innately inequitable system, you lose sight of how change is the greater goal than equality in broken rule books.
Today, many in the LGBTQ community will hope that HB 235 passes its third and final reading in the House, in order to then move on to the Senate this Monday, the 28th.
Dually, today many in the queer and trans-community will worry that HB 235 will vanquish any subsequent chances to have full and equal rights.
Not of enough of us, in these divided LGBTQ communities (that have become segregated by more than ideological issues- but are isolated with pervasive race, class,and gender divisions), will be hoping for more than equality and demanding change regardless of legislative dictates.

A Hope

Sandy Rawls is Director and Founder of Trans-United, which is a Baltimore City organization that works to advocate for, provide vital resources to, and improve the quality of life of transgender individuals. She released a powerful video detailing the particular needs of the African American transgender community, as well as for the transgender community as a whole. Whilst ever-struggling to not be blindsided by false promises made towards freeing our humanity and ever-toiling for LGBTQ social justice, her words ring every more powerful and panoptic.

Sandy Rawls: As the transgender community takes focus on gaining more of its civil and human rights, we will become a gradual threat because we are no longer hiding in the cracks and crevices of a society. So those who oppose us, will add resistance to our struggle for equality. But they will underestimate us. For we have the right to be all that we can be through life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But we must stand up and say, “A life is a life.”
We must stand up and say, “We are one with destiny.”
We must stand up and say, “We know why the sparrow sings the songs of victory.”
We must stand for something or we are sure to fall by the side of a broken people.
We must acknowledge that we are a divided community within a community.
For the first steps of healing is admittance. And only then, the fixing of a broken people can be harvested into visions of greatness.
A community with the right foundation and cohesive bonding, can withstand any amount of hate- can withstand any amount of distrust- can withstand and defeat any amount of bigotry.
But where do we stand today with so much brokeness in our community?
Broken spirits ‘cause of a lack of sustainability. Broken spirits cause of centeredness. Broken trust because we don’t know who we can trust. Broken opportunities to educate ourselves and others ‘bout who we are. A broken community without a vision of hope is lost forever. Now is the time to create the norms that we deserve.
We are not created to be prostitutes.
We are not created to be con artists.
We are not created to be the devil.
We are not created to hate each other.
We were created to live our higher selves. So that we can create a support system. So that we can rely on that- will produce opportunities, education, housing,freedom from discrimination, employment opportunities and family support- and all of the other realistic privileges everyone else depends on and receives through their hard work.
The Declaration of Independence reads that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ninety-five percent of African American transgender people spend a lifetime in pursuit of all the above. I hear it over and over again.
“They did this to me.”
“They did that to me.”
But what are we doing?
What are we doing to break down the barriers of hate that take away our lives?
That take away our liberty?
That take away our pursuit of happiness?
That take away your right to gender identity, sexual orientation, and civil rights- the rights belonging to each individual with equal access and due process under the law and freedom from discrimination.
The Fifth Amendment, in the Constitution, reads, “ No person’s life, liberty, or property should be taken away from them without due process of the law.”
But yet our lives, our liberty, our property, our happiness, our due process under the law and freedom from discrimination is snatched away from us in a blink of an eye. And yet we say and do nothing as a unit of people. We should be in Annapolis, MD every single session. We should be at City Hall every single week demanding that our civil rights, our constitutional rights, our Declaration of Independence rights, be acknowledged based on our unique needs as civilians of the United States of America.
We cannot afford to ignore the sense of urgency and emergency in our community. While opportunity after opportunity to unite as a community pass us by.
This message is not about me. It’s about all of us as a people.
I hope and pray that we all can hear or see something today that will move us to take the much noted and needed changes to build a better community.
Peace and God bless each and everyone of you.