I am delighted to facilitate a workshop as part of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association’s Asian American pre-conference institute at Creating Change 2026 on the topic of Palestine. Allow me to suggest at least seven compelling reasons why Palestine is a queer issue and in fact a queer Asian/Pacific Islander (API) issue and why LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world should be supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation.

1) Americans live on unceded indigenous land that was home to Native Americans for millennia before the coming of the white man.

The parallel with the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians is unmistakeable and the tragic irony is that the United States is now funding that dispossession with $3.8 billion a year in US taxes + more than 7 billion in new funding; all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress support the violent ethnic cleansing of illegally occupied Palestine and Apartheid Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

The origin of the current ‘conflict’ (as it is rather inaccurately characterized) lies in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1.3.1916) between the British and French in which they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey, the British taking Ottoman Palestine by force and then having the League of Nations award a ‘mandate’ that legitimized the British Mandate Authority in Palestine. The French got Lebanon and Syria in exchange for British control of Palestine and Iraq; the consequences of this shabby deal have been a century of war, conflict, death and destruction. 

2) APIs should understand connections between ethnostate imperialism, colonization and fascism in Asia and the US  and that in illegally occupied Palestine; think of the parallels with China, Korea, etc.; in fact, the United States participated in the carving up of Qing China along with the European powers and Japan.

And that leads to an important point: imperialism is not the preserve of European powers or the United States: Russia and China are imperial powers and fascist Japan subjected Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, much of China and virtually all of Southeast Asia to a brutal regime of colonization in the 1930s and 1940s.

There is an enormous irony that while Korea was ruthlessly exploited by fascist imperial Japan in one of the most brutal foreign military occupations of modern times, many contemporary South Koreans support Apartheid Israel over occupied Palestine because around 40% of South Koreans are Christians and most of those are right-wing Christian fundamentalists; in fact, they form the backbone of the homophobic and transphobic political elements blocking adoption of LGBT rights legislation in the Republic of Korea.

3) And that leads to a crucially important point: the US is the biggest supporter of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the Zionist machine is the key element in maintaining US support for the occupation; a majority of Zionists are Christians and many if not most Christian Zionists are Christian fundamentalists who are the biggest support for anti-LGBTQ legislation across all of the 50 states; the enemies of the LGBTQ community in the US are the enemies of Palestinians in the occupied territories. While Democrats on the whole are better on LGBT issues than Republicans, those centrist Democrats who are triangulating around transgender issues (Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, Tom Suozzi) are also among the biggest Zionist supporters of Apartheid Israel.

4) The Zionist machine has used ‘pinkwashing’ to try to generate support within and outside the LGBTQ community for Apartheid Israel: an attempt to use Israel’s record on LGBT rights to attempt to justify its illegal occupation of Palestine; it’s a non sequitur of course because a good record on LGBT rights does not legally or morally justify a state to occupy foreign territory or subject its indigenous population to violent ethnic cleansing, dispossession or genocide. Zionist pinkwashing is a strategy to generate queer support for Apartheid Israel but it is based on entirely false notions. Palestinians are almost never given asylum in Israel based on sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact they are surveilled and blackmailed in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may be better than that of neighboring Arab countries but is inferior to that of the Western European countries with which Zionists like to compare Israel (‘the villa in the jungle’); but even if Israel’s record on LGBT issues were better, it could not possibly justify the illegal occupation, apartheid regime and genocide. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may compare favorably to that of neighboring dictatorships (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, non-Arab Iran) but is mediocre at best in comparison with the Western European countries Zionists like to classify Israel with (Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, etc.); Israel even participates in the Eurovision Song Contest even though Israel isn’t located on the European continent.

Pauline Park with Abu Rabiyah in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (1.10.12)

5) A significant proportion of Palestinians living under illegal occupation are LGBTQ and they get no special ‘pink card. While there is homophobia and transphobia in Palestinian society, there is homophobia and transphobia in American society but no American would accept that as justification for foreign occupation of the US; in fact, when the Israeli authorities discover LGBTQ people in the illegally occupied West Bank, they blackmail them into becoming agents for the Israel state, putting them in real danger if they are discovered. It is likely that a significant proportion of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide have doubtless been LGBTQ whether or not they were able to openly identify as such. And to the extent that Palestinians see LGBTQ support for BDS, that increases acceptance of LGBTQ Palestinians in Palestinian society. 

Pauline Park with Abu Nidal in Mas-ha (1.10.12)

6) LGBTQ people should be supporting the oppressed (Palestinians) rather than the oppressor (Apartheid Israel) on principle. As MLK would say, an injury to one is an injury to all; liberation of the human spirit must necessarily include Palestinian liberation; LGBT rights should not be separated from human rights for all; true liberation is found through global thinking informed by progressive feminist intersectional analysis. Sarah Schulman provided an example of that progressive feminist intersectional analysis when she joined me at a forum on Israel/Palestine at Queens Pride House (6.4.13); co-sponsored by New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), the forum remains (to my knowledge) the only public forum about Israeli occupation and apartheid both hosted and sponsored by an LGBT community center anywhere in the United States and the furious Zionist response to the event is a lesson in itself about both the power of the Zionist machine and the commitment to Palestinian liberation that those who stand in solidarity need to exhibit in order to make that solidarity real (Pauline Park, “Queens Pride history: the 2013 Israel/Palestine forum,” 21 July 2013). Schulman organized the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine and invited me to join; the historic venture took place in January and we spent an entire week touring the West Bank; we meet with queer and non-LGBTQ Palestinians from Hebron to Nablus to Nabi Saleh and stayed two nights in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank); at the end of the tour, we met with the founder of Zochrot, the Israeli organization attempting to educate Israeli Jews about the violent ethnic cleansing of the Nakba that was the basis for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 (Pauline Park, “Palestine: the first US LGBTQ delegation tour in pictures,” 4 April 2012).

Pauline Park & Sarah Schulman at Queens Pride House (6.4.13)

7) Those who wish to advance a progressive agenda for social justice and social change cannot accept the Zionist ‘Palestine exception’: as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, an injury to one is an injury to all. LGBT organizations that have attempted to square the circle or straddled the fence have only risked discrediting their own claims to be involved in the pursuit of social justice. It is actually the National LGBTQ Task Force that provides one of the best examples of this equivocation: at the Creating Change 2016 conference in Chicago, A Wider Bridge organized a reception for Jerusalem Open House. A Wider Bridge’s mission was to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation and generate support for Israel within the LGBT community in the United States; it was not in any real sense a genuine LGBT community-based organization but rather a front organization for the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby that supports it. AWB deliberately tried to mislead the community and the public about the nature of the event that the National LGBTQ Task Force initially cancelled and then uncancelled, insinuating that those opposed to the reception were targeting the shabbat service that is scheduled to precede it and Jerusalem Open House, which is a co-sponsor of the event. 

Cancel Pinkwashing protesters at Creating Change in Chicago

In fact, activists who spoke with Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, made clear to her that they were not objecting either to the shabbat service or to the participation of JOH, but rather to the reception and AWB’s use of it to promote the Israeli government and its illegal occupation of Palestine. Despite, this, AWB dishonestly portrayed the #cancelpinkwashing initiative as ‘anti-Semitic,’ even though several of the activists involved with it were Jewish. AWB board member Dana Beyer even went so far as to write a blog post on HuffingtonPost.com entitled, “National LGBTQ Task Force Censors the Jews” (1.17.16), in which she called the Task Force’s initial decision to cancel the AWB event “an act of bigotry against Jewish LGBTQ persons as mean-spirited as any other,” ignoring the fact that  Sue Hyde, who made that decision, is herself Jewish.

Pauline Park & Nakba survivor Abu Hassam in the ruins of Lajun (1.11.12)

In the statement issued by the Task Force on Jan. 18 announcing a reversal of its earlier decision, executive director Rea Carey wrote, “It is our belief that when faced with choices, we should move towards our core value of inclusion and opportunities for constructive dialogue and canceling the reception was a mistake,” adding, “We are aware that our original decision made it appear we were taking sides in a complex and long-standing conflict.” But in fact, by reversing its original decision and re-scheduling the pinkwashing event, the Task Force was taking sides, providing a platform for Zionists to use the conference to promote LGBT support for the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, risking making the Task Force indirectly complicit in the occupation as well (Pauline Park, “Creating Change or pink washing Israeli apartheid? A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing,” 17 January 2017).

And the reference to ‘inclusion’ rings false when LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation are not included, given that Palestinians need special permission from the Israeli authorities to leave the West Bank, rarely granted. A Wider Bridge went out of business at the end of 2025 after falling into deficit and following a scandal in which its executive director was accused of sexual misconduct. An organization cannot insist that it is on the cutting edge of the pursuit of progressive social and political change when its annual conference promotes the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid; it is this year’s conference and this workshop in particular that confirm the Task Force’s rather belated decision to ‘allow’ for discussion of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

Pauline Park at the apartheid wall in Al-Wallejeh (1.9.12)

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pauline Park with New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani in Manhattan (7.20.23)

The post Queering the Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid: Creating Change 2026 appeared first on Pauline Park.

LGBT rights & progressive politics in the age of Trump
Pauline Park
at
Kingsborough Community College
29 March 17

I’m honored by the invitation to speak to you today at this ‘Dinner & Dialogue’ event. I’d like to begin by thanking Lauren Ferguson for helping to arrange my visit here, my second time at Kingsborough Community College. And in keeping with the theme of ‘dinner & dialogue,’ I’d like to allow more than enough time for questions and comments, as I find the interaction with an audience is often as interesting to audience members as any formal presentation. So in keeping with the spirit of the evening, I’ll try to limit myself to speaking to leave lots of time for Q&A.

What I’d like to do is to think analytically and strategically about where we are right now both in terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues and the broader pursuit of progressive political change in the age of Trump.

It’s hard to believe it’s less than ten weeks since Donald Trump took office; it feels more like ten years~! So far, it’s been like a rolling stinky cheese of disaster; but I also see hopeful signs, especially in the broad resistance movement that has arisen since his election. Let me start with the new administration’s actions on LGBT issues and work outwards from there.

For well over a decade, the fight for marriage equality consumed the time and energy and resources of the LGBT movement, culminating in the Windsor and Obergefell rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the latter decision in 2015 recognizing same-sex marriage nationally. The more perceptive leaders in the religious right realize that they’ve lost that fight and I think the chances of the Supreme Court reversing itself on marriage are slim to none. And so the forces of ignorance and bigotry have since June 2015 been consumed with another issue, transgender rights, focusing their energies on creating a ‘bathroom panic,’ asserting without a shred of evidence that transgendered women pose some sort of existential threat to our society simply by using the public restroom associated with the gender with which they identify. There may be some who actually believe that, but I think that most of those pushing this bathroom panic are doing so cynically, knowing that it’s nothing but fear-mongering.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has gone so far as to say that the bathroom issue “is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public schools” (Caitlin Emma, “Obama transgender edict incites the right,” Politico, 5.13.16). “As a voter turnout tool for conservatives, this could be the new gay marriage,” writes Kevin Drum (Kevin Drum, “Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives” (Mother Jones, 5.13.16). And isn’t that the point? Following the US Supreme Court rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the only obvious ‘family values’ wedge issue to latch onto is transgender inclusion, given the increasing acceptance of non-transgendered lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in American society.

North Carolina’s enactment of House Bill 2 is a case in point: HB2 not only required transgendered people to use public restrooms consistent with their legal sex designation (the ‘gender marker’ on their birth certificates), the legislation eliminated non-discrimination statutes at the local level across the state, making it impossible to pursue legal redress for discrimination through local law not only on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but race, ethnicity, religion and disability as well. And so the ‘bathroom panic’ has been a façade behind which right-wing Republicans and the religious right have been pushing a rollback across the country of civil rights and human rights for women and people of color as well as LGBT people and people living with disabilities.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first thing that Donald Trump did after coming into office on Jan. 20 was to sign a flurry of executive orders on immigration as well as transgender rights. But significantly, courts blocked the first and the second executive orders on immigration, which the administration insisted were not an attempt to impose a ‘Muslim ban,’ even thought that’s exactly what Trump called the proposed action during the campaign. And the really hopeful sign was that the executive orders sparked a nationwide resistance, with protestors rushing out to JFK and other airports across the country to support and defend immigrants and refugees caught up in Trump’s dragnet.

Trump’s executive order rescinding Barack Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools also got national attention, if not quite to the extent of the travel ban(s); but what got less attention was the details of the executive order and the Obama guidelines he rescinded. And here it is important to note the political context in which the guidelines were issued in the twilight of the Obama presidency, with an outgoing president anxious to create some sort of historic legacy. The real opportunity to do so came in Obama’s first term, when he had a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives to work with until he handed both houses of Congress to the Republicans in the mid-term elections in 2010. What LGBT activists cheering Obama’s recent executive actions either have forgotten or conveniently failed to mention is the fact that he refused even to lift a finger to push the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) through Congress, instead apparently taking the advice of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in focusing on repealing the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of discrimination signed into law by Bill Clinton, who also signed DOMA into law. Still better than ENDA, Obama could have pushed through an amendment to the 1974 Civil Rights Act or similar legislation that would have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, health care, education and credit. For whatever reason, Obama refused to consider any non-discrimination legislation once he signed the DADT repeal bill into law, which only ended discrimination based on sexual orientation, not gender identity or expression.

With less than eight months left in office, and as the lamest of lame ducks and facing a hostile Congress controlled by Republicans, Obama’s options were limited to executive action, since no LGBT rights legislation would have had any chance of passage last year. LGBT advocacy organizations praised the president for what they characterized or at least wanted to believe were bold and courageous actions (National Center for Transgender Equality, “Department of Education affirms critical protections for trans students,” 5.13.16), but the time for bold action was in 2009 and 2010 when LGBT rights legislation had a decent chance of passage in Congress (Sam Levin, “Obama orders public schools to allow transgender students access to restrooms,” Guardian, 5.12.16). Here are a few important points to keep in mind when thinking about this whole brouhaha:

o The new guidelines (Ann Whalen and David Esquith, “Examples of Policies and Emerging Practices for Supporting Transgender Students“) were introduced with a cover letter from Catherine E. Lhamon of the US Department of Education and Vanita Gupta of the US Department of Justice  (“Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students,” 5.13.16). The Obama guidelines focused on compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and reference similar guidelines adopted by states and localities, including those adopted by the State of New York Department of Education (NYSED) guidelines for implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act of 2011; these salient points must be made:

o While they might be helpful in advising schools on transgender inclusion, the guidelines had no binding legal force; the only way to enforce these guidelines would have been by withholding or threatening to withhold federal funds to school districts, localities and/or states to refuse or fail to abide by them.

0 The letter was clearly an interpretation of the provisions of Title IX and did not have the force of statute law.

0 There is no significant federal case law on the interpretation of ‘sex’ in Title IX to include gender identity and expression in the expansive manner in which the March 13 letter speaks; the risk of being overturned in court is not insignificant, given that courts general hew closely to legislative intent and it would be difficult to argue that there was transgender-specific legislative intent in the drafting of Title IX.

o Women’s safety is an important issue but has nothing to do directly with gendered restroom usage; it’s probably the case that most sexual predators are conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual men; opponents of transgender rights are simply using the legitimate issue of women’s safety to undermine the safety of transgendered women & men.

o Opponents of transgender rights use the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms and changing rooms, but there is not a single case I know of of a conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual man crossdressing to gain entrance to women’s spaces. And a sexual predator can simply walk into a women’s restroom or changing room if he wants to.

o There are already laws in every state and locality in the United  States prohibiting assault and sexual assault; no transgender-inclusive statute, regulation, rule or guideline would do anything to undermine such laws.

o HB2 is based on restricting public restrooms to assigned birth sex and gender, but there is actually no way to determine conclusively what that might be in every case; the reference to birth certificates is particularly curious, because many states and localities now allow transgendered people to change the legal sex designation on their birth certificates. HB2 and similar laws are unenforceable, as they would require police and/or specially designated and authorized security guards posted at every public restroom door in the state, which would be completely unaffordable even if most states were not currently suffering significant budget deficits. Nor could policy or security guards actually demand production of a birth certificate, given Americans do not regularly carry their birth certificates with them wherever they go. Obviously, a genital check would be invasive and non-transgendered people would certainly object to being subjected to it.

o The reality is that transgendered people who ‘pass’ in the gender they identify with will rarely have problems with public restrooms while those who do not ‘pass’ will have problems even if they are post-operative and have changed the legal sex designation on their birth certificate and other government-issued identity documents.

o Public restrooms should not be an issue at all, since the only legal question of any significance here is what is referred to as ‘unavoidable nudity in sex-segregated facilities,’ which can involve public gyms, pools, showers and locker rooms but simply does not involve restrooms.

o Public restrooms are actually not regulated by statute law in most states and localities; North Carolina’s HB2, far from being ‘traditional,’ is in fact a radical break in this regard.

o The ‘bathroom panic’ here is entirely irrational because it is focused almost entirely on women’s restrooms, which have stalls but not urinals; ordinarily, there is no public nudity at all.

o Gyms, pools and other facilities with locker rooms and showers more often these days have private individual showers. Where there are open showers and changing areas, reasonable accommodation can be made; where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. Just as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires public facilities to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (including in wheelchairs), so all public restrooms, gyms, pools and other such facilities can provide reasonable accommodation for transgendered people, and such accommodation does not require them to be viewed as having a disability based on their gender identity.

o There are more and more single-user restrooms and ‘family’ restrooms in the US, especially in airports, which are leading the way in this regard.

Significantly, Trump’s recission of Obama’s guidelines for transgender inclusion in public schools has not yet been followed up by any other initiatives, even while the new president has appointed leading figures from the religious right hostile to the LGBT community, such as Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Tom Price as secretary of health and human services.One such case in point is the executive order that Obama issued in his last year eliminating discrimination in the military based on gender identity; in his very first year in office, Obama had signed a bill into law that rescinded the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ bill that Bill Clinton had signed into law; but since DADT was focused on sexual orientation and did not include gender identity and expression, rescinding DADT did nothing to eliminate discrimination against transgendered people in the military.

But whatever the new administration does will have an impact on LGBT people, perhaps nowhere more significantly than in health care. And here, the whole debacle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ‘repeal and replace’ bill is a case in point. While it’s true that Health & Human Services (HHS) issued guidelines and regulations interpreting the ACA as including LGBT people and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, it is of signal importance that neither Obama nor the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of Obama’s first term ever even considered including a provision in the bill that would have prohibited discrimination in the provision of health care based on sexual orientation or gender identity; had they done so, LGBT people would now have protection from discrimination in health care that could not be eliminated by an executive order issued by Donald Trump or a directive or regulation issued by Tom Price, a notorious homophobe. But the débacle that ensued when the right-wing Freedom Caucus torpedoed the ‘repeal and replace’ bill (called ‘TrumpCare’ by some and ‘RyanCare’ by others) also shows that the new administration faces far more serious impediments in some policy arenas from Republicans in Congress than from Democrats.

There is now talk of a Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, who has a dismal record on LGBT issues. But even if Gorsuch were confirmed, he would only replace Antonin Scalia and therefore not shift the balance of power on the court; it is only when Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the court that the real battle royal will commence. But even if Trump were successful in getting two right-wing justices confirmed, I seriously doubt that the Supreme Court will overturn Windsor or Obergefell; and it is worth pointing out that a Republican justice wrote the majority opinions in both cases, a Reagan appointee in fact.

But from the panicked posts I’ve seen on Facebook since Nov. 8, some LGBT people seemed to be wondering if they would immediately be stripped of all rights once Trump took office. The simple fact is, Congress has never enacted a single LGBT rights law other than repealing DADT, and other than the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage rights and the DADT repeal law’s recognition of the right of LGB people to serve in the military, we have no statutory rights at the federal level; what we do have is a patchwork quilt of federal case law, some good, some bad, some mixed. When Obama took office in Jan. 2009, he pursued no LGBT rights legislation, even though Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress; the candidate who promised to be a fierce advocate for LGBT rights was anything but; aside from a handful of executive orders and guidelines with extremely limited impact, the Obama administration did almost nothing for the LGBT community, and what little Obama did for us, he had to be pushed into doing reluctantly; in fact, Obama resolutely defended DOMA until nearly the end of his first term, reasserting explicitly homophobic attacks on the LGBT community in defending the Bush administration’s position on marriage.

Given that there is little chance for progress on LGBT issues at the federal level with Trump in the White House and right-wing Republicans in control of Congress, it is more important than ever to try to push a legislative and policy agenda at the state and local level. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination based both on sexual orientation and gender identity, while three more states have enacted sexual orientation-only non-discrimination laws.

The bad news is that New York (along with Wisconsin and New Hampshire) is one of those states that have yet to enact statutes to protect transgendered people from discrimination. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) remains stalled in the Republican-controlled state Senate, but lest anyone think that the new TransPAC strategy to get GENDA passed by electing a Democratic majority in the Senate, I would simply point out that Democrats actually won a majority in the Senate in 2008, but when the Democrats controlled that body for six months from January to June 2009, they failed to bring GENDA to the floor for a vote, despite having the votes to pass the bill; I would also point out that Democrats have a majority in the Senate today, but the breakaway Democrats of the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) continue to keep Republicans in control of the Senate, with the tacit support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. While the governor’s executive order in October 2015 added ‘gender identity and gender expression’ to the State Division of Human Rights list of protected categories (“ESPA goes out with a whimper without having passed GENDA“), like Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools, Cuomo’s directives on transgender discrimination could potentially be reversed by a successor; and his executive order and guidelines have undermined the already slim chances for passage of GENDA in the Senate. The good news is that here in New York City, the transgender rights law enacted by the City Council in 2002 cannot be rescinded by any president or governor and we are continuing to make progress in its implementation, which is an ongoing process.

Whatever we have already achieved at the state and local level, we must continue to pursue policy change at the federal level, and it is important to point out that the impact of any president or administration on the LGBT community actually goes well beyond the arena narrowly conceived of as ‘LGBT rights.’ In this regard, it has to be noted that globally, Obama’s impact on the LGBT community around the world has been a net negative; whatever small and largely symbolic measures Obama took in favor of LGBT rights, on the whole, the policies of his administration undermined LGBT people, women and people of color in countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Obama actually deported more undocumented immigrants than any US president in history, earning his designation ‘Deporter-in-Chief’ from La Raza; many of these deportees may have been LGBT and the majority were women and children, many of them knowingly sent to violent deaths in Central America. Note that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported these deportations. Obama also killed more innocent civilians with drone strikes – all enthusiastically supported by Hillary Clinton – than all previous presidents combined, virtually all of them people of color and many of them women and children.

As president and secretary of state, Obama and Hillary Clinton supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and supported the junta despite its persecution of feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents; Hillary persuaded Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that it was a violation of US and international law. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres, Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

Obama and Hillary also supported the coup d’état that has plunged Egypt into an abyss of corruption, brutal repression and despair (Yahia Hamed, ”Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), with LGBT people being rounded up, imprisoned and tortured by the regime that the Obama administration enthusiastically supported. As in Honduras, Obama resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup. And the Obama administration authorized the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising in 2011 by the despotic Bahraini regime which even arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising. Obama also encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the support of the Trump administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16); how many of these Yemenis are LGBT? That we don’t know, but we do know that the majority of the victims of Saudi war crimes in Yemen are women and children and all are people of color.

Perhaps most disturbing was Obama’s support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which a report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) has declared an apartheid regime. And in 2014, the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians in the Gaza Strip , killing over 2,500 Palestinians, a majority of them women and over 500 of them children; under international law, Israel’s actions in 2014 constitute genocide, and Obama and Hillary publicly supported and defended the genocide; in fact, Obama rewarded Netanyahu for it by increasing US military aid to Israel, handing Netanyahu a $38 billion check on his way out of office. Note here that there are many LGBT people living under the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and that LGBT/queer Palestinian organizations all support Palestinian civil society’s call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel. Note also that Donald Trump’s new administration has been as enthusiastic in supporting Israeli apartheid as Obama’s was, with perhaps fewer constrains in its discursive practices. David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, has referred to Jewish Americans who oppose the illegal occupation as ‘kapos’ and has openly scorned the two-state solution that has been official US policy for decades.

As truly horrendous as the new administration has proven to be, Donald Trump has made one very commendable decision, which is to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the worst trade deal in history; for all that some still harbor illusions about Obama being a progressive, he worked assiduously with Republicans in Congress to push this anti-labor trade deal that would have a devastating impact on workers as well as the environment. What is not entirely clear is whether Trump will abjure the destructive neoliberal economic policy that every president from Carter through Obama has pushed. Unfortunately, if the Obama administration was an abject failure, in foreign policy even more so than in domestic policy, the Trump administration may prove to be worse. But the very bright silver lining in the dark cloud of Trumpery is the resistance movement that the election of Herr Drumpf has sparked. If Hillary Clinton’s election would have put the country into a slumber of passive acceptance of neoliberal economic policy, neocon foreign policy and creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank as well as incremental genocide in Gaza, Trump’s election has at the very least woken quite a lot of people up to the dangers of the new administration.

What is needed now is a broadly conceived, LGBT-inclusive and strategically and tactically savvy movement for progressive policy change; and as the Mahatma Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world; as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. Thank you.

Pauline Park, Ph.D., is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002; she also participated in the working group convened by the New York City Commission on Human Rights that drafted guidelines for implementation of the statute.  Park was a member of the steering committee that led the campaign for enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) and negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in that legislation, the first transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the New York state legislation when it was signed into law in 2011.

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Pauline Park, Ph.D.

On a beautifully sunny day in April 2004, I joined half a dozen members of the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) at the Manhattan offices of “Details,” a men’s magazine that had published an offensive feature entitled “Gay or Asian?” that mocked gay Asian men as effeminate and undesirable.  After a successful meeting with the editor and publisher, we went to the Manhattan Mall nearby on Sixth Ave. at 33rd Street for lunch; we were delighted to have gotten an apology from them and a promise that “Details” would run a formal apology in the next issue of the magazine. While my colleagues were having lunch in the food court in the basement, I went to the women’s room; when I came out, I was surrounded by security guards who stood around me in a menacing stance, demanded to know if I was a man or a woman; the five men were big and menacing; the one woman among them seemed to have some authority, and when I suggested to them that they were risking a discrimination lawsuit, she had the others return to their station behind a one-way window just down the hall from the women’s restroom. While a bit shaken, I demanded to see her supervisor, who came out a few minutes later. After reconnoitering with my colleagues in the food hall, who were curious as to why I had disappeared for such a long time, we left the Manhattan Mall. When I got home, I called my colleague, Michael Silverman, then the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) to enlist his support.

My experience of discrimination in the Manhattan mall on that day in April 2004 was not that different in character from countless such incidents of discrimination based on gender identity and expression that transgendered and gender-variant people have had over many decades in the United States and throughout the world; what was different was that I was a transgender activist who had led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted only two years earlier in April 2002 and at the time of the incident in April 2004 was a member of the working group meeting at the New York City Commission on Human Rights engaged in drafting guidelines for implementation of that transgender rights law. Having written the statement of legislative findings and intent, I knew the new law as well as anyone; and given my participation in the working group at the Commission, I also knew that status of the guidelines at that moment.

The working group was actually at an impasse over the language to use to describe possible situations involving discrimination in sex-segregated facilities requiring nudity such as gyms and locker rooms. Michael Silverman represented me in legal action against Advantage Security, the private firm that provided security for the Manhattan Mall; at the same time, I filed a complaint on my own with the Commission, meeting with a staff attorney who did not know about my participation in the working group working to draft the implementation guidelines for the transgender rights law. After some discussion between TLDEF and Advantage Security, they agreed to settle, making a donation to the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) at my request as well as having their security guards undergo transgender sensitivity training. Ironically, the language that Michael Silverman and I worked out for the Advantage Security settlement helped us resolve the impasse within the working group and the Commission on Human Rights incorporated that language into the draft of the guidelines adopted by the Commission in December 2004.

TLDEF announced the settlement of my case as well as that of Justine Nicholas on 31 March 2005 and the  New York Times reported on our settlement, Nicholas Confessore writing,

When Pauline Park watched Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sign an amendment toughening the city’s anti-discrimination laws two years ago, she never expected to become one of its first beneficiaries. But yesterday, a complaint filed by Ms. Park – a co-chairwoman of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, which helped lobby for the amendment to the New York City Human Rights Law – became part of the first settlement issued under it… (Nicholas Confessore, “Transgender Group Reaches Agreement on Restrooms,” New York Times, 2 April 2005).

A New York Times story tends to attract attention from both friends and foes, and so it was with this one. Among the most influential of the organizations on the religious right is the Traditional Values Coalition. TVC attacked the settlement that I reached in April 2005 in my discrimination case, not in the least bit impressed by the fact that I was the first (along with Justine Nicholas) to successfully pursue a discrimination claim under the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. In response to the report by the e Traditional Values Coalition declared on April 7 of 2005,

“The New York Association of Gender Rights Advocacy has won a victory over restroom use by individuals who believe they are a member of the opposite sex… The victory involves a settlement from a security guard company that allegedly discriminated against transgender activist Pauline Park when he [sic] used a woman’s restroom in a Manhattan mall in April, 2004. Park wears women’s clothing and identifies as a woman but has not had a sex change operation. Park is still anatomically a male but calls himself [sic] a ‘male-bodied woman’… This decision means that men who think they are women and are still anatomically males can use women’s restrooms in New York City…”

The April 7 TVC news report is entitled, “Ladies Restrooms: Who is That Male-Bodied Woman In the Next Stall?” That report concludes, “In a society where rational thought still existed, Pauline Park would be institutionalized for insanity or be given intense therapy to overcome his [sic] serious gender identity disorder. Instead, he has imposed his own mental illness upon the city of New York — and Michael Bloomberg has been a willing accomplice…”

That TVC ‘news report’ (if one could call such an absurd expression of prejudice a ‘news report’) brought home to me the profound significance of the continuing pathologization of transgender identity of gender variance and transgender identity. The ‘gateway’ diagnosis required to access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and SRS from 1974 until 2013 was gender identity disorder (GID), introduced into the fourth edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). While GID is usually thought of as the diagnosis by which adult transsexual and transgendered people gain access to HRT and SRS, the true significance of GID is much larger. First, a change of legal sex designation  the ‘gender marker’ on identification documents that assigns us to either male or female sex in most jurisdictions requires at the very least documentation of an intent to go for SRS, if not actually proof of completion of surgery (as is the case in New York City).

While there is no necessary connection between a change of legal sex designation and a change of legal name, in many if not most cases, transitioning transsexuals pursue these two changes simultaneously. The truth is that most transgendered people frequently or even consistently present in a gender that does not match their ID, which causes problems in a multitude of situations. Since 911, most large buildings in New York City require photo ID even to enter the building. And so the apparent discrepancy between ID and either ‘gender marker’ and/or gendered name and/or gender presentation in a photocan constitute a barrier to employment, housing, and public accommodations as well as to accessing health care and social services.

But if the apparent ’solution’ is to go for a change of legal sex designation as well as name, and if the former change – and in some cases, effectively, the latter – requires a diagnosis by a psychiatrist; then in effect, the ability to access health care as well as employment, housing, and public accommodations requires such a diagnosis as well. I personally find it outrageous that transgendered people in the United States and elsewhere have to have themselves declared mentally ill in order to access health care or to get or to keep a job. We must commit to finding means by which transgendered people can access forms of medical intervention such as HRT and SRS without having to subject themselves to the degradation of being declared mentally ill simply by virtue of their gender identity.

GID not only undergirds the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care (SOC) and the protocols for gender transition in this society, this diagnosis – what I call the GID ‘regime’ – constitutes the very basis for American society’s understanding of transgender. Even in relatively more sympathetic portrayals of transgendered characters such as those in “TransAmerica” and on “All My Children” and “Ugly Betty,” the discourse through which those characters are understood is a medical model of transsexuality based fundamentally on the concept of gender dysphoria. My own work as a transgender activist is informed by a feminist conception of gender and a commitment to challenging and dismantling the sex/gender binary that is at the root of our oppression as women and as men as well as transgendered men and women or for that matter, genderqueers who resist binary categorization. Our goal as a movement must therefore be nothing less than the transformation of society’s understanding of gender. And if we are committed to that goal, we must also be committed to dismantling the ‘GID regime’ that undergirds this system of gender regulation and control.

In 2013, the APA published the DSM V, which replaced ‘gender identity disorder’ with ‘gender dysphoria’ (American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults,” Supplement to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” fifth edition (Sept. 2016), p. 19.: DSM-5 classificaion, gender dysphoria, gender dysphoria in adolescents and adults, p. xxiv (Desk Reference, p. xxv): change F64.1 to F64.0).

I fully understand the practical implications of GID for accessing hormones and surgery, but I think we need to question the notion that we must accept the pathologizing of all gender variance as mental illness in exchange for the ostensible benefits that flow from the diagnosis. The reality is that many and perhaps even most of those who have gotten SRS paid for by private insurance in the United States in the last decade have been able to do so under the auspices of the Affordable Care Act, legislation whose future is extremely insecure given the public commitment of Barack Obama’s successor Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress to repeal the ACA. One might also point out parenthetically that there was no provision in ‘Obamacare’ (as the ACA is popularly known) that explicitly prohibited discrimination in the provision of health care on the basis of gender identity or expression (or sexual orientation, for that matter), nor was there any provision that explicitly required health insurance companies from covering HRT or SRS for transitioning transsexuals. The very fact that insurance payment for HRT and SRS appear to be dependent on the fate of controversial legislation opposed by the majority party in the United States itself would seem to be a compelling argument to re-examine the very notion of retaining a pathologizing diagnosis in the DSM simply to secure continued insurance payment for those medical interventions. And it must also be pointed out that, despite the ACA, many transgendered people continue to have no health insurance at all, and those who do have either Medicaid, whose budget is more precariously perched than that of any other major federal entitlement program.

If Republicans in Congress are successful in ‘repealing and replacing’ the ACA, then the reversion to the status quo ante could well mean that those who get health insurance through health maintenance organizations (HMOs), most of which had explicit clauses written into their policies excluding coverage of any service related to gender transition, could well find themselves unable to access insurance coverage for HRT and SRS as in the era before Obamacare.

What is striking to me is the narrow parameters of the debate within the transgender community and even within the larger LGBT community over the role of the diagnosis of GID and its successor, gender dysphoria, in accessing HRT and SRS; there has been virtually no discussion in LGBT contexts of the fact that the United States is the only industrialized democracy in the world without universal health care. It seems to me that rather than fighting for private insurance coverage for medical interventions related to gender transition, we in the transgender community and the larger LGBT community should instead be demanding universal health care and statute laws that explicitly prohibit discrimination in the provision of health care based on gender identity and expression as well as sexual orientation; doing so would enable us to connect the struggle for transgender access to health care to the larger national debate over universal health care; doing so would also enable the transgender community to forge real relationships and alliances with other communities fighting for health care rather than characterizing the issue of transgender health care narrowly as a fight for HRT and SRS through a pathologizing definition of transgender identity under the rubric of disability.

It is important at this point to talk about the impact of pathologization and to recognize the fact that the pernicious effects of GID extend far beyond simply the instrumental necessity for adult transsexuals to obtain the diagnosis in order to access hormones and surgery. According to one report, three quarters of all those diagnosed with GID are diagnosed with GID in childhood and adolescence. These are for the most part gender variant children whose parents take them to a psychiatrist because Johnny is playing too often with dolls or Janie is climbing too many trees. The parents conflate homosexuality with transgender and hope that the psychiatrist can ‘cure’ or at least ‘prevent’ homosexuality in their chil dren. There may well be a significant segment of the psychiatric profession that uses the diagnosis in precisely this fashion  to try to ‘cure’ or ‘prevent’ homosexuality in children and youth – this, despite the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1974.

Many of these psychiatrists, such as Charles Socarides and George Rekers, are associated with the religious right and in fact advocate re introduction of homosexuality in the DSM. Rekers, who is on the faculty of the School of Medicine at the University of South Carolina, has in fact received over half a million dollars from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMN) to study ways to ‘treat’ and ‘cure’ such ‘deviant’ behavior, including ‘at ypical gender identity,’ ‘atypical sex roles,’ and ‘pre transsexual behavior.’

One of the leading organizations advocating re introduction of homosexuality in the DSM is the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. NARTH and their co conspirators in homophobia see removal of GID as having the potential to eliminate the ability of psychiatry and homophobic and transgenderphobic parents to police and enforce the gender boundaries that they wish to impose on their children as well as on adults to the extent possible.

I have an Asian American lesbian friend in Queens whose nephew is transgendered. When he told his parents that he felt himself to be a girl, his mother and stepfather had him institutionalized, on the basis of a diagnosis of GID. He is currently at Cinnamon Hills, which despite its charming name, is in effect a prison for youth located in the middle of the desert in southern Utah. Perhaps the most famous such case of institutionalization of a youth with GID is that of Daphne (now Dylan) Scholinski, who now identifies as a transman. At fifteen years old, Scholinski identified as a butch lesbian and was committedto a mental institution by parents who were determined to ‘cure’ her ofthe mental illness with which she was diagnosed. The Last Time I Wore A Dress is only the most famous account of a gender-variant youth subjected to behavior modification therapy for a gender identity that is no disorder and that cannot be cured.

What many people evenwithin the transgender community do not realize is that legal minors can be committed to a mental institution and subjected to behavior modification therapy up to and including electroshock therapy. In fact, even adults can be institutionalized against their will if they are diagnosed with GID, which is precisely what happened to the renowned economist Deirdre McCloskey, when family members decided that she was ‘insane’ after she told them of her intention to transition (as she writes in Crossing: a Memoir, University of Chicago Press, 1999). It seems to me that what is ‘insane’ is forcibly institutionalizing a brilliant economist simply because she has informed her family that she wishes to live her life consistent with her internal sense of gender identity. What is insane is the diagnosis of GID itself.

The pernicious effects of GID extend by implication indirectly to the intersexed as well. Intersex genital mutilation (IGM) certainly requires no diagnosis of GID, and in fact, the intersex ‘condition’ is explicitly excluded as a criterion for GID, but the rigid insistence on the sex/gender binary articulated by the GID diagnosis that is officially recognized by the psychiatric profession through its inclusion in the DSM gives implicit support to the practice of IGM.

The influence of GID also extends into the sphere of public policy as well, impeding the fight for transgender rights. We have made enormous progress as a community and as a movement over the course of the last two decades, but while 95 jurisdictions  including nine states and the District of Columbia – now have enacted legislation explicitly prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity or expression, it is a sad fact that 41 states have no such protection in their state laws. However, every state has included disability in its human rights law, and it is that rubric that litigators are using to obtain legal redress for transgendered plaintiffs across the country, and they often win on that basis. But the argument that such litigators proffer usually follows along these lines: my client is mentally ill by virtue of his/her gender identity disorder and therefore is protected under state disability law. I should make clear that I have nothing but admiration for the hard  working lawyers who represent transgendered clients – often pro bono – with limited time and resources. And in those 41 states without explicit inclusion of gender identity and expression in state human rights law, appeal to disability by way of GID may well be the only practical way of obtaining legal redress for discrimination against a transgendered client. But I think we need to recognize how sharp the horns of that dilemma may be.

As a non lawyer who works on legislation, I can tell you that the genuine happiness that I feel for the transgendered client who wins such a case is diminished by the realization that the victory for that individual undercuts the very arguments that we need to make in the legislative arena. Because it is precisely GID that gives the religious right and other opponents of transgender rights legislation their most powerful ammunition.

Consider Vermont, where activists are trying to get the state legislature to pass a transgender rights bill against the opposition of right -wing organizations such as Vermont Renewal, which describes itself as “a grassroots organization with the primary goal of promoting and defending traditional family and moral values based on the Judeo- Christian worldview that Vermont and the entire United States were founded upon” (www.vermontrenewal.org). In an op-ed in the Burlington Free Press for Vermont Renewal, Stephen Cable writes,

“Under the banner of equality, the Vermont Legislature seeks to protect transgender behavior (i.e. transvestite and transsexual) from discrimination (bills S.51 and H.228)… Despite good intent, there are major problems with this legislation. First, such behavior is associated with a treatable mental disorder. However, we question efforts which, under the pretext of equality, actually favor one mental disorder for protections to the exclusion of all others, such as depression, anorexia, kleptomania, etc. The Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution forbids such preferential treatment…”

Cable continues,

“There are, of course, serious pitfalls associated with efforts to protect behavior associated with mental disorders. Perhaps the largest would be inadvertently sending a message that such illness is healthy, or even desirable, rather than encouraging treatment and recovery – thereby trapping people within this disorder. Equally important, however, is the danger that, by affording too much protection to the sufferer, government may actually become the oppressor, creating unforeseen hardship and complexity for businesses, schools, and the common person…” Now, there are certainly many responses to Cable’s uninformed and bigoted screed, including a critique of the way in which he misconstrues disability law and how it works. And one can also respond to Cable by pointing out that there is no evidence that the GID diagnosis was intended to be used as an argument against non-discrimination legislation. But we simply cannot ignore the fact that the religious right not only in Vermont but across the country has latched onto GID as the core of its argument against transgender rights legislation at the local, state and national levels; to that extent, the removal of GID from the DSM would disable their core argument (pun intended). And any student of LGBT history would be conscious of how the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1974 advanced the gay and lesbian movement from that point onwards.

What I would say to the Traditional Values Coalition is this: I do not have a gender identity disorder; it is society that has a gender identitydisorder. I must admit it was a bit of a shock to be subjected to personal attack by one of the largest religious right organizations in the country, but I have taken the advice of a friend of mine who encouraged me to wear it as a badge of honor. Now that I’ve been declared a public enemy by the likes of TVC that I have ‘arrived.’

But the point I would like to make here is not so much about the TVC bull’s eye on my forehead; it is the ammunition that the discourse of mental pathology gives to opponents of transgender rights. In TVC’s report, “A Gender Identity Disorder Goes Mainstream” (also issued in April 2005), the organization declares, “These are deeply troubled individuals who need professional help, not societal approval or affirmation.”

Elsewhere in its ‘report,’ TVC describes “this mental illness and how it is being normalized in our culture.” In fact, the very title of the TVC ’special report’ is “A Gender Identity Disorder Goes Mainstream,” followed by the sub head, “Cross dressers, transvestites, and transgenders become militants in the homosexual revolution.” And TVC is not the only such organization pursuing this line of argument, however specious. The religious right is now so panicked about the growing acceptance of gay men and lesbians in this societythat they are increasingly focusing on the diagnosis of GID not only to oppose transgender rights legislation, but also non discrimination andhate crimes legislation that includes sexual orientation as well.

And that is why I say that every victory for a transgendered plaintiff whose lawyer uses disability to win a discrimination case compromises our ability to work in the legislative arena – hence my profound ambivalence about the GID-based arguments being used in such cases. A few years ago, I had a conversation with a transgender activist from another state for whom I have great respect. She insisted that the way forward for the transgender movement was the disability route. I insisted with equal vehemence that the ‘disability track’ was the wrong path to pursue. I cited the clause in the Americans with Disabilities Act that explicitly excludes ‘transvestism and transsexualism’ from coverage under the terms of the 1990 federal disability rights law, thanks to Jesse Helms. The notoriously bigoted senator from North Carolina made certain that the path to transgender rights through federal disability law would be closed, and there is little if any chance that that path will be opened anytime soon.

But the issue of federal disability law aside, the larger strategic question for our community and for our movement must be this: is our goal only litigation and legislation or are we pursuing something bigger? The whole critique of the queer left of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement is that it has for far too long focused narrowly on juridical rights. Now, I happen to believe that we should pursue non-discrimination legislation and that we must ensure that all transgendered and gender variant people – indeed, all LGBT people – gain equal rights under federal as well as state and local law in every area of activity, including marriage. But I also believe that our movement must have at its core a vision of social justice and social change. And that vision must be premised on the goal I articulated earlier. Our objective must be nothing less than the transformation of society’s understanding of gender. And so the removal of GID from the DSM must be a goal of our movement; it simply cannot be otherwise. We must discard a medical model of transsexuality that is a disease model of mental illness; we must reject any suggestion that our goal as a community and as a movement is simply to find a place within a normalizing discourse of the existing sex/gender binary, expanded ever so slightly to accommodate us – or at least those of us who can comfortably fit within a governing regime of heteronormativity. In its stead, we must embrace a vision in which all forms of transgender are seen simply as natural variants in gender identity and expression and in which all transgendered and gender variant people will be accepted as fully equal to their conventionally gendered family members, friends, colleagues, and neighbors.

It is important at this point to address the misunderstandings that have arisen when I have discussed the need for the depathologization of transgender identity and gender variance in speeches that I have given since 2007, when I called for the abolition of GID in my keynote address at the Philadelphia  Trans-Health Conference (“Transgender Health: reconceptualizing Pathology as Wellness,” 7 April 2007) and in a talk at Harvard University’s School of Public Health in Boston in 2011 (“Transgender Health, Pathology and Human Rights,” 20 April 2011). When I spoke at Harvard, one graduate student in the audience asked me if I was advocating that the transgender community disassociate itself from the disability community; this student misinterpreted my comments as suggesting that transgendered people should distance themselves from people with disabilities because of the stigmatization of people with disabilities (mental as well as physical) in American society. In fact, I think we should work to end the stigmatization of all forms of disability, whether mental or physical; and I think an alliance between transgender activists and disability rights activists would be a very good thing indeed; but that relationship cannot be based on a false pathologization of transgender and gender variance. The real basis for an effective working relationship between the transgender community and other communities, including the disability community, would be precisely the rejection of the false notion that transgender is a psychopathology, the objective of ending the stigmatization of all forms of disability.

What I would like to suggest as an alternative is to put a concept of wellness at the center of transgender health. I am arguing here for the removal of transgender identity from the DSM altogether and a comprehensive rejection of the pathologizing of transgender and gender variance. Just as homosexuality is now viewed by mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists as simply a natural variance in sexual orientation, so transgender would be viewed simply as a natural variance in gender identity and expression – no more or less natural than conventional gender identities.

The objection to such a conception coming from certain quarters no doubt would be that it would render hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery as ‘elective’ procedures, thus making it impossible to get insurance payment for HRT and SRS as ‘medically necessary.’ But I would argue that we must challenge the very notion that as transgendered people we should view ourselves as having been born with a ‘birth defect’ and instead see ourselves as being fully natural and fully human just as in fact we are.

In this conception, the various technologies that some of us use to modify our anatomy and biology would be viewed as technologies of self-determination, used to configure our bodies to conform to our internal sense of gender identity. In other words, HRT and SRS, breast reduction and breast augmentation, metoidioplasty, tracheal shaves, and other forms of plastic surgery would be technologies we can use to make ourselves feel more comfortable in our own skin – technologies that we can use to enhance our sense of well-being. In such a conception, would hormones, surgery and the like be elective? Yes, and by reconceptualizing such technologies as elective, we would reclaim our sense of self determination. The truth is that the argument for SRS as currently conceived makes no sense whatsoever. For what mental illness is surgery on a part of the body other than the brain indicated or prescribed? I know of none. The usual objection to SRS is that it involves the removal (in most cases) of perfectly healthy tissue, and that is in fact usually the case. There is nothing diseased in the sex organs of most transsexual or transgendered people who seek SRS. But surgery will enhance the well-being of those who elect it. And by reconceptualizing surgery – including and above all SRS – as elective, we reclaim our sense of agency. The notion that SRS is medically necessary cannot be advanced except by way of an argument that pathologizes our bodies and our minds – that pathologizes our very identities.

The truth is that SRS is rafely if ever medically necessary in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, SRS can be a very effective way of enhancing the well-being of those who elect it, and as such, should be readily available without any psychiatric evaluation or diagnosis to those who choose to elect it. And just as private insurance pays for hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal non transgendered women, it should pay for HRT for transgendered women and men as well as for SRS for both. The crucial point is that we as transgendered individuals have to move towards acceptance of ourselves. And we as a transgender community have to reject the idea that the body of a transgendered person is a diseased body. Even more importantly, we must reject the notion that the mind of a transgendered person is a diseased mind. The ‘problem’ of ‘gender dysphoria’ is not to be found in the mind of a transgendered person. Rather, the problem is to be found in the society that is too rigid to allow for those born male to identify as women or those born female to identify as men – or to allow those born male, female, or intersexed to identify as something other than men or women.

And so I say that what we need to do is to reconceptualize pathology as the problem and not the solution to our problems. The solution is, instead, a (w)holistic concept of wellness informed by feminist consciousness that locates the problem at the level of society and not the individual who resists the dictates of an overly gender-rigid society. As I see it, my work as a transgender activist is not about helping a small number of post-operative transsexuals to fit more easily into existing boxes but rather about helping all of us to break out of all of the boxes so that we can all be whoever and whatever we feel ourselves to be. In my view, the task facing us as a community is not to shore up regressive notions of mental pathology but rather to challenge and dismantle the GID regime and the larger sex/gender binary of which it is a part and which is the source of our oppression as transgendered and gender variant people. We must set as our objective nothing less than the transformation of society’s understanding of gender, as part of a movement for social justice for all.

Reconceptualizing the struggle for transgender health care access in progressive feminist terms is part and parcel of engaging in the struggle for universal health care, which can only be based on a ‘single-payer’ system administered by the federal government. The question of the precise form of that system of health care lies well beyond the parameters of this chapter but could certainly involve ‘Medicare for all,’ to cite just one possible option. But what is crucial is that we move from the limiting conceptualization of our work as transgender activists as being about securing access to HRT and SRS through use of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on the basis of transgender identity as a mental illness and instead recast our struggle as part of the larger struggle for universal health care with guarantees prohibiting discrimination in its provision on the basis of gender identity and expression as well as sexual orientation; by doing so, we can make common cause with other groups and communities.

I urge you to join me in that struggle. Thank you.

In 2004, I named and co-founded the Transgender Health Initiative (THINY), a joint project of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) whose mission was to enhance access to health care for transgendered and gender-variant people. When we began a series of monthly membership meetings that continued for a few years, we expected that THINY members would want to begin by working with hospitals that were part of the Health & Hospitals Corporation of the City of New York, which were and still are underfunded and desperately in need of transgender sensitivity training; we were  surprised to discover that THINY members actually wanted to address issues of transgender sensitivity — or lack thereof — at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center; we were surprised because Callen-Lorde is the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community health care provider in New York and may well have more transgendered clients than any other health care provider in the city.

But our transgendered members had many complaints about Callen-Lorde and their experiences there, and so we launched a project collaborating with management at Callen-Lorde to survey transgendered patients and clients on their experiences there; we designed the survey, which was made available on-line and in paper form at the front desk, and we got a significant rate of return. As a result of the very candid feedback from the survey, we were able to make recommendations to the administration, which in turn created a transgender community advisory committee as well as hiring for a new position of transgender services coordinator. Following our work with Callen-Lorde, we then began to work with senior management at HHC, though it was the inability to get a commitment to a budget for training that prevented us with moving forward on training for HHC personnel. (At the same time, Gouverneur, one of the HHC hospitals, was moving forward with a small LGBT health clinic.)

In 2009, I worked with NYAGRA’s summer intern, Kelly White, to put together the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in New York City and the metropolitan area (which is now available on-line at  transgenderrights.org). Published in July of that year, this was the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers for New York City and the metropolitan area ever published, and to my knowledge, it was the first such directory for any city published in a print edition anywhere in the United States.

In 2006, I did a series of trainings with Michael Silverman (then executive director of TLDEF) for St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was one of the largest hospitals in New York City, and a hospital with one of the largest transgender patient populations; these were the first transgender sensitivity trainings at any major hospital in the city. Sadly enough, St. Vincent’s went bankrupt in 2010 and closed after failing to resolve a situation in which the hospital had accumulated over a billion dollars in debt. These transgender sensitivity trainings were as much of an eye opener for us as they were for the nurses, techs, and other health care professionals we trained. Participants ranged from hostile to indifferent to open-minded to genuinely supportive  in short, a microcosm of society and its attitudes towards the transgendered. Only a few of the nurses were openly hostile and even (in at least two cases) somewhat disruptive. But most of the nurses and other providers we did trainings for at the very least listened politely.

The real problem was the lack of both knowledge of the challenges facing transgendered people as they try to access health care as well as the lack of sensitivity on the part of some of these providers. With regard to the former  lack of knowledge  one of the big problems facing our community is that among those who think about transgender access to health care and there are far too few who think about this issue at all  most imagine that the main challenge we face is accessing hormones and sex reassignment surgery (SRS). While that is a challenge, the biggest challenge for transgendered people really is accessing healthcare for all of those medical issues unrelated to gender transition.

And that leads me to the central theme of this chapter. The work that I have done in New York on health care access for members of the transgender community has made very concrete the many paradoxes and dilemmas of advocating simultaneously for health care access and for human rights in the face of the pathologization

(photo courtesy Anh Ðao Kolbe)

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York (www.nyagra.com), which she co-founded in June 1998. She also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF). Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines – adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 – for implementation of the new statute.

Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation introduced in that body. She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post GID & the pathologization of transgender identity appeared first on Pauline Park.

Creating Change or pinkwashing Israeli apartheid: A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing
by Pauline Park

I have attended 13 Creating Change conferences, but the 28th Creating Change in Chicago in January 2016, which I did not attend, will be remembered as perhaps the most controversial of them all (Matt Simonette and Gretchen Hammond, “Creating Change conference marked by controversies,” Windy City Times, 1.25.16). Creating Change is the largest annual general purpose conference of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in the United States, the flagship event of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, which in 2016 changed its name to ‘National LGBTQ Task Force.’ If the 2016 Creating Change conference is remembered for anything, it will be remembered for the enormous controversies swirling around the invitation to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the reception held by A Wider Bridge on Jan. 22.

In a statement issued on Jan. 12, the Task Force announced that it had rescinded the invitation to ICE to facilitate a session at Creating Change 2016 after a wave of outrage from LGBT activists, especially people of color (statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force regarding Creating Change and ICE), executive director Rea Carey and deputy director Russell Roybal writing,

We know the decision to accept a proposal from ICE for a session at our Creating Change Conference was the wrong decision and that it has caused hurt and pain to communities and individuals we deeply care about. The decision also could have created a situation where the conference would not have felt like a safe space — a vitally important component of what makes the conference special — for undocumented immigrants, immigration activists and allies. Our commitment to immigrant rights and reform has never wavered, but we know community trust in our commitment has been damaged. We made a mistake and we deeply regret it and with our whole hearts apologize…

Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, issued a companion statement also apologizing for the decision and providing some background on the invitation to ICE. But if Task Force staff thought they had dodged a bullet, the outrage over ICE was just the prelude to the much bigger explosion over their invitation to A Wider Bridge.

On its website, A Wider Bridge describes itself as “the pro-Israel organization that builds bridges between Israelis and LGBTQ North Americans and allies,” but this is disingenuous at best if not downright misleading. AWB ‘pinkwashes’ the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine by creating an image of Israel as a gay paradise as a justification for the increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that Palestinians have endured since 1967. As Jimmy Pasch, the west regional organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote on JVP’s website (“Don’t Pinkwash Apartheid: a Tochecha for the National LGBTQ Task Force“),

A Wider Bridge has a long history of ignoring and covering up Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians by touting Israel’s ‘gay-friendly’ reputation Upon learning of their participation at Creating Change, a diverse coalition of groups, with LGBTQ Palestinian organizations and leaders at the center, came together to oppose it. the coalition effectively made the case for how support of Israel’s military occupation, ethnic cleansing, racism, and colonialism [is[ incompatible with queer liberation and with fundamental human rights.’ Their organizing led to the initial cancellation of the event, but the backlash from institutional players was swift, leading to a barrage of misleading op-eds and the uncertain National LGBT Task Force, which runs the conference, reversing their decision.

The Task Force reversed its initial decision under enormous pressure from Zionists, both within and outside the LGBT community (“Group reverses decision to cancel reception with Israeli activists,” by Michael K. Lavers, Washington Blade, 1.19.16). If anything, the Task Force’s pusillanimous indecision, far from pleasing everyone, just managed to alienate both Zionists and anti-Zionists as well as make the organization’s leadership look weak and indecisive.

Jimmy Johnson reported on Black Lives Matter Chicago’s statement for the Electronic Intifada, writing, “Shortly after that statement was released, the Chicago organization Brown People for Black Power cancelled its scheduled workshop at Creating Change, adding, “Kristian Davis Bailey, co-organizer of the ongoing Black for Palestine effort, told me by email that the Black Lives Matter Chicago statement builds on the joint struggle between segments of Black and Palestinian liberation movements” (“Activists pull out of Chicago LGBTQ conference over Israel pinkwashing,” Jimmy Johnson, Electronic Intifada, 1.22.16)

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) issued a statement denouncing the Task Force (MASGD Statement on Pinkwashing Session at Creating Change 2016) on Jan. 22, on the morning of the AWB reception, declaring,

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) rejects the Task Force’s latest attempt to address current tensions at Creating Change 2016 with regard to Zionism and the military occupation of Palestine by Israel. The past two weeks have included a series of attempts to manipulate, undermine, divide, and co-opt our communities, absent any intersectional analysis of the broader oppressive dynamics at play. MASGD stands with all LGBTQ activists who reject oppressive forces at Creating Change, whether they be ICE or Zionism… this ‘dialogue’ is a naked attempt to co-opt our criticisms of the structural violence of Zionism, by making this issue one of emotions and ‘hurt feelings’ rather than one of the politics of oppression, occupation, and racism. Such attempts at window-dressing can never address structures of power, and therefore cannot serve as a fix for the decisions made by the Task Force at Creating Change 2016 that support systems of oppression. The Task Force pays a lot of lip service to being concerned about social justice, and to understanding the ways in which oppressions intersect with one another; however, their actions this year have demonstrated a clear hypocrisy and betrayal of what queer liberation truly means… By siding with the forces of oppression and occupation, the Task Force is clearly on the wrong side of history.

The Chicago-based Gay Liberation Network issued this statement on ‪#‎cancelpinkwashing‬ @ ‪#‎CC16‬, entitled, “Why We Oppose Pro-Israel Organizations at Creating Change”:

For several years the Israeli government has attempted to use propaganda about the freedoms some LGBTQs in that country have as a cover for their increasingly brutal rule over Palestinians — a process known as ‘pink-washing.’ Because of the brutal racism of the country, mimicking South Africa under apartheid – one set of laws for Jews, another for Palestinians – most Palestinian LGBTQs don’t enjoy those freedoms. Instead, they endure the anti-Palestinian racism meted out on a daily basis to gay and non-gay alike. Israel’s racist rule features widespread imprisonment of Palestinians without charges or trials, systemic torture documented by numerous human rights organizations, and the intentional, extreme impoverishment of Palestinians thru the purposeful destruction of their economic activity in Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing more succinctly encapsulates the racist nature of the Israeli state than its infamous apartheid wall, facilitating the increasing theft of land from Palestinians even as they approach a majority of people in all the areas controlled by Israel. As progressives rightly criticize the racist wall that Donald Trump proposes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border, why can’t some of them see the profoundly racist nature of the wall that Israel has already built? By allowing a pro-Israel group space at its Creating Change conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force has turned its back on its ostensible mission to oppose racism in all of its forms. We will not keep silent as the LGBTQ movement is used as a cover for this anti-Palestinian racism.

In fact, none of the protestors objected to the presence of Jerusalem Open House; the criticisms were aimed solely at AWB; and none of the protestors blocked anyone from entering the ballroom; in fact, it was AWB people who tried to block the demonstrators from entering the room, directly contrary to Creating Change policy, which makes public events such as this AWB reception open to all Creating Change attendees. And the only ‘fire storm of hate’ was that being directed by Slepian and AWB against the peaceful protestors both during and after the event, with incendiary language mischaracterizing the demonstration as anti-Jewish (despite the participation of many Jews in it). Unfortunately, editorials such as that written by Kevin Naff seriously confused the issues at stake; in his editorial for the Washington Blade (Kevin Naff, “Creating Shame: Anti-Israel protest misguided, offensive,” Washington Blade, 1.25.16), Naff repeated the nonsense that Arthur Slepian was spreading about the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” writing,

It’s not clear whether they understood the context of what they were chanting or if they were merely caught up in the moment. That genocidal chant is an overt call for the destruction of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

No one I know thinks that chant means anything of the sort; rather, it is an expression of the wish that Palestinians may one day live in freedom, liberated from the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine; far from ‘genocidal,’ it is actually the opposite: it is an expression of opposition to genocide. LGBT activist Faisal Alam wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 23,

90% of what you’re reading about what happened or didn’t happen at Creating Change is being written by people who weren’t here. People who were here AND were involved with on-the-ground organizing are either traveling back right now or are exhausted as fuck from the insanity of the weekend! There is no way to describe what happened here and the impact that its had on those that were on the front lines. But here are three things that are facts. 1) there were 2 shabbat services held at Creating Change; neither were disrupted or canceled. 2) A Wider Bridge’s reception started without disruption. 3) The Hilton Chicago called the Chicago Police Department and the Hilton security shut down the reception. It seems that Windy city times is the only newspaper that  has any semblance of ‘balance’ in its articles right now. Every other article has extensive quotes from A Wider Bridge and absolutely zero comments by organizers of the protest.

And as Jimmy Pasch of JVP put it,

The exclusion of A Wider Bridge from Creating Change is not about excluding Jews, as some have falsely charged, but rather to make clear that our struggles for liberation are all interconnected, and that support for occupation, colonialism, and discrimination has no place in our community.

A Wider Bridge is nothing more than a front for the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and AWB’s only role is to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.  The invocation of the opportunity for ‘dialogue’ from both the National LGBTQ Task Force and AWB is disingenuous at best, because LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation cannot participate in it even if they wanted to. By inviting A Wider Bridge to use Creating Change as a platform to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Task Force implicitly endorsed the occupation and the apartheid regime used to enforce it, thus betraying LGBT/queer Palestinians as well as the organization’s own nominal commitment to progressive social and political change.  If the Task Force were really committed to social justice as its leadership claims, the organization would endorse the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which all of the queer Palestinian organizations have asked the LGBT community in the United States and throughout the world to support.

On Jan. 25, the Task Force issued a statement ‘condemning anti-Semitism’ (“National LGBTQ Task Force Condemns Anti-Semitism,” 1.25.16), though precisely what ‘anti-Semitism’ it was condemning was not at all clear from the statement, which documented nothing of the sort; instead, the Task Force seemed to be parroting Arthur Slepian’s false and almost absurdly desperate accusation of anti-Semitism to slander the progressive activists — many of them Jewish and many people of color — challenging the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In its Jan. 25 statement, the Task Force seems to turn its back on people of color, youth, progressive activists and the pursuit of social justice altogether; it is difficult to read the statement in any other way, since there is not even an acknowledgement of the justice of the anti-apartheid cause or even of the right to freedom of speech and expression for those who oppose Israeli apartheid. The Task Force’s behavior in this whole episode has really shattered its pretension to being the lead organization of ‘the movement.’ An organization that would bow to money and power as the Task Force so obviously did in caving into the Zionist machine has abdicated any legitimate claim even to be progressive, let alone the lead organization of the LGBT movement.

The Task Force leadership should have realized that its craven capitulation would not appease Zionists and did not. Melanie Nathan, whose specialty seems to be vicious personal attacks on human rights activists, seemed to want to publicly ‘shame’ those who participated in the #cancelpinkwashing demonstration by naming as many participants as she could identify (Melanie Nathan, “Naming Participants in the Creating Change 2016 LGBTQ Jew Bash Fest,” 1.30.16).

Even A Wider Bridge rejected the overtures of the notorious Islamophobe Michael Lucas, who apparently proposed that the organization bring suit against the Task Force, according to a report in Ha’aretz  (Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Gay Porn Star Comes Out Against anti-Israel LGBTQ Protest,” Ha’aretz, 2.2.16). In his op-ed in Out Magazine, Michael Lucas wrote,

The 200 thugs who showed up Friday at a Jewish reception were not interested in dialogue. They comprised an enraged gang filled with Jew-hatred, bent on intimidating and silencing LGBT Jews who have any connection to the state of Israel. And the sponsor of the creating Change Conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force, knew full well the potential for violence, and did absolutely nothing to safeguard the lives of more than 100 participants at the reception (Michael Lucas, “The Creating Change Protest Was Pure Anti-Semitism,” Out.com, 1.27.16).

Lucas himself was not at Creating Change and his account of the incident is fictional. Of course, this description is as far from reality, but it is hardly surprising coming from Lucas, a notorious Islamophobic bigot whose hysterical rants even the Zionist machine finds a tad embarrassing. A far more respected figure, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York (the largest LGBT synagogue in the world), unfortunately engaged in statements just as misleading if less hysterical in tone, writing,

What Kleinbaum refers to as a chant ‘calling for the eradication of Israel’ was the chant, ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.’ But as Wendy Elisheva Somerson noted,

references the Jewish historical trauma of forced displacement and genocide in Europe in order to position Israeli Jews as victims of Palestinians. In fact, it is Palestinians who were driven from their homes in 1948 during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to clear the way for the state of Israel [and] says nothing about Israel… The chant itself simply promotes a vision of a liberated Palestine. Pro-occupation advocates who equate Palestinian freedom with Israeli annihilation reveal their view of the relationship between Israel and Palestine as a zero-sum game in which only one group of people, Israeli Jews, deserves liberation. But can we call it liberation if Israeli freedom comes at the cost of Palestinian freedom? Or if a handful of LGBTQ people gain individual rights, while others languish in poverty, prisons and detention centers? (Wendy Elisheva Somerson, “Widening the Frame: The connections Between Queer and Palestinian Liberation,” Truthout.org, 2.2.16)

One other claim that Kleinbaum made in her Ha’aretz op-ed requires examination:

Anyone who knows me—or Googles me—will know that I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. In 2012 I participated in a national LGBT leadership trip to Palestine, and connected strongly with activists there. I have always taken a stand for freedom of speech.

I actually participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine, and as the other 15 delegates and the two tour directors as well as the camera crew can attest, Kleinbaum actually abandoned the tour halfway through the week-long itinerary and did so without explanation or even notice to the tour directors and her delegate colleagues. When the deputy tour director asked Kleinbaum why she left the tour, she told him that the tour was not what she had thought it would be, mumbling something about having expected ‘dialogue’ between Israelis and Palestinians; but this explanation is no explanation at all, because Kleinbaum like all of the delegates had been given a clear explanation of the tour in advance. One can speculate why she abruptly left the tour halfway through it, but the common consensus among the other delegates was that Kleinbaum could not bring herself to face the reality of the occupation; and in fact, at every stop along the way, she aggressively questioned our local Palestinian tour guides (we had a different one in every city, town and village) as to the veracity of their description of the apartheid regime in each such municipality or locale, implying skepticism about the extent of the oppression and repression by the Israeli authorities that they were describing.  And I am not aware of any real work that Kleinbaum has ever done to challenge the occupation; in fact, her public pronouncements have almost uniformly been harshly critical of those criticizing the occupation, especially those advocating boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting apartheid Israel, calling into question her self-description in the Ha’aretz op-ed (“I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine”). It seems to me that someone less intent on criticizing the occupation than on criticizing those criticizing the occupation is not really ‘fighting’ the occupation.

In any case, despite its knowingly false and absurdly histrionic account of the events at Creating Change 2016 in Chicago, A Wider Bridge did not host a reception or any programming at Creating Change 2017 in Philadelphia, explaining that absence on its website:

Following the anti-semitic, anti-Israel incident at A Wider Bridge reception during Creating Change Conference last year, there’s a demand to know what we are planning to do with regard to participating in the upcoming Creating Change Conference, set for January 18 – 22 in Philadelphia. In brief, we are sending two of our staff leaders, Tye Gregory and Quentin Hill to participate in the conference, and to represent A Wider Bridge in the discussions, especially those that might focus on issues related to Israel and anti-Semitism. While we are not presenting a program or hosting a reception at the Conference itself, we are hosting a private Lunch and Learn event in Philadelphia on January 20, that will be an opportunity for both conference attendees and others in the Philadelphia area to learn about and discuss our work. On Wednesday, A Wider Bridge will be returning to the Creating Change Conference, this year in Philadelphia, to continue engaging LGBTQ leaders and activists with the shared advancement of LGBTQ rights in the United States and Israel. (“Creating Change 2017 and A Wider Bridge,” AWiderBridge.org, 1.16.17)

It is not clear from A Wider Bridge’s statement whether the organization submitted programming proposals to the Task Force and/or a request for space for a reception and was turned down or whether AWB decided not to attempt any such direct participation altogether; and unfortunately, the Task Force is not transparent in its decision-making and has not and likely will not respond to any requests for information about AWB and Creating Change 2017.

Unfortunately, for all its talk of ‘intersectional analysis’ of multiple oppressions, the Task Force ended up excoriating progressive activists for challenging Israeli apartheid and apologizing to Zionists for allowing their pinkwashing event to be disrupted, a betrayal of the organization’s ostensible commitment to the pursuit of social justice and the empowerment of those working for its attainment. Quite the contrary: the Task Force’s statements about the incident at Creating Change 2016 and its refusal to take a principled stand against Israeli apartheid and genocide represent a capitulation to the wealthy donor class to which the organization apparently now owes its primary loyalty rather than to the social justice activists who are its ostensible constituency, the opposite of what a progressive organization would do when confronted with a conflict between such activists and the propaganda machine of the illegal occupation of Palestine.

If the name of the Creating Change conference is to have any meaning, it must be as the name of a conference at which activists either create change or are empowered to do so by programming, networking and interactions there; if however the purpose of the conference is to fill the coffers of one of our largest LGBT organizations while at the same time excluding any discussion of such gross injustices as Israel’s illegal occupation much less real action to challenge it, then perhaps the conference should be renamed ‘Stifling Creating Change in Order to Satisfy Wealthy Zionist Donors.’ Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” And so one would hope the arc of Palestinian history would. But the arc of the history of the Creating Change conference seems to be from that of a grassroots gathering of activists to an enormous and highly profitable mainstream LGBT conference to a conference that excludes discussion of one of the great issues of our time, and one with enormous implications not only for LGBT/queer Palestinians but for the LGBT community in the United States and worldwide.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012.

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Hillary Clinton’s anti-feminist & anti-progressive agenda will never have my support
by Pauline Park

Hillary Clinton’s supporters depict her as a courageous feminist trying to advance a daringly progressive agenda in the face of Republican opposition; the truth is actually quite the opposite: Hillary is an anti-feminist who has always pursued an anti-progressive agenda from her earliest days as a ‘Goldwater girl.’

To begin at the beginning: Hillary grew up in the lily-white upper middle class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. It is important to point out that Barry Goldwater was not only the Republican nominee in 1964, he was the most right-wing Republican nominee of his day, part of a conservative movement that used his candidacy to take over the party and transform it into the GOP we know today, so far right-wing that Northeastern liberals like Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javitz and Claiborne Pell could not win nomination to run for any statewide office today, even in New York or New England. In 1964, while Bernie Sanders was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Hillary Clinton was supporting the Republican presidential nominee who was ridiculing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and calling him a ‘communist.’

Of course, the question is not where Hillary Clinton started out but where she has ended up and where she has been along the way, and her role as First Lady of Arkansas and the United States needs to be taken into account in a comprehensive assessment of her record. Hillary supporters lash out at those who would examine that record as ‘sexist,’ but as First Lady, Hillary was not a purely decorative element in her husband’s administration in Little Rock and later in Washington, D.C.; she was a very public figure and cast herself as an active policy-maker in both administrations; and in fact, the whole rationale for her campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2000 was that she had been a key decision-maker in the Clinton administration; and so what Hillary did in Little Rock and later in Washington in her husband’s administrations are very relevant.

I would just point to her crucial role in advocating for the 1994 crime law that helped accelerate the mass incarceration of people of color — especially African American and Latino men — as well as her public advocacy for the welfare reform legislation that further impoverished millions of poor women and children, disproportionately people of color. As Michelle Alexander has pointed out, the Clinton administration

capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did… Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history… He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement. Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary… not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures… In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals… Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself. (Michelle Alexander, “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” the Nation, 2.10.16)

The support that many people of color have offered Hillary Clinton in the course of the 2016 presidential campaign is all the more curious when one considers her use of language that some would call racist, as Marc Charles wrote in April 2016,

Hillary Clinton is using terms like ‘off the reservation,’ and reassuring people that ‘We don’t need to make America great again. America never stopped being great.’ This type of behavior demonstrates she does not understand the systemic racism and blatant oppression that has been endured by people of color throughout the entire history of this nation,” writes Mark Charles, adding, “Unfortunately, the dialogue that is taking place this election cycle is not about broad-based equality or ending racism. The conversation we are having today is about the type of racism we want to settle for” (Mark Charles, “A Native Response to Hillary Clinton’s ‘Off the Reservation’ Comment,” Native News On-Line, 4.30.16)

Is it sheer ignorance of the history of race and ethnicity in the United States? Or was the ‘off the reservation’ comment a racist ‘dog whistle’ as when Hillary asserted that she had a broader base of support than then-Sen. Barack Obama, citing an Associated Press article

that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again,  and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here (Richard Prince, “Hard Working… White Americans,” Maynard Institute, 5.8.08)

The pattern that many people of color saw was that of a privileged white woman casting herself as the champion of white Democrats unwilling to vote for an African American. “Was Hillary channeling George Wallace? Hillary’s reckless exploitation of racial division could split the Democratic Party over race  — a tragic legacy for the  Clintons,” wrote Joe Conason (ibid).  Hillary also aggressively pushed the Republican ‘welfare reform’ bill that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 that plunged hundreds of thousands of families  — disproportionately African American women and children — from poverty into even deeper poverty as part of a cynical attempt to out maneuver Bob Dole and the Republicans in the lead up to the 1996 election, which Clinton won handily and most likely would have easily won even if Clinton had not signed the crime bill and welfare reform bill into law.

If Hillary supporters rail at those who criticize her policy-making role in the Clinton White House, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that she would never have been considered a credible candidate for the Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan had she not claimed to have been a key policy-maker in the Clinton administration. Neither Clinton had ever lived in New York before, and so Hillary was rightly called a ‘carpet bagger’ for moving to Chappaqua just to be eligible to run for the Senate in 2000 with the blessing of Pat Moynihan. Whether former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani could have beaten Hillary we will never know, because he withdrew from the race after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, leaving the feckless U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio from Long Island to go down to defeat in November of that year.

My own interaction with Hillary came in the form of a request that I and a group of transgender activists made to meet with her before the election and then again after she won in November; her staff refused both requests, even declining to offer a low-level staff member to meet with us to discuss transgender discrimination issues; the second time around, of course, we were not just voters, but constituents of the newly elected Senator, whose refusal to meet with us or even explain her refusal to meet with us alienated not just me but the mostly African American transwomen who were part of our group as well. The fact that Housing Works, one of New York City’s largest social service providers to people living with HIV and AIDS, was part of the group requesting the meeting, seemed to have no impact whatsoever on the willingness of Hillary’s staff to meet with us.

Just as important in creating a lasting impression with me were Hillary Clinton’s responses to questions posed by Lesbian & Gay New York (‘LGNY,’ since renamed ‘Gay City News’) to her in an interview in 2000. Paul Schindler, the newspaper’s editor, asked me if I could suggest a transgender-specific question to pose to the Senate candidate; I suggested that he ask her if she would commit to supporting full transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the federal hate crimes bill. Taking my suggestion, in an interview on Oct. 4, Schindler (Paul Schindler, “Hillary Clinton Talks to Paul Schindler, 2000“) asked the Senate candidate,

“Do you think the goal of broadening the language for ENDA or broadening language in the hate crimes protection act to include gender expression and gender identity, do you think that’s a practical goal at this point politically?”

To which Hillary responds, “I think we need to try to move ENDA forward. I think ENDA is such an important legislative goal. I think it’s within reach and I think it’s a vehicle for widening the circle of rights and freedoms and responsibilities and I would really focus on trying to get that passed.”

“In other words, no effort at this point at amending?”

“I don’t see at this point that that would be in the best interest of moving the agenda forward.”

After another go around on this question, Schindler then asks, “One of the things that the transgender community points to is that, for example, on hate crimes in New York State, the entire coalition for hate crimes held out to have gays and lesbians included in it. We would have had a hate crimes bill in New York long ago if it had only been for religion and so forth. But everyone hung tough on that. But what the transgender community is saying now is, ‘Wouldn’t that approach be appropriate for them as well?’ in other words, don’t do it piecemeal, include everybody and then move forward.”

“Well no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that. I think there’s an understood recognition of the political reality. So for me it’s a priority to try to get ENDA passed, which is what I will work on.”

Transgendered people suffer pervasive discrimination, transgendered people of color in particular, and it was shocking to me to see Hillary dismiss transgender discrimination altogether in her comments in her October 2000 interview with LGNY; what was especially appalling was her response to the question about supporting inclusion of gender identity and expression in ENDA and the hate crimes bill: “no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that.” Well, it should not be up to gay and lesbian gatekeepers to decide whether transgendered people should be protected from discrimination and all the more so given that the gay and lesbian ‘leaders’ Hillary talks to are wealthy and powerful members of the gay political establishment, many of them millionaires and almost all of them white and at least upper middle class.

Even when she caught onto the increasingly common and more inclusive usage of ‘LGBT’ community, as senator and later as secretary of state, Hillary almost never addressed transgender discrimination as a stand-alone issue apart from the broader LGBT umbrella.

It is worth pointing out that Hillary not only supported the discriminatory bill that became known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993 but also the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that Clinton signed into law in 1996 — the only legislation specifically institutionalizing discrimination against LGBT people ever signed into law by any president in US history. And Hillary not only supported that legislation but aggressively defended it for years with language that far exceeded what was necessary to justify DOMA purely in terms of political expediency.

Hillary only came out for same-sex marriage when she began her second campaign for president and after Obama himself had come out in favor of marriage equality, and he only did some when it became clear that he would have a hard time raising money in the LGBT community for his 2012 election campaign if his administration was still supporting DOMA.

And as late as May 2016, when Hillary was almost assured of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she refused to respond to a questionnaire from a transgender advocacy organization; as Kevin Gosztola reported on May 24,

Trans United Fund received a call from a Clinton campaign representative a full two weeks after the campaign had committed to complete the survey, explaining that the survey was ‘too long’ and the campaign did not have the appropriate resources to complete it in a timely manner. The Sanders campaign completed the questionnaire completely and on time (Kevin Gosztola, “Transgender Group ‘Perplexed’ At Why Clinton Won’t Fill OutQuestionnaire,” Shadowproof, 5.24.16).

As Gosztola put it so trenchantly, “For a ‘frontrunner’ Democratic presidential candidate, who has cast herself as the inevitable nominee, it’s hard to comprehend how the campaign could not have found time to answer some questions important to trans people.” Hillary has been at best a follower, not a leader, when it comes to LGBT rights, and for most of her career, an opponent of LGBT rights.

Of course, there are those who not only insist upon but demand that women support Hillary simply because she’s a woman, though it is difficult to see why simply being female alone should compel anyone’s support; after all, Carly Fiorina ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 but got no support from Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright, Joan Walsh or the legion of pseudo-feminists moving in lockstep behind the Clinton machine. The truth is that most women who come to power not only in the United States but in other countries around the world do so through a masculinist discourse of power, Margaret Thatcher being a case in point; Ronald Reagan famously called her ‘the best man in England.’ I lived in London for two years during a crucial period in Thatcher’s career; I was there when she declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands (‘las Malvinas’), with profound consequences for the United Kingdom as well as for Argentina, and the prime minister was compared by the British and world media to Boadicea (Boudicca) and other warrior queens of yore. But Thatcher’s direction of the war was far from heroic; in fact, her order to sink the General Belgrano was arguably a war crime. Thatcher also branded Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist,’ despite his heroic efforts to challenge South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime.

One could mention many other women who have risen to the highest office in the land, including the first female prime ministers of Israel and India; Golda Meir denied the very existence of Palestinians, including Palestinian women, and Indira Gandhi forcibly sterilized poor men and women, hardly orthodox feminism.  There is an ironic parallel between Hilary and Park Geun-hye, who served as acting First Lady of the Republic from 1974-79 when her father was president, the dictator Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated in 1979, later going on to become the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea in 2012. A contemporary of Hillary’s, Park alienated large sections of the Korean public with her war on labor and her authoritarian style of rule, proving through her behavior and her policies that the first woman elected president of a democracy can be both anti-feminist and profoundly anti-progressive (Hankyoreh editorial, “Democracy sorely missing from Park’s inaugural address,” 2.26.13).

Closer to home, Carly Fiorina withdrew from the Republican contest after failing to et even one percent in the New Hampshire primary in January; but before her withdrawal, neither Gloria Steinem nor any other Hillary supporter suggested that women should support Fiorina’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination despite the fact that she is just as much a woman as Hillary Clinton; Steinem’s lack of support for Fiorina speaks as much to the inconsistency and contradiction of the ‘feminists’ supporting Hillary as to the rigor of their feminism. In fact, Gloria Steinem was rebuked by feminists across the country for declaring (with no evidence whatsoever) that the only reason young women were supporting Bernie Sanders in droves was because they were looking for dates with young ‘Bernie Bros’; if Donald Trump had said that, he would have been rightly excoriating for such a deeply misogynist assertion.

The first woman elected governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is anything but a feminist, and she became something of a national laughingstock for her bizarre pronouncements as John McCain’s Republican running mate in 2008. But Palin is a woman, and at no time has Steinem ever proposed support for Palin’s election either as vice-president or as president; it is difficult to see how either Carly Fiorina’s election as the first woman president or Sarah Palin’s would be any less ‘historic’ than Hillary Clinton’s. Nonetheless, Madeleine Albright went so far as to say that “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women,” condemning women who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries to everlasting hellfire and damnation, a curious theology to affirm; but Albright did not support Sarah Palin for vice-president in 2008 or Carly Fiorina for president in 2016, so it is difficult to see how Albright could escape eternal torment in the flames of hell any more than any other woman who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s record on women’s issues is appalling by any standard. Hillary she supported Barack Obama’s mass deportations of Latino immigrants, deportations so enormous that La Raza dubbed him the ‘Deporter in Chief.’ Obama deported more than twice as many undocumented immigrants as George W. Bush and by some counts, more than all previous presidents combined. Hillary did not begin to distance herself from these deportations until she began her campaign for president (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16). In a March 10 Democratic presidential debate, Hillary declared that as president she would not deport children,  prompting Betsey Woodruff to write,

Clinton struggled mightly to communicate last night that deporting children is bad… Just two months ago… Clinton defended the practice of deporting children… and less than two years before that, Clinton argued passionately that undocumented children in the United States be subject to deportation… she told Christian Amanpour that children fleeing from violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala shouldn’t be able to stay in the U.S. (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16).

Speaking of Honduras, as secretary of state, Hillary supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The coup that Hillary supported brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and has made Honduras one of the most violent countries on earth, and as secretary of state, Hillary continued to support the junta despite its persecution of women, feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents of all kinds, and she persuaded Barack Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that the resumption of such aid was a violation of US law as well as a breach of international law.  In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres , Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

But the coup in Honduras was not the only one that Hillary supported as secretary of state; she also supported the coup d’état in Egypt, which has proved to be a disaster for the country (Yahia Hamed, “Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), plunging it into a miasma of corruption, brutal repression and despair. As in Honduras, Obama and Hillary resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup.

It was in neighboring Libya that Hillary had her biggest impact as secretary of state, but it is not a legacy that she is eager to talk about. While Republican members of Congress have focused obsessively on Benghazi, which was so obviously a disaster for which Hillary was fully responsible as secretary of state, they have missed the forest for the trees. It was the Libya intervention as a whole that was the real catastrophe, and one which Hillary is primarily responsible, pushing Obama into the ill-fated war against his better judgment. The Gaddafi regime’s attacks on innocent civilians in eastern Libya certainly provided a rationale for a no-fly zone of some sort, but Hillary’s US/NATO intervention repeated the folly of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which she aggressively supported), decapitating the regime and leaving a power vacuum which al-Qaeda and ISIS (‘Da’esh’) have filled.

Other than turning Libya into a failed state, it was in Bahrain that Hillary had perhaps the biggest impact. As secretary of state, Hillary approved the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising against the despotic Bahraini regime in 2011 in which the dictatorship even arrest, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to the wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising.

Next door, Hillary encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the full support of the Obama administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and houses and apartment buildings in Sana and elsewhere in Yemen (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16). An International Business Times investigation  revealed an astonishing conflict of interest on Hillary’s part:

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IB Times analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure… represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term. The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143% increase in complete sales to those nations over the same time  frame during the Bush administration (David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” International Business Times, 5.26.15).

Not insignificant is the fact that these regimes are all undemocratic to say the least, including Saudi Arabia, one of the most despotic regimes on earth, whose record on human rights is appalling; Saudi women cannot vote in national elections and are not even allowed to drive; and LGBT people have been executed by the regime for same-sex relations and crossdressing, according to human rights organizations. One need also note that Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights not only did not improve during Hillary’s tenure of secretary of state but actually worsened.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters claim she is the most qualified person ever to run for president, but her support for Israeli apartheid and genocide disqualifies her entirely in my view. In a letter to fellow Methodists considering support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, Hillary denounced BDS as ‘anti-Semitic’ and declared, “We must never tire in defending Israel’s legitimacy” (Maggie Habermas, “Hillary Clinton Criticizes Group Advocating Boycott Against Israel,” New York Times, 5.10.16). Michelle Goldberg aptly called Hillary’s speech at the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention on March 21 ‘a symphony of craven, delusional pandering’ (Michelle Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC Speech Was a Symphony of Craven, Delusional Pandering,” Slate, 3.21.16), in which Hillary declared, “We have to be united in fighting back against BDS,” equating BDS with ‘anti-Semitism’ (Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Read Hillary Clinton’s Speech to AIPAC,” Time, 3.21.16), this, despite the fact that the governments of Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands have officially recognized BDS as legitimate and constitutionally protected speech (Kevin Squires, “Ireland latest EU state to defend BDS,” Electronic Intifada, 5.28.16).

While Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spoke at AIPAC and mouthed the usual Zionist machine talking points as Hillary, she alone among all the presidential candidates speaking at AIPAC specifically named the BDS movement as the enemy, and a candidate who specifically and explicitly slanders the movement for justice and human rights for all in Israel/Palestine with false allegations of anti-Semitism has fully disqualified herself as a candidate for any public office, let alone that of president of the United States (Steven Klein, “America Must Tell Israel: Annexing the West Bank Is Our Red Line” (Ha’aretz, 5.8.16). While Bernie Sanders’ pronouncements on Israel fall far short of what they could and should be, it is worth noting that he is the first major party presidential candidate to publicly criticize Israel at all in the course of a presidential contest (Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman, “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity,” New York Times, 5.25.16); contrast that with Hillary’s shilling for apartheid Israel, her open support for the Israeli war of genocide in Gaa in 2014 and her declaration that destroying the BDS movement as a priority of her presidency, and there is simply no rational argument for any progressive to support Hillary over Bernie.

Even beyond Hillary Clinton’s colossal failure as secretary of state and her outrageous support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is the issue of her character, and her willingness to subvert the law and lie repeatedly about her many violations of it should be troubling to anyone who thinks that the character as well as the judgment of a president matters. Hillary is the only secretary of state ever to have set up a private server secretly in the basement of her house in order to evade clear State Department rules and then attempt to mislead the public about the subterfuge. On May 25, the Inspector General of the State Department issued a report, declaring,

At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act (Julian Hattem, “Watchdog: Clinton, top aides did not comply on records policy,” The Hill, 5.25.16)

Destroying government documents is a serious crime and repeatedly lying about such behavior is an indictment of Hillary Clinton’s character, even if it were the case that every single one of the 32,000 e-mail messages that she destroyed was about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding planning, which is of course a completely implausible assertion.

(A.J. Vicens, “State Department Inspector General Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Recordkeeping Rules,” Mother Jones, 5.25.16).

As Amy Chozick put it so trenchantly in her May 25 news report for the New York Times, “Voters just don’t trust her,” noting that

After months of Mrs. Clinton’s saying she used a private email for convenience, and that she was willing to cooperate fully with investigations into her handling of official business at the State Department, the report, delivered to Congress on Wednesday, undermined both claims (Amy Chozick, “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her,” New York Times, 5.25.16)

Far from being a partisan Republican ‘witch hunt,’ the report was issued by the inspector general of the State Department, an Obama appointee and one-time subordinate to Hillary Clinton, reporting to Congress that Hillary refused to meet with him and the State Department staff conducting the review; her campaign’s statement issued after the report was widely reported on in the media was that she was waiting to be interviewed by the FBI; but that is of course absurd on its face because the FBI has never precluded her from meeting with the inspector general’s office and one would imagine would strongly support the former secretary cooperating with it.

Hillary is now viewed rightly by an overwhelming majority of Americans as dishonest and untrustworthy (Jeff Jacoby, “In Clinton, Americans Don’t Trust,” Boston Globe, 5.31.16). Part of that perception may be because of her corruption. Since leaving office as president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton have cashed in on public office in a way absolutely unprecedented in American history. Hillary alone has received more than $22 million in speaking fees, while Bill Clinton “has earned more than $132 million in speaking fees, in addition to book royalties and other income. The Clintons’ most recent financial-disclosure forms show that he earned nearly $2.7 million in fees for speaking to audiences that included financial-industry firms, after she announced her candidacy,” writes Amy Davidson (Amy Davidson, “Bill Problems: As Donald Trump attacks both Clintons, it’s like 1992 all over again,” New Yorker, 6.6.16). Can you imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln raking in $132 million in speaking fees after leaving office? Or Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson?

One of the most disturbing facts about Hillary is that she is bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. As Charlie Cray wrote in a report for Greenpeace,

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign (‘Hillary for America’) has received $147,840 in direct contributions from 65 fossil fuel lobbyists and $2,502,740 in bundled contributions by fossil fuel lobbyists. Combined, the total direct and bundled contributions from 65 oil/coal/gas lobbyists to Clinton’s campaign is at least $2,650,580 (Charlie Cray, Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ Contributions to the Clinton Campaign, Greenpeace.org, 4.22.16).

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Hillary’s dishonesty and corruption as well as anti-progressive politics and sheer incompetence, her supporters insist that we all have an obligation to support her for the Democratic nomination and if she wins that, vote for her in the general election. And this is one of the most curious aspects of the Hillary Clinton campaign: is the binary opposition being constructed by her supporters as well as those of Donald Trump, both of whom use the other as a bogeyman with which to frighten wavering voters. But the fact is, we do not have a national election for president but rather fifty state elections (plus the District of Columbia, etc.) in which voters elect representatives to the electoral college. Of all the states, New York is one of the ‘bluest,’ reliably Democratic in every election since the Reagan landslide of 1984; so the argument in favor of Hillary, already weak, looks even weaker when one looks at the bluest and reddest of the states. While it is true that Trump’s unusual if not to say bizarre candidacy may well scramble the red/blue picture that we have been used to for the last few decades, the fact is that no one thinks that 2016 will be a 49-state blow-out like 1984 or 1972. In such circumstances, the demand by Democratic partisans that progressives support an anti-progressive candidate such as Hillary Clinton becomes even less persuasive for those living and voting in the ‘safest’ Democratic and Republican states.

Polls show Hillary beating Trump by margins of 80%-20% or even greater, so the notion that my vote for Jill Stein on the Green Party line would throw the election to Trump is simply absurd. One could point out the illogic of that logic by arguing that a vote for Jill Stein is not only not a vote for Donald Trump but is in fact a vote against Donald Trump as well as Hillary Clinton. I intend to vote for Jill Stein in November not merely as a ‘protest’ vote but as an expression of my values, and the principles of progressive politics that are at the heart of my own activism and life’s work. A vote for Hillary Clinton would be nothing less than a betrayal of progressive principles and the social justice that I have been pursuing for over twenty years now.

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; she keynoted the Queer Korea Festival preceding the Seoul Pride Parade in 2015, the largest event in the history of the LGBT community in Korea. Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Obama & North Carolina’s HB2: the transgender bathroom panic
By Pauline Park

North Carolina’s enactment of House Bill 2 and the response from the administration of Barack Obama have made transgender rights and public restroom usage front-page news across the country. In the wake of HB2, Christian fundamentalists have tried to organize a boycott of Target after the national retailer made a public statement about its policy supporting transgendered people in using the gendered restroom consistent with their gender identity. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has gone so far as to say that the bathroom issue “is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public schools” (Caitlin Emma, “Obama transgender edict incites the right,” Politico, 5.13.16). “As a voter turnout tool for conservatives, this could be the new gay marriage,” writes Kevin Drum (Kevin Drum, “Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives” (Mother Jones, 5.13.16). And isn’t that the point? Following the US Supreme Court rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the only obvious ‘family values’ wedge issue to latch onto is transgender inclusion, given the increasing acceptance of non-transgendered lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in American society.

But the political context in which the new bathroom war is taking place is the twilight of the administration of Barack Obama, eager to create some sort of historic legacy. The real opportunity to do so came in Obama’s first term, when he had a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives to work with until he handed both houses of Congress to the Republicans in the mid-term elections in 2010. What LGBT activists cheering Obama’s recent executive actions either have forgotten or conveniently failed to mention is the fact that he refused even to lift a finger to push the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) through Congress, instead apparently taking the advice of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in focusing on repealing the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of discrimination signed into law by Bill Clinton, who also signed DOMA into law. Still better than ENDA, Obama could have pushed through an amendment to the 1974 Civil Rights Act or similar legislation that would have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, health care, education and credit. For whatever reason, Obama refused to consider any non-discrimination legislation once he signed the DADT repeal bill into law, which only ended discrimination based on sexual orientation, not gender identity or expression.

With Hillary Clinton his chosen heir apparent, Obama now has less than eight months left in office, and as the lamest of lame ducks and facing a hostile Congress controlled by Republicans, his options are limited to executive action, since no LGBT rights legislation would have any chance of passage this year. LGBT advocacy organizations are praising the president for what they characterize or at least would like to believe are bold and courageous actions (National Center for Transgender Equality, “Department of Education affirms critical protections for trans students,” 5.13.16), but the time for bold action was in 2009 and 2010 when LGBT rights legislation had a decent chance of passage in Congress (Sam Levin, “Obama orders public schools to allow transgender students access to restrooms,” Guardian, 5.12.16). Here are a few important points to keep in mind when thinking about this whole brouhaha:

o The new guidelines (Ann Whalen and David Esquith, “Examples of Policies and Emerging Practices for Supporting Transgender Students“) are introduced with a cover letter from Catherine E. Lhamon of the US Department of Education and Vanita Gupta of the US Department of Justice  (“Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students,” 5.13.16). They guidelines focuse on compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and reference similar guidelines adopted by states and localities, including those adopted by the State of New York Department of Education (NYSED) guidelines for implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act of 2011.

o While they may be helpful in advising schools on transgender inclusion, the guidelines are intended d have no binding legal force; the only way to enforce these guidelines would be by withholding or threatening to withhold federal funds to school districts, localities and/or states to refuse or fail to abide by them.

0 The letter is clearly an interpretation of the provisions of Title IX that can be overturned by any of Obama’s successors and does not have the force of statute law.

0 There is no significant federal case law on the interpretation of ‘sex’ in Title IX to include gender identity and expression in the expansive manner in which the March 13 letter speaks; the risk of being overturned in court is not insignificant, given that courts general hew closely to legislative intent and it would be difficult to argue that there was transgender-specific legislative intent in the drafting of Title IX.

o Women’s safety is an important issue but has nothing to do directly with gendered restroom usage; it’s probably the case that most sexual predators are conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual men; opponents of transgender rights are simply using the legitimate issue of women’s safety to undermine the safety of transgendered women & men.

o Opponents of transgender rights use the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms and changing rooms, but there is not a single case I know of of a conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual man crossdressing to gain entrance to women’s spaces. And a sexual predator can simply walk into a women’s restroom or changing room if he wants to.

o There are already laws in every state and locality in the United  States prohibiting assault and sexual assault; no transgender-inclusive statute, regulation, rule or guideline would do anything to undermine such laws.

o HB2 is based on restricting public restrooms to assigned birth sex and gender, but there is actually no way to determine conclusively what that might be in every case; the reference to birth certificates is particularly curious, because many states and localities now allow transgendered people to change the legal sex designation on their birth certificates. HB2 and similar laws are unenforceable, as they would require police and/or specially designated and authorized security guards posted at every public restroom door in the state, which would be completely unaffordable even if most states were not currently suffering significant budget deficits. Nor could policy or security guards actually demand production of a birth certificate, given Americans do not regularly carry their birth certificates with them wherever they go. Obviously, a genital check would be invasive and non-transgendered people would certainly object to being subjected to it.

o The reality is that transgendered people who ‘pass’ in the gender they identify with will rarely have problems with public restrooms while those who do not ‘pass’ will have problems even if they are post-operative and have changed the legal sex designation on their birth certificate and other government-issued identity documents.

o Public restrooms should not be an issue at all, since the only legal question of any significance here is what is referred to as ‘unavoidable nudity in sex-segregated facilities,’ which can involve public gyms, pools, showers and locker rooms but simply does not involve restrooms.

o Public restrooms are actually not regulated by statute law in most states and localities; North Carolina’s HB2, far from being ‘traditional,’ is in fact a radical break in this regard.

o The ‘bathroom panic’ here is entirely irrational because it is focused almost entirely on women’s restrooms, which have stalls but not urinals; ordinarily, there is no public nudity at all.

o Gyms, pools and other facilities with locker rooms and showers more often these days have private individual showers. Where there are open showers and changing areas, reasonable accommodation can be made; where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. Just as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires public facilities to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (including in wheelchairs), so all public restrooms, gyms, pools and other such facilities can provide reasonable accommodation for transgendered people, and such accommodation does not require them to be viewed as having a disability based on their gender identity.

o There are more and more single-user restrooms and ‘family’ restrooms in the US, especially in airports, which are leading the way in this regard.

I’ll finish by telling a story from my own experience. Several years ago, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see a film with a friend. After the film, he went to the men’s room and I went to the women’s room. I was standing in a line behind three other women, waiting for one of three stalls (women will understand that there is almost always a longer line in the ladies’ room) when a woman opened the door to the women’s room and pushed an old man in a wheelchair in, going directly to the wheelchair-accessible stall and closing the stall behind them. I do not know what the woman’s relationship to the man was; was she his wife, sister, daughter or professional caretaker? Both were white and the man was very aged and frail. I was shocked that one of the women in line in front of me clucked in disapproval to another woman in line; the lack of compassion for this frail old man was really appalling. Did this woman think it would be any less awkward for the old man and her female companion to use the men’s room, with the woman having to pass men at the urinals?

Pauline Park, Ph.D., is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002; she also participated in the working group convened by the New York City Commission on Human Rights that drafted guidelines for implementation of the statute.  Park was a member of the steering committee that led the campaign for enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) and negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in that legislation, the first transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the New York state legislation when it was signed into law in 2011.

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“Pinkwashing is an explicit strategy taken up in recent years by the government of Israel to portray Israel as a leader in gay rights and a gay tourism destination to improve its human rights image while deflecting attention away from the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Through a campaign called ‘Brand Israel,’ Israel has tried to change its public image, promoting itself as a ‘modern democracy’ – and projecting a ‘LGBT-friendly’ image is just one part of this,” wrote Sarah Schulman in 2011 (“A documentary guide to ‘Brand Israel’ and the art of pinkwashing “Mondoweiss.net, 11.30.11). Pinkwashers make a number of absurd assertions; these are among the the key claims:

1) Palestinian society is monolithically homophobic and transphobic. Pinkwashers never provide any evidence for this and in fact make false claims such as the assertion that homosexuality is illegal in the West Bank and prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority.

2) Israel is a gay paradise. Maybe for wealthy Jewish gay men in Tel Aviv, but Jewish lesbians, bisexuals, trans people and Mizrahi (Sephardi Jews of Arab origin) have very different experiences even in Tel Aviv; trans people in particular often face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Outside of Tel Aviv and Haifa, attitudes towards LGBT people are often far from fully accepting. Israel also does not recognize same-sex marriage.

3) Palestinians find refuge from persecution in Israel. Zionist pinkwashers promote the image of queer Palestinians fleeing the West Bank to find refuge in gay bars in Tel Aviv, but in fact, Israel does not recognize or accept non-Jewish asylum seekers for political asylum, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact, the Israeli authorities often blackmail queer Palestinians into becoming collaborators, which creates a very dangerous and impossible situation for them. If LGBT people outside of Palestine actually want to help queer Palestinians, they can best do so by supporting LGBT Palestinian organizations including al-Qaws, Aswat (the Palestinian lesbian and bisexual women’s and trans organization based in Haifa) and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS).

4) Comparing Israel’s record on LGBT rights to Palestinian society helps queer Palestinians. When everyone from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to A Wider Bridge harps on Israel’s supposedly sterling record on LGBT issues actually makes things worse for queer Palestinians by pitting LGBT rights against Palestinian rights. What actually helps Palestinians is LGBT support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is the best way queer people can show support for queer Palestinians, along with direct support for their organizations.

5) Israel’s record on LGBT rights justifies the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Many non-Muslim, non-Arab countries in the world have terrible records on LGBT rights, including Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Jamaica; no one suggests that they deserve to be subjected to foreign military occupation. Would anyone support or even propose a German invasion and occupation of Russia simply because Germany has a much better record on LGBT rights than Russia? No amount of progress of LGBT rights in Israel can possibly justify the illegal and increasingly brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the incremental genocide being pursued against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip all of which the United States subsidizes with more than $3 billion in US aid to the Israeli government a year. LGBT organizations based in Israel, Europe and especially the United States play a crucial role in advancing the discourse of pinkwashing, often directly coordinating with the Israeli government and sometimes funded directly by the Israeli government.

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ESPA goes out with a whimper not the bang of having passed GENDA
by Pauline Park

On Dec. 12, the Empire State Pride Agenda abruptly announced it would be shutting down the Pride Agenda — which so many people over the years have called ‘ESPA’ — and its Foundation, though its political action committee will apparently remain active.

The announcement was reported by media outlets from the New York Times (“Empire State Pride Agenda to Disband, Citing Fulfillment of Mission,” 12.12.15) to Gay City News to PlanetTransgender.com. This is big news for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, because ESPA is the only statewide LGBT advocacy organization in New York and widely viewed as its voice, especially by members of the state legislature. In its Dec. 12 press release, ESPA declared,

The Boards’ decision comes on the heels of securing the Pride Agenda’s top remaining policy priority — protecting transgender New Yorkers from discrimination in housing, employment, credit, education and public accommodations — in the form of new regulations announced in partnership with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo at the organization’s Fall Dinner on October 22…

Of course, an executive order and even a state Division of Human Rights regulation can be rescinded by any of Cuomo’s successors as governor, so it does not have the force of an enacted statute law, and many saw this as a George W. Bush ‘mission accomplished’ moment, in particular because the Pride Agenda is closing shop without having gotten the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) through the state Senate and signed into law.

But Norman C. Simon, chair of the Pride Agenda board and co-chair of the Foundation, responded to criticism of the decision and the announcement of it by telling Gay City News,

We did not and are not declaring mission accomplished on LGBT equality. What we are saying is that our top priorities have been completed, and that the remaining work that needs to be done we will transition to other organizations in the coming months in an orderly process (Paul Schindler, “ESPA Leadership Pushes Back on Charge They’ve Declared ‘Mission Accomplished’,” Gay City News, 12.13.15).

In his story for Gay City News, Paul Schindler wrote, “Matt Foreman focused his criticism both on the way the Pride Agenda reached its decision and on the message the announcement of that decision sent,” quoting the former executive director as saying,

There was zero consultation with folks who spent their lives building the Pride Agenda. If they are going to make a decision of that magnitude, there has to be a consultative function. They need to talk to the stakeholders, to the communities around the state… This is an abrogation of a fundamental obligation that an organization has to its constituency… And, it plays into the national narrative that the job is done.

But the same could be said of ESPA’s decision to endorse Cuomo’s executive order without any consultation even with the coalition attempting to advance GENDA in the state Senate. I have been involved with what originally was called the GENDA Coalition from the beginning, far longer than all of the current ESPA staff, and I represented the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in that coalition from its formation, and at no time was there even a conference call to discuss the executive order, which will have the effect of undermining any remaining efforts to push GENDA through the Senate. Why would the Republican majority in the Senate feel pressured to pass GENDA when ESPA and the governor are both touting the executive order/regulation as providing sweeping protections for transgendered people in the state? And the lack of even the most rudimentary consultation on the decision to endorse the governor’s executive action is why it feels to me like a backroom deal cut between ESPA and the governor rather than a genuinely community-driven policy victory. Hence the decision to settle for an executive order rather than to demand that the governor use his power and influence to push GENDA through the Senate — in which Republicans maintain a majority in large part due to Cuomo’s efforts to keep the Senate in Republican hands — is not only substantively questionable but really represents a betrayal of the transgender community and the process through which the GENDA coalition was working to achieve a legislative remedy to the lack of protection from discrimination based on gender identity or expression in state law.

The most negative reactions to the news of the shutdown of the two most important parts of the Empire State Pride Agenda empire have focused on the organization’s abandonment of its transgender legislative agenda, Kelli Anne Busey writing,

Realizing the trans community’s worst fears, the New York Empire State Pride Agenda announced the shocking news Saturday that they are ceasing operations after 25 years of operations…  [executive director Nathan] Schaefer just said the job isn’t finished without saying transgender and every fucking person in the room knows that’s what he’s eluding to. (it’s their little secret) They’ll just walk. So gay New Yorkers will spend money on making sure the laws protecting them aren’t eroded but will throw the T under the bus. Nice. (Kelli Anne Busey, Empire State Pride Agenda Disbands, Screwing NY Transgender People,” Planet Transgender, 12.13.15)

On Twitter, a number of people ‘tweeted’ critical comments:

This is what superficial justice looks like: “Empire State Pride Agenda to Disband, Citing Fulfillment Mission” (Jen Jack Gieseking @jgieseking, 12.13.15)

“We got marriage equality our work is done.” “What about trans equality, we aren’t done?” “Well we are!” (Mia Marie Macy @Miamariemacy, 12.13.15)

The closure of NYC’s @prideagenda is a sad indictment of legal activism. Marriage equality does not heal all wounds. (Senthorun Raj @senthorun, 12.13.15)

I have worked with every executive director and deputy director of the Pride Agenda from 1998 onwards as well as every transgender community organizer and every coordinator of the New York State LGBT Health & Human Services Network, which Tim Sweeney founded when he was deputy director of the Pride Agenda and in which I represented Queens Pride House (the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens), so I actually know ESPA’s history better than the current members of the board and staff. And . So my perspective is the long view, informed by my experience leading the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002, in partnership with Tim Sweeney and Matt Foreman and other ESPA staff; it is also informed by my participation in the steering committee of the coalition that led the campaign for the New York State Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), enacted in 2011.

And so what I would like to do is offer an assessment of the Pride Agenda’s record from 1998 to 2015 as informed by 17 years of working with the organization. That relationship goes back to the founding of NYAGRA in 1998 and our very first meeting with another organization; several co-founding members went to the Pride Agenda’s old office on Hudson Street. In the cramped office in the West Village, we met with Tim Sweeney, then deputy director, to seek ESPA’s support for inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) then pending in the Republican-controlled state Senate after having already passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly; we also sought Pride Agenda support for transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill, which had also passed the Assembly and was also stalled in the Senate. Tim Sweeney told us that NYAGRA should join the state hate crimes bill coalition if we wanted to have gender identity and expression added to the hate crimes bill; he also told us that ESPA was not prepared to add gender identity and expression to SONDA but that the Pride Agenda would be willing to work with us on a local transgender rights bill. As a result of that collaboration, we launched the campaign for the bill that would eventually pass the City Council in April 2002 and be signed into law later that month.

It is important to recognize that the Empire State Pride Agenda was a self-defined ‘lesbian and gay’ organization when we met with ESPA staff in November 1998; transgender simply was not a part of the organization’s mission and there was no indication that they had even considered including transgendered people in their work. NYAGRA was the first transgender advocacy organization in the city or the state, and its formation and our pressing ESPA on transgender inclusion in pending state legislation is what prompted the Pride Agenda to move toward transgender inclusion in its work.

Any assessment of the Empire State Pride Agenda has to focus primarily on legislation, because that is where the organization has made its mark, along with the founding of the Network and the funding that it was able to garner for the over 60 LGBT-specific social service providers in the state. The major legislation that ESPA played a role in getting enacted since 2000 have included the state hate crimes law (2000), SONDA (2002), DASA (2011), and marriage equality. ESPA also helped with the campaign for the New York City Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA), enacted by the City Council in 2004 over Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s veto, though the organization didn’t play the leading role with that legislative campaign as it did with the aforementioned state bills.

The first and best-known charge of transgender exclusion leveled against ESPA is also the most misunderstood; it is often thought that the Pride Agenda stripped gender identity and expression from SONDA so that it could be pushed through the Senate in December 2002; but in fact, transgender-specific terms were never in SONDA; the more mundane truth is that ESPA simply refused to bow to pressure from various parties to add gender and expression to the bill when it became viable in June 2001 when Gov. George Pataki first expressed openness to supporting it. As executive director of the Pride Agenda, Matt Foreman cut the deal that secured passage of SONDA: in exchange for ESPA’s endorsement of Pataki for a third term as governor, Senate majority leader Joe Bruno allowed a floor vote on SONDA in December, with the bill passing with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans before being signed into law by Pataki.

GENDA was introduce the next year and has since passed the Assembly several times but never the Senate, where it was even defeated in a vote in committee in 2011. The bill that did finally pass the Senate in that year was the Dignity for All Students Act, the first and so far only explicitly transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the state legislature and signed into law. But the history of DASA does not reflect unqualified support for transgender inclusion on ESPA’s part. When Moonhawk River Stone was co-chair of NYAGRA with me, we were twice approached by Alan Van Capelle, then executive director of the Pride Agenda, about a possible compromise that could satisfy the Republican Senate leadership sufficiently to allow the bill to come up for a vote in the Senate. The first was an overture from the Senate leadership that entailed stripping gender identity and expression from the bill altogether; the second a proposal by Kevin Jennings, then executive director of the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to water down the language of the Dignity bill to remove the definition of gender, which included identity and expression, and instead put ‘identity and expression of’ in front of the list of characteristics in the bill; the dubious language had never been tested in any court or even enacted by any state language. Alan Van Capelle convened a small group of transgender activists, hoping I am quite certain that we would all go along with the dubious proposal; but Hawk Stone and I stood firm and refused to put NYAGRA’s imprimatur on it. After these two overtures were deflected, the coalition continued to work on the bill, even after the lead sponsor in the Senate, openly gay Sen. Thomas K. Duane, completely lost interest in his own bill; Dignity did eventually pass the Senate in June 2010, ironically enough as a kind of consolation prize to the LGBT community for the Senate’s rejection of the marriage equality bill that would eventually pass a year later, in June 2011.

As for the marriage equality legislation itself, on the one hand, it is certainly true that it ultimately redounded to the benefit of transgendered New Yorkers as well as non-transgendered gay and lesbian New Yorkers; but many felt that those who would be the most immediate beneficiaries of same-sex marriage recognition in New York would be the relatively more privileged members of the LGBT community, including wealthy gay white Manhattan professionals who — just as Andrew Cuomo no doubt calculated they would — opened up their checkbooks to make donations not only to ESPA but also to Cuomo for his 2014 re-election campaign. The most deleterious effect of the drive for marriage legislation by ESPA and Cuomo as well as marriage organizations such as Freedom to Marry and Marriage Equality-New York was that marriage came to dominate discussions of LGBT issues in the state legislature and coverage of the LGBT community in the media for most of the decade that preceded passage of the marriage equality bill, to the detriment of discussion of virtually anything else. I can remember one media interview in which I attempted to discuss GENDA and DASA with a reporter who seemed to insist that marriage was the most important issue facing the LGBT community and misquoted me to that effect in her write-up, despite my having said the opposite. Because of the enormous media attention on marriage, even Tom Duane, the lead sponsor of both GENDA and DASA, lost interest in those bills and let them languish. Nor did ESPA do anything effective to pressure the Democrats when they were briefly in control of the Senate from January through mid-June 2011 to bring GENDA to the floor for a vote, when it would almost certainly have passed.

The Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation honored Christine Quinn and Louis Bradbury at its annual fall dinner in October 2012, which was a disgraceful political act intended to ingratiate the organization with the Council Speaker when she was preparing to run for mayor; the press release announcing the honorees declared, as Council Speaker, “she was at the helm of some of our community’s most historic victories, including ensuring dignity and protections against bullying for all students, and New York’s momentous marriage victory in 2011.”  Chris Quinn had little if anything to do with the marriage bill passing — the Speaker of the New York City Council has no authority in the state Senate — and she did nothing but sign her name to the New York City Dignity in All Schools (NYC DASA) bill as a co-sponsor; I was on the NYC DASA Coalition steering committee and Chris Quinn didn’t lift a finger to help us get the bill passed, which actually passed during Gifford Miller’s speakership, not Quinn’s; in fact, after NYC DASA was enacted, she conspired with Mayor Bloomberg to block its implementation by the NYC Department of Education (NYC DoE); so to give her credit for NYC DASA’s enactment is doubly false. The same ESPA release asserted of Bradbury, “As Chair of the Board of the Empire State Pride Agenda, which under his leadership helped to secure passage of The Dignity for All Students Act.” I was on the steering committee of the New York State DASA Coalition and Louis Bradbury had zero involvement with that effort; the bill finally passed the New York State Senate when he was chair of the ESPA board, but enactment had nothing to do with him, and it was clear to me that he was just using his position as chair for yet further self-aggrandizement after he fired Ross Levi — ESPA’s best executive director, in my view — back in March 2012 in a sordid power struggle initiated by Bradbury that significantly undermined the organization’s credibility. Truth does not come from falsity and honoring the dishonorable only dishonors the LGBT community that the Pride Agenda claimed to represent; honoring Chris Quinn and Louis Bradbury by making false claims about their achievements was a disgraceful act.

The manner of one’s passing says a great deal about an individual and I think the same is true of an organization. Organizations die just like individuals, and the rather abrupt, almost hasty manner of ESPA’s passing is telling. Just as the Pride Agenda consulted with no one — not even the coalition working to advance GENDA — when it cut a deal with Gov. Cuomo to endorse his executive order on transgender discrimination and give him a platform at its annual fall dinner in October 2015, so the boards of the Pride Agenda and its Foundation consulted with no one, not even former board and staff members, on the decision to close their doors. Norman Simon’s talk about an ‘orderly process’ of winding down and collaboration with other organizations to try to parcel out its current work seems to mask something quite disorderly. Because of the secretive nature of ESPA deliberations, it would likely be impossible to get confirmation of my suspicions, but I suspect that the board voted to shut down operations for the very mundane reason that ESPA and even its Foundation were no longer financially viable operations. As Gay City News reported,

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and served as executive director of Queens Pride House from 2012-15; she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the steering committee of the coalition that led the campaign for the New York State Dignity for All Students Act that was enacted in 2011.

The post ESPA goes out with a whimper without having passed GENDA appeared first on Pauline Park.

Queer Korea Festival speech & Seoul Pride Parade 2015 (6.28.15)
(퀴어문화축제 & 퍼레이드)

I’m Pauline Park and I’m honored to have been invited to speak to you today. I would like to thank the march organizers for the invitation and especially Kahye and Candy from the Queer Korea Festival and I would like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to address you as the LGBT community in Korea marks an important milestone — not merely the celebration of LGBT pride but also the victory over those reactionary forces that tried to prevent this event from taking place at all.

But movements are like that: one step backward, two steps forward. I speak from personal experience, having been involved with LGBT activism for 21 years now. If I had had a child the year I first became involved with LGBT activism, he/she would be old enough to legally drink in New York state. And speaking of which, sadly, our campaign for a transgender rights law in New York state is still stalled in the New York State Senate 13 years after it was first introduced.

But the good news is that we have made tremendous progress in the United States since I first became involved with activism back in 1994, including enactment of the transgender rights law by the New York City Council in 2002 after a successful campaign that I led through the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

Our most spectacular victory came earlier this week, when the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, guaranteeing same-sex marriage rights in all 50 states. It is my sincerest hope that the next time I return to Korea that all of my Korean brothers and sisters will enjoy the same right to marriage.

But of course, both here as well as in the US, there are so many other items on the community’s agenda that deserve just as much attention as marriage. Youth and elders, police and criminal justice system reform, bullying and bias-based harassment in school, health care access, immigration, etc., etc. There is so much more work to be done, but we’re making progress in the US just as here in Korea. And it thrills me to see the LGBT community come of age in the country of my birth. And what a truly great honor it is to address you on the occasion of my first return to Korea since I left here at the age of seven months.

Even if I had had an memories from back then, I would not be able to recognize the city of my birth after half a century of dramatic change. When I left here, it wasn’t long after the popular uprising that overthrew Rhee Syngman and it’s even possible that my birth father participated in that revolution. So perhaps I was born to make revolution.

Less than a month after I left Korea, Park Chung-hee came to power in a coup d’etat. I ronic that I return for the first time in 54 years only to find his daughter living in the Blue House. So maybe there’s another agenda item for change to consider. We need fewer princesses and more queens in power. We also need someone more willing to support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and less willing to be complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. And the LGBT movement — which is becoming more global by the day — needs to embrace a global agenda of social justice for all rather than confining itself to a limited agenda of legal rights for some.

And Koreans need to embrace their LGBT brothers and sisters to make Korea truly a national family and home for all. So my message to the people beating drums out there to protest this event is that they should be beating drums for freedom and not for oppression for acceptance and not prejudice. They worship a God I don’t recognize — a judgmental, homophobic and transgenderphobic God who is the opposite of the Gold of love I know. Their hate may be strong, but our love is stronger, and love will ultimately vanquish hate. I t is my hope that the next time I come to this event, the ajima in hanboks waving their Bibles at us and beating their drums will be joining us to celebrate LGBT pride. And it is my hope that on my next visit to Korea, the  Seould city government and the National Assembly will have enacted LGBT rights legislation protecting everyone from discrimination. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you. Kamsamnida.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

You can watch a video of this speech on YouTube as well as Cory May’s video of the speech and the festival and pride parade.

Korean translation by Joanne Lee:

콜린 박입니다.

이자리에 서게 되어 영광입니다 기획단 여러분께 감사인사를 드리며 특히 캔디와 가혜님께 감사드립니다

제가 여기서 발언하게되어서 기쁘고 이 축제는 한국의 LGBT 여러분에게 중요한 이정표입니다

LGBT 자부심 뿐만 아니라 반대하는 사람들에 대한 승리라고 봅니다

하지만 운동은 그렇습니다 한걸음 뒤로 가면 두발자국 앞으로 가는 것입니다

제 경험을 토대로 말씀드리면 LGBT운동에 21년간 몸담고 있습니다

제가 처음 LGBT 단체에 몸 담았을 때 아이가 있었다면 그 아이는 뉴욕주에서  합법적으로 술을 마실 수 있는 나이가 되었을 것입니다

하지만 슬프게도 뉴욕주의 트렌스젠더 인권법은 여전히 13년 전 트렌스젠더 인권법이 소개됐을 때부터 지금까지 제자리입니다. 하지만 좋은 소식은 제가 처음 활동에 몸담기 시작한 1993에 비해 엄청난 진전이 있다는 겁니다.

가장 놀라운 성과는 이번 주에 일어났죠. 바로 미국연방대법원이 동성결혼에 합헌이라는 역사적 결정을 내린 것입니다.

제가 다시 한국에 돌아오게 되면 꼭 한국의 모든 분들도 같은 권리를 누릴 수 있었으면 좋겠습니다.

하지만 동성결혼만큼 주목 받아야 할 사회적 이슈가 아직 많이 있습니다.

우리의 청소년들과 형사정의체제개혁, 학원폭력, 편견과 차별, 의료법 이민자 문제 등이 그 예입니다.

한국과 같이 미국도 앞으로 나아가고 있고 제가 태어난 이곳에서의 LGBT커뮤니티 진전을 보게 되어 기쁩니다.

제가 이곳을 떠났을 때는 이승만 정권이 끝났을 때였고, 아마 저의 친구도 이승만 정권에 저항하기 위해서 싸웠을 겁니다.

그래서 제게도 그런 저항의 피가 흐르고 있는지도 모릅니다.

그 후에 박정희 전 대통령이 쿠데타를 일으켜 정권을 장악하였고, 아이러니하게도 54년이 흐른 후 한국에 돌아왔더니 그의 딸 박근혜가 정권을 이끌고 있었습니다.

지금 이 사회는 공주님들보다 리더십 있는 여왕들이 더 필요합니다.

또한 팔레스타인 이슈에서 많은 관심이 필요합니다. 팔레스타인 땅에 이스라엘이 점령하고 있는 것에 더 많은 사람들의 비판의 목소리를 해야한다고 생각합니다

LGBT운동 또한 단순히 어떤 하나의  아젠데에 묶여있는 것이 아닌 동성혼 합법화와 같은 다양한 이슈에 집중할 필요가 있다고 생각합니다.

여기 계신 모든 분들도 다같이 앞장섰으면 좋겠습니다.

지금 저 멀리서 북을 두드리며 이 행사에 반대의 목소리를 내고 있는 사람들을 보십시오.

그들은 내가 알지 못하는 신을 추앙하며 포비아적이고 혐오로 가득 찬 메세지가 하나님의 메세지라고 외치고 있습니다.

저들의 메세지는 강렬하지만 저희의 사랑이 훨씬 위대하고 강력합니다

그리고 결국 저들의 혐오는 우리의 사랑으로 정복되고 말 것입니다.

제가 다음에 이 행사를 다시 찾게 되면 지금 한복을 입고 북을 두드리는 저분들이 LGBT를 응원하고 있으면 좋겠습니다.

한국 정부가 LGBT 인권을 보장한 법안을 발의했으면 좋겠습니다.

예전 마틴 루터 킹이 연설했듯이 역사는 길지 모르지만 그 혼은 정의의 방향으로 굽어있다고 했습니다.

감사합니다.

The post Queer Korea Festival speech & Seoul Pride 2015 (6.28.15) appeared first on Pauline Park.

TRANSGENDER
Tragic Trans? Nope!

The American series “Transparent” makes the subject gender identity now also popular in Germany. In America, the debate is far more. A visit to the transgender center in Queens, New York.
By Claudia Steinberg
Die Zeit
9 April 2015

A rainbow flag between Isabel’s Hair Salon and the mini supermarket shows the way to Pride House: the center for queers and transsexuals on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. There sits on voluminous sofas and office chairs a group of transsexuals, lesbians and bisexuals. The atmosphere is relaxed. Until a woman of indeterminate age dressed in black with a glamorous Chinese shawl draped around her shoulders, takes her place. Pauline Park is the founder and director of Pride House. The group discussion includes dramatic tales of family disputes and unease with their assigned gender identity that feels wrong.

Everyone has known for a long time about Laura’s attempted suicide. Gene reported on the visit of his beloved grandmother from China and how she did not understand the transformation of her granddaughter into a boy and the difficulty she was having accepting his new gender identity. Dylan is computer programmer and longs for acceptance from his ex-wife and his children as he contemplates his transition. June wants to find a new job as a woman, but her doctorate and all her excellent work experience is under her male name.

Since the debates of the 1970s, gays have been able to integrate into the mainstream, leaving transgendered  individuals as an exotic community of outsiders. Their stories of redemption still have entertainment value in a way that the story of a gay couple with a dog and a house in the suburbs has lost. Meanwhile transgender has become the new hot topic, even among the general public, as a civil rights issue, as glamor factor, as a television series. In universities, transgender is challenging gender boundaries under the flag of queer studies. In October of last year, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for the ability to change one’s gender on birth certificates without sex reassignment surgery. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has demanded that health insurance companies pay for sex change operations. The New York City jail, Rikers Island, one of the largest prisons in the world, set up a special department for transsexual inmates because prisons are dangerous places where they often have to endure violence and sexual attacks. Ten years ago a film like “TransAmerica” – in which heroine Bree transitions from man to woman – was still exceptional. Beginning this week, you can go to Amazon.com to find a German-language version of the series “Transparent” (as in, a parent who is transsexual); it has already won a Golden Globe award and has a good chance of attaining cult status.

The writer and director of “Transparent,” Jill Soloway, was inspired by the gender metamorphosis of her own father to create a funny and empathetic call for gender freedom: As Mort’s three daughters are grown up, he risks his coming-out and suddenly comes through the door as a woman with a long hair, in high heels and in a pretty dress. The astonishment is great, especially since Papa Mort surprises his daughter in an intimate embrace with her girlfriend. The series celebrates not just “the birth of a new mother from the female I of the Father,” but also “boygirl, girlboy, macho princess and officer slutty sweet bear,” encouraging them to affirm the identity of their choice. With this anti-dualistic conception, Soloway has wiped away the stereotype of the tragic tranny, the audience of millions demonstrating the possibilities of bold self-determination.

Pauline Park has situated her Pride House in one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world: In the school kitty corner, 84 languages are spoken. At Pride House, there are clients from Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Each year, the site provides approximately 6,000 interactions with residents from throughout Queens, New York’s second largest borough in population. Pride House has a database of lawyers and doctors accumulated over the course of two decades from whom transsexuals can hope for respectful behavior, working with psychotherapists or psychiatrists together. Immigration and health care are the most important issues. Pride House provides HIV tests, distributes 50,000 condoms a month, and helps homeless clients to find accommodation. “Transsexual teens often end up on the street,” says Park.

Pauline Park’s compassion for people like Laura or Gene is based on her own complicated biography. In 1960, American adoptive parents took two malnourished twins from Seoul. The boys were only eight months old and were the only non-white children in their elementary school. They found themselves in a Christian fundamentalist Republican family. In the first semester of her philosophy degree at the University of Wisconsin, to Park came out as gay. But that was only half the story. The other half came to light when Park took a scholarship to London and there increasingly appeared as a woman. She calls it the most liberating experience of her lives: “For the first time, I presented myself as I saw myself.” Finally, there was her reading of Michel Foucault, through which Park freed herself from the burden of supposedly inauthentic Korean identity and the sex/gender binary, unmasked as a social construct. “I started to accept me as” a male-bodied woman “and as Korean adoptee.”

At home in the sexual and cultural ambiguity, Pauline Park makes a radical theorist and activist who is at loggerheads with the “transgender establishment” in America and the “classic transsexual transition narrative.”

Page 2/2: The gender identity disorder still has the status of a mental illness

After conducting hundreds of training sessions and workshops at universities, hospitals, government agencies and companies Pauline Park is very familiar with all the prejudices that circulate about transsexuals. “Most participants expect me to tell them something about hormones and surgery. But while I begin by talking about that, I focus on trying to explain how many barriers a transsexual must overcome in a hospital visit.” Since 9/11, almost every public building has required showing an identity card. If one’s ID is in a male name, but the person appears as a woman, she will not be able to get beyond the guards. The next hurdle is the form on which you have to check ‘male’ or ‘female.’ If the patient Joanna is sitting in the waiting room, but the name John is called, it can expose her to astonished glances.

The linear transformation from male to female and vice versa is presented to the public on countless talk shows, from Oprah Winfrey to Barbara Walters – with guests who talk about being trapped in the wrong body and want to corrected that state of affairs through hormones and surgery. A change in legal sex designation can actually reinforce the sex/gender binary if it is based on the disease model of transsexuality. In 1974, homosexuality was removed from the diagnostic manual of mental disorders, which instantly ‘cured’ millions of gays. At the same time, the American Psychiatric Association introduced the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which was recently changed to gender dysphoria, but which retains its status as a mental illness. Consequently, all transgendered individuals are still considered mentally ill.

Park conceded that the dissonance between the assigned gender identity and internal feeling, especially coupled with transgenderphobia, can lead to depression. But that would implicate a diseased society rather than the individual. She wants more than a few crumbs from the table at the Department of Health and isn’t willing to accept them at the cost of pathologizing the community. She regards transgender identity rather like left-handedness, with transsexualism as a natural variant of the dominant gender identity, not a form of deviance. Whoever would like sex reassignment surgery should have the opportunity to get it, says Park. But in contrast to the traditional transgender discourse only a tiny minority would undergo these serious interventions. The majority is situated on some point in the wide spectrum between masculine and feminine. A subversive concept that can result in open conflict in the choice of a public toilet in New York as elsewhere.

NB: This article appeared in the 9 April 2015 issue of Die Zeit under the title, “Tragische Transe? Nö!.” The original German text is below. The above English translation is mine. ~Pauline Park

TRANSGENDER
Tragische Transe? Nö!

Die amerikanische Serie “Transparent” macht das Thema Geschlechtsidentität jetzt auch in Deutschland populär. In Amerika ist die Diskussion längst weiter. Ein Besuch im Transgender-Zentrum in Queens, New York.

Von Claudia Steinberg
Die Zeit
9 April 2015

Eine Regenbogenflagge zwischen Isabels Haarsalon und dem Minisupermarkt zeigt den Weg nach Pride House: ins Zentrum für Queers und Transsexuelle auf der 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Dort sitzt auf voluminösen Sofas und Bürostühlen eine Gruppe von Transsexuellen, Lesben und Bisexuellen. Die Atmosphäre ist ausgelassen. Bis eine schwarz gekleidete Dame unbestimmten Alters, glamourös einen chinesischen Schal um die Schultern drapiert, Platz nimmt. Pauline Park ist die Gründerin und Direktorin von Pride House. Sie weiß, gleich wird die Stimmung abstürzen, mit dramatischen Erzählungen von Familienstreit, dem Aufflammen von Unbehagen an der zugewiesenen Geschlechtsidentität, die sich falsch anfühlt.

Alle wissen längst um Lauras Selbstmordabsichten. Gene berichtet vom Besuch seiner geliebten Oma aus China, die über die Verwandlung ihrer Enkelin in einen Jungen so verzweifelt war wie er über ihre Unfähigkeit, seine neue Identität zu akzeptieren. Dylan ist Computerprogrammiererin und sehnt sich nach einer “Rückwärtskompatibilität” mit der Ehefrau und den Kindern aus ihrem früheren Leben als Mann. Ihre Kollegin June sollte sich bei der Suche nach einem neuen Job einfach als Frau vorstellen, findet Dylan – doch Junes Doktortitel und ihre ganze exzellente Berufserfahrung laufen unter ihrem Männernamen.

Seit sich die Schwulen nach den Debatten der siebziger Jahre in den Mainstream eingliedern konnten, sind Transgender-Individuen als exotischer Rest der Außenseitergemeinde übrig geblieben. Ihre Erlösungsgeschichten besitzen noch immer jenen Unterhaltungsfaktor, den ein schwules Paar mit Hund und Haus in der Vorstadt längst verloren hat. Inzwischen ist Transgender das neue heiße Thema, es ist sogar in der breiten Öffentlichkeit angekommen, als Bürgerrechtsproblematik, als Glamour-Faktor, als Fernsehserie. An den Universitäten rüttelt es unter der Flagge von Queer Studies an den Geschlechtergrenzen. Im Oktober des vergangenen Jahres plädierte der New Yorker Bürgermeister Bill de Blasio für die Möglichkeit, das Geschlecht auf Geburtsurkunden ohne operative Umwandlung ändern zu können. Der New Yorker Gouverneur Andrew Cuomo hat verlangt, dass Krankenversicherungen für Geschlechtsumwandlungen aufkommen. Das New Yorker Gefängnis Rikers Island, eine der größten Strafanstalten der Welt, richtet eine Sonderabteilung für transsexuelle Häftlinge ein, weil Gefängnisse für sie zu den gefährlichsten Orten zählen, wo sie oft Gewalttätigkeit und sexuelle Attacken erdulden müssen. Vor zehn Jahren war ein Film wie Transamerika mit seiner vom Mann zur Frau transformierten Heldin Bree noch eine Ausnahme. Von dieser Woche an kann man über Amazon auch auf Deutsch die Serie Transparent sehen (parent wie Eltern und trans wie transsexuell), sie ist schon ausgezeichnet mit dem Golden Globe und hat beste Aussichten auf einen Kultstatus.

Die Autorin und Regisseurin von Transparent, Jill Soloway, hat sich von der Gendermetamorphose ihres eigenen Vaters zu einem witzigen und empathischen Aufruf für die Geschlechterfreiheit inspirieren lassen: Als Morts drei Töchter erwachsen sind, wagt er sein Coming-out und kommt plötzlich als Frau mit langer Haarmähne, auf Stöckelschuhen und im hübschen Kleid durch die Tür. Das Erstaunen ist groß, zumal Papa Mort dabei seine Tochter in inniger Umarmung mit ihrer Freundin überrascht. Die Serie soll nicht nur “die Geburt einer neuen Mutter aus dem weiblichen Ich des Vaters” feiern, sondern auch “boygirl, girlboy, macho princess and officer sweet slutty bear” zur Identität ihrer Wahl ermutigen. Mit dieser antidualistischen Auffassung hat Soloway das Klischee der tragischen Transe mit Schwung hinweggewischt und einem Millionenpublikum die Möglichkeiten kühner Selbstbestimmung vorgeführt.

Dieser Artikel stammt aus der ZEIT Nr. 15 vom 9.4.2015.

Dieser Artikel stammt aus der ZEIT Nr. 15 vom 9.4.2015.  |  Die aktuelle ZEIT können Sie am Kiosk oder hier erwerben.

Pauline Park hat ihr Pride House an einem der ethnisch vielfältigsten Orte der Welt angesiedelt: In der Schule schräg gegenüber werden 84 Sprachen gesprochen. Im Pride House erscheinen Klienten aus Kolumbien, Ecuador, Mexiko, China, Indien, Pakistan, Bangladesch oder von den Philippinen. Die Einrichtung verzeichnet jedes Jahr rund 6000 Interaktionen mit Bewohnern aus ganz Queens, New Yorks zweitgrößtem Stadtteil. Pride House hat in zwei Jahrzehnten einen Katalog von Rechtsanwälten und Medizinern angesammelt, bei denen Transsexuelle auf respektvollen Umgang hoffen können, man arbeitet mit Psychotherapeuten oder Psychiatern zusammen. Immigration und medizinische Versorgung sind die wichtigsten Themen. Pride House vermittelt HIV-Tests, verteilt pro Monat 50.000 Kondome oder hilft obdachlosen Klienten, eine Unterkunft zu finden. “Gerade transsexuelle Teenager enden oft auf der Straße”, sagt Park.

Pauline Parks Mitgefühl für Menschen wie Laura oder Gene ist in ihrer eigenen komplizierten Biografie begründet. Im Jahr 1960 nahmen amerikanische Adoptiveltern zwei unterernährte Zwillingsbrüder aus Seoul in Empfang. Die Jungen waren erst acht Monate alt und wuchsen nun auf als die einzigen nicht weißen Kinder der Umgebung. Sie waren in einer christlich fundamentalistischen, republikanischen Familie gelandet. Im ersten Semester ihres Philosophiestudiums an der University of Wisconsin offenbarte sich Park als schwul. Doch das war nur die halbe Wahrheit. Die andere Hälfte kam zum Vorschein, als Park mit einem Stipendium nach London zog und dort immer häufiger als Frau auftrat. Sie nennt es die befreiendste Erfahrung ihres Lebens: “Zum ersten Mal präsentierte ich mich so, wie ich mich sah.” Schließlich war es die Lektüre von Michel Foucault, die Park von dem vermeintlichen Fluch einer inauthentischen koreanischen Identität befreite und die binäre Geschlechtsbestimmung als gesellschaftliches Konstrukt entlarvte. “Ich begann, mich als ›körperlich männliche Frau‹ und als koreanisches Adoptivkind zu akzeptieren.”

Dass sie sich in der geschlechtlichen und kulturellen Ambiguität so beheimatet fühlt, macht Pauline Park zu einer radikalen Theoretikerin und Aktivistin, die mit dem “Transgender-Establishment” Amerikas und seiner “klassischen Version der Geschlechtsumwandlung” auf Kriegsfuß steht.

Seite 2/2: Die Geschlechtsidentitätsstörung hat immer noch den Status einer Geisteskrankheit

Nach Hunderten von Schulungen und Workshops an Universitäten, in Kliniken, Regierungsstellen und Unternehmen ist Pauline Park bestens mit allen Vorurteilen vertraut, die über Transsexuelle kursieren. “Die meisten Teilnehmer erwarten, dass ich ihnen etwas über Hormone und Operationen erzähle. Aber das Thema berühre ich kaum. Ich versuche zu erklären, wie viele Barrieren ein Transsexueller etwa bei einem Krankenhausbesuch überwinden muss”. Seit dem 11. September verlangt nahezu jedes öffentliche Gebäude das Vorzeigen eines Ausweises. Wenn der auf einen männlichen Namen lautet, die Person jedoch als Frau erscheint, wird sie möglicherweise nicht über den Wachtposten hinauskommen. Die nächste Hürde ist das Formular, auf dem man “männlich” oder “weiblich” ankreuzen muss. Wenn die Patientin Joanna im Warteraum sitzt, aber als John aufgerufen wird, ist sie verwunderten Blicken ausgesetzt.

Die lineare Transformation vom Mann zur Frau und umgekehrt wurde der Öffentlichkeit in zahllosen Talkshows von Oprah Winfrey bis Barbara Walters nahegebracht – mit Gästen, die sich im falschen Körper eingesperrt fühlten und diesen Missstand mit Hormonen und Operationen behoben. Mit der Umkehrung der genitalen Vorzeichen bleibt aber nicht nur die Weltordnung der polaren Geschlechtsidentität erhalten, sondern die Transsexualität weiterhin dem Krankheitsmodell verhaftet. 1974 wurde die Homosexualität aus dem diagnostischen Handbuch psychischer Störungen gestrichen, das führte mit einem Streich zur “Heilung” von Millionen von Schwulen. Gleichzeitig definierte aber die American Psychiatric Association eine gender identity disorder, Geschlechtsidentitätsstörung, die zur gender dysphoria abgemildert wurde, ohne jedoch ihren Status als Geisteskrankheit zu verlieren. Demzufolge wären alle Transgender-Individuen geisteskrank.

Park konzediert, dass die Dissonanz zwischen der zugewiesenen Geschlechtsidentität und der eigenen Empfindung, vor allem aber Transgender-Phobie zu Depressionen führen kann. Das wäre allerdings eher eine Krankheit der Gesellschaft als eine des Individuums. Sie will mehr als ein paar Brotkrumen vom Bankett des Gesundheitsministeriums um den Preis der Pathologisierung eines Zustands, den sie als so natürlich betrachtet wie Linkshändigkeit. Transsexualität ist für sie eine Varianz der dominanten Geschlechtsidentität, keine Devianz. Wer eine operative Geschlechtsumwandlung wünsche, sollte die Gelegenheit dazu haben, meint Park. Doch im Unterschied zum klassischen Transgender-Diskurs wolle sich nur eine winzige Minorität diesen gravierenden Eingriffen unterziehen. Die Mehrheit siedele sich einfach an irgendeinem Punkt auf dem breiten Spektrum zwischen maskulin und feminin an. Ein subversives Konzept, das bekanntlich schon bei der Wahl einer öffentlichen Toilette Konflikte eröffnen kann, in New York wie überall.

In der Serie “Transparent” wählen “MaPa” (Jeffrey Tambor” und seine Töchter die Damentoilette.

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QAIA & the pinkwashing of the NYC Council trip to apartheid Israel
speech at New York City Hall
Pauline Park
22 January 2015

I’m a member of New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and I’m hear to talk briefly about the pernicious influence of the ‘pinkwashing‘ of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. ‘Pinkwashing’ is the attempt to use Israel’s supposedly superior record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues to attempt to justify the illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip since 1967. In fact, Israel is far less of a gay paradise than the picture painted by Zionist apologists for its apartheid regime.

One would get a very different impression speaking primarily or exclusively with wealthy gay Jewish Israeli men in North Tel Aviv than if one spoke with LGBT Israelis from more marginalized communities, including lesbians and bisexuals, who often feel marginalized by gay men in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, or transgendered women, who face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel just as they do in New York and other U.S. cities.

Nor do queer Palestinians have any ability to seek refuge in Israel, as Zionist apologists for Israeli occupation suggest; they have no right to remain in Israel, because the state of Israel does not recognize non-Jewish economic refugees or those fleeing political persecution — regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. So Israel’s record on LGBT issues is far more mixed than Zionist apologists for Israeli apartheid suggest, but even if it were a perfect one, it’s impossible to see how such a record could possibly justify the denial of basic human rights to millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories, some of whom are in fact LGBT and are subjected to the same brutal repression and daily humiliations as their non-LGBT Palestinian brothers and sisters living under occupation.

I participated in the first U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine in January 2012 and I saw for myself the abysmal conditions to which Palestinians are subjected there. We met with many Palestinians — both LGBT and non-LGBT — throughout the West Bank, from Nablus in the north to Hebron in the south and Ramallah in between. Staying two nights with a Palestinian family in Dheishe in Bethelem, one of the largest refugee camps in the West Bank, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Palestinians about conditions in the occupied territories. We also met with members of alQaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (PQBDS) in Ramallah and Aswat (the organization for queer Palestinian women) in Haifa, and if members of the US LGBT community really want to help queer Palestinians, they should be working with LGBT Palestinian groups rather than helping to pinkwash the occupation.

One last important note: for those who think that the Israeli occupation and the apartheid regime constructed to enforce it is a purely foreign policy issue, they need only look to Roosevelt Island, where Technion University — which is deeply implicated in the occupation — is collaborating with Cornell University. And members of the LGBT community here in New York who think that the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid have nothing to do with their lives should consider the two-year-long ban on all Palestine solidarity organizing — including the Siege Busters Working Group and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid — at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan, which was in place from February 2011-February 2013.

The ‘pinkwashing’ of the Israeli occupation has implications for the ability of LGBT people of conscience to speak out and organize here in this country and in this city, which is why we must all become invested in challenging both pinkwashing as a discourse and the apartheid regime that such discourse would defend. Corey Johnson, Ritchie Torress and Jimmy Van Bramer are members of the LGBT Caucus who are going on this junket, but they cannot claim to be representing the LGBT community in expressing their support for apartheid Israel. Thank you.

Pauline Park is a co-founding member of New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, founded in 2011. She was a member of the first U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine in January 2012.

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transgender usage: 5 misunderstandings about ‘transgendered’
by Pauline Park

And so the great nomenclature debate continues…

I have already written about the controversy over the use of ‘transgender’ vs. ‘transgendered’ as an adjective describing people (“GLAAD is wrong on ‘transgender’ vs. ‘transgendered’“), concluding that ‘transgendered’ is the correct adjective to apply to people while ‘transgender’ is the correct usage with abstract concepts, such as ‘community,’ ‘studies,’ ‘law,’ etc. I’ve gotten five different responses from members of the transgender community as well as non-transgendered people who have objected to that conclusion:

1) negative valence

The first misunderstanding about transgender usage is the most easily disposed of. I have had a number of people tell me that an adjective ending in ‘ed’ always indicates something negative or bad; clearly, even the most cursory scan of a dictionary will yield a host of adjectives with a positive denotation or connotation, such as ‘educated,’ ‘sophisticated,’ and ‘nuanced.’ And some adjectives unambiguously indicate something positive, such as ‘honored,’ ‘awarded’ and ‘commended,’ all three of which are commonly used with describe people. Interestingly, even adjectives that have a negative denotation or connotation do not automatically imply something bad about the person to whom they are applied: so, for example, I could say that I am ‘appalled’ by the acceleration of global warming, which does not necessarily say anything bad about me and may in fact suggest something good about me (i.e., environmental consciousness). What is particularly relevant here is that the very term for showing a lack of respect for one’s gender identity is ‘misgender,’ and even those who think ‘transgendered’ is always wrong are most likely to use the term ‘misgendered’ to describe someone who has been referred to by someone else with a pronoun or form of address (‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’) not consonant with that individual’s self-identification. Now on first glance, this reference might suggest evidentiary support for the objection that ‘transgendered’ has a negative valence; but in fact, it proves just the opposite, because if someone can be ‘misgendered,’ then it must follow that someone can be appropriately gendered (i.e., addressed in a way that respects the transgendered person’s gender identity); and the evident meaning of the very expression ‘appropriately gendered’ or ‘respectfully gendered’ proves the point. Nor would anyone say in idiomatic English, ‘they  appropriately gender him/her’ or ‘they misgender him/her’ to indicate the past tense, because it would never be understood as such.

2) tense

The second misunderstanding about the use of ‘transgendered’ as an adjective is the misconception that such a usage necessarily  indicates something that happened in the past; but many adjectives ending in ‘ed’ can be used to indicate present tense. So for example, when I say, “I’m overjoyed to see you,” I clearly mean that I’m overjoyed right now in this present moment at seeing you, not that I was overjoyed some time in the near or distant past. And of course, the same applies to adjectives cited before, such as ‘educated,’ ‘sophisticated,’ and ‘balanced.’ I try to eat a well-balanced diet in the present, and saying that the meal I’m eating right now is well-balanced is very much about the present moment. The same is true of being ‘right-handed’ or ‘left-handed.’  Nor does acceptance of the term (and concept) ‘misgendered’ substantiate the case for this second objection, because one can be ‘gendered’ in a steady state that refers to a current situation as well as one in the past. To indicate an event that happened in the near or distant past — any incident, in fact — one would have to say, “they misgendered him/her” in order to be understood. But if ‘misgendered’ is correct usage — which I have never heard any objection to — why would ‘transgendered’ always be incorrect? To say that someone was properly, appropriately or respectfully gendered in the past tense requires the ‘ed’ to be understood, otherwise no English speaker would understand the reference as referring to the past tense. So saying that someone is ‘transgendered’ does not in any way imply a past status; to do so and to be clearly understood in English, one would actually have to say, “I was transgendered but I’m not any more” (arguably a dubious notion, but grammatically correct). A variant on this theme is the odd notion that ‘transgendered’ cannot be the correct adjectival form of the word when applied to people because gender identity is an immutable characteristic (a debatable assertion), but even the most cursory perusal of a dictionary will produce a whole list of adjectives referring to what are arguably immutable characteristics that end in ‘ed’ (e.g., introverted, extroverted, conceited, weak-willed, kind-hearted, warm-hearted, balanced, quick-witted, etc.). An even odder variant on the misunderstanding about tense is the assertion that adjectives related to transgender identity should parallel those related to sexual orientation, or perhaps even race, ethnicity and nationality; what I often hear is that ‘transgendered’ can’t be correct because one doesn’t describe gay or lesbian people as ‘gayed’ or ‘lesbianed.’ But ‘transgendered’ as an adjectival form is not describing something that is ‘done to’ the transgendered person by someone else, nor is there any reason to believe that  terms related to gender and gender identity have to parallel those related to sexuality, race, ethnicity or anything else. There is in fact no such internal consistency even among terms related to sexuality alone: so, for example, one can use terms such as ‘gayness’ and ‘lesbianism’ to describe the phenomenon (rather than the people), but it is standard to use ‘heterosexuality,’ ‘homosexuality’ and ‘bisexuality’ to describe the phenomenon of straight, gay and bi sexuality.  And terms related to race, ethnicity and nationality almost always have an adjectival form that differs from the nominative form: e.g., I’m a Korean American; I would never say that I’m ‘Korea America,’ just as one is French or German, not France or Germany.

3) agency

And that leads to the third objection to ‘transgendered,’ which is the notion that such usage implies that the person being described was the passive subject of someone else’s agency, as in violent acts such as when someone has been murdered or raped; this notion that ‘transgendered’ implies that has done something to someone else is also easily refuted, as with the above-mentioned adjectives ‘educated,’ ‘sophisticated,’ and ‘nuanced.’ One could quibble about the adjective ‘educated,’ arguing that someone else did in fact participate in my education, but one could also describe oneself as self-educated; when it comes to the visual arts, that’s largely true for me, having had only one course in art history, and that in modern art. But ‘sophisticated’ seems not to indicate someone else’s agency; saying of me that I’m sophisticated does not mean that someone else actively ‘sophisticated’ me. And the same certainly goes for an adjective such as ‘balanced’ or ‘well-balanced.’ Saying of someone that s/he is ‘balanced’ does not in any way imply that someone else balanced him or her. And to return to the example in #1, the sentence, “they misgender him/her” will be understood by any English speaker as referring to an ongoing situation in the present. If being ‘misgendered’ does represent a loss of agency, being ‘transgendered’ and recognizing oneself to be and declaring oneself transgendered can in fact be an act of self-empowerment.

4) authority

Those who believe there is a higher authority to which they can appeal may cite the Associated Press Stylebook, but AP simply took its cue from GLAAD; more often, those who oppose the usage ‘transgendered’ will simply cite GLAAD’s stylebook; but as I argued in “GLAAD is wrong on ‘transgender’ vs. ‘transgendered’,” GLAAD itself offers no persuasive or even coherent argument for its position on the issue, simply asserting (inaccurately) that ‘transgendered’ is always incorrect and asserting further that it is also offensive; that usage doesn’t offend me, though the notion that GLAAD gets to tell me what I call myself certainly does. But the question the appeal to GLAAD begs is this: why does GLAAD have any such authority over linguistic usage? Who elected or appointed GLAAD to determine what is correct or incorrect usage? No one that I know of. GLAAD is certainly a wealthy and influential organization, but so is the Human Rights Campaign, and I have never heard anyone — at least not any transgendered person — suggest that all transgendered people need to accept the authority of HRC.  Variants of this claim would be citing the New York Times, prominent celebrities or elected officials, or prominent members of the transgender community, all of which would beg the same question about linguistic usage authority. Because of GLAAD’s pernicious influence, ‘transgender’ has now begun to appear in dictionaries, but once again, no dictionary has absolute authority over English language usage; like a public opinion poll, any dictionary is simply a compendium of current usage. We have no Academie Française, and even if we did, we would be just as likely to ignore it in practice as do the French. Pour moi, ça va.

5) consensus

And so we come to the last defense, the last bulwark of the ‘transgendered’ is always wrong crowd; at the risk of mixing metaphors, perhaps we might call it the last gasp, because it is no more persuasive than any of the other objections to this usage. The objection runs something like this: everyone uses ‘transgender’ and no one (except maybe some poor uneducated souls) uses ‘transgendered,’ so that means we all have an obligation to use ‘transgender’ exclusively and eschew ‘transgendered’ altogether. Such an assertion confuses the normative and the empirical; as anyone familiar with the fact/value distinction would realize, even if it were true that everyone did X, that would not in and of itself entail or even imply a moral obligation for any individual to do X. But of course, the assertion of universality is not true and one would not have to make that assertion at all if it were. When pressed, the person making this assertion usually falls back to something along the lines of “all my friends use ‘transgender’ and none use ‘transgendered.'” But of course, such an assertion is of no value, because the friends of the person making the assertion could themselves be the outliers. Since no one as far as I know has ever done a survey of usage, any claims to prevalence of one usage over the other can only be based on anecdotal evidence. But one only need think about the question of public opinion polling on this question to see that it is a difficult if not possible one to answer: precisely whom would one survey? The transgender community alone? The entire lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community? All Americans? All inhabitants of planet Earth? I suspect most would say, ‘the transgender community.’ But which one? Just that in the United States? And only those who identify as transgender or transgendered? Perhaps some might say, only those who identify as ‘transgender,’ but not those who identify as ‘transgendered,’ which of course would be to bias the response altogether. Surveys of the transgender community in the US alone are difficult to carry out, but a survey of the transgender community worldwide would entail almost insuperable difficulties, and would be seriously biased in terms of Internet access (a global paper survey being impossible in practice) and language usage. In practical terms, there is probably no way even to effectively survey the US transgender community on this question, and restricting the survey to that community of course would represent a serious cultural and even political bias. Ultimately, of course, any public opinion poll is nothing more than a snapshot of opinion at any one given moment anyway. When it comes to language, the only absolute truth is that it is always changing; indeed, the term ‘transgender’ is itself of recent origin and only became popularized in the 1990s. So insisting that the community has come to consensus on usage here in the absence of any evidentiary support is not a persuasive argument or even an argument at all.

And so, any thorough review of the objections to ‘transgendered’ as an adjective describing people will show that all such objections are based on faulty assumptions; it is always correct to refer to people as ‘transgendered’ and to abstract entities and concepts as ‘transgender.’

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and president of the board of directors and acting executive director of Queens Pride House. She did her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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