Trans-Form the Occupation

Pauline Park

at

Occupy Wall Street

13 November 2011

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here. I’m Pauline Park, chair of NYAGRA, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, an LGBT community center in the borough of Queens.

I’m honored by the invitation to speak here at Occupy Wall Street, which I think is one of the most exciting recent developments in American politics. People are finally standing up to corporate greed and the powers that be. And that includes transgendered people. I’m a transgendered woman who was born in Korea. I’ve lived in New York since 1995 and I’d like to talk about the people who make up my community.

1) The diversity of the transgender community.

We need to recognize the full diversity of the transgender community. There are as many different ways of being transgendered as there are transgendered people. Do not assume that sex reassignment is the end point for every transgender transition; most transgendered people do not want sex reassignment surgery, and most people who do never get it.

2) ‘Transgender’ as an umbrella term.

There are literally hundreds of descriptors and self-descriptors that people use to identify or self-identify. But don’t confuse the label with the person. ‘Transgender’ is an ‘umbrella’ term that is widely used to bring together a wide variety of different subgroups within the community, including transsexuals, crossdressers and genderqueers. The term ‘transgender’ can be used in three different ways: as a term of self-identification, as an analytic term, or as a political term. There are many people who don’t identify with the term ‘transgender,’ including a lot of immigrants and transgendered people of color.

3) Sexual orientation vs. gender identity.

It’s important to understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation refers to who you’re attracted to; gender identity refers to how you identify and express your gender. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity per se. There are transgendered people who identify as heterosexual as well as those who identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual. Don’t assume someone’s sexual orientation from their gender identity or presentation. What do you know about someone’s sexual orientation if you know that they’re transgendered? Nothing~!

4) Discrimination.

In this society, transgendered and gender-variant people face pervasive discrimination, harassment, abuse & violence. Even with a transgender rights law in place since 2002, transgendered people regularly report discrimination in this city. Fortunately, the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, education and credit. If you experience discrimination, contact NYAGRA through nyagra.com or the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund through the TLDEF website at transgenderlegal.org.

5) Bullying, harassment & violence.

Transgendered and gender-variant youth face pervasive bullying and bias-based harassment in our public schools; and the rate of teen suicide among trans and genderqueer youth is astronomically high. Many trans and genderqueer youth drop out of school because of such bullying; and without even a high school diploma, the chances of finding a well-paying job are very slim. Last year, the New York state legislature enacted the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), which prohibits bullying and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state.

6) Housing & homelessness; health care.

Many transgendered people find themselves homeless because of discrimination and abuse, including domestic and intimate partner violence. Many are forced into sex work, with heightened risk of HIV infection, police brutality, and street violence. Many transgendered people lack health insurance and even access to basic health care.

7) GID.

Many transgendered people access hormones and surgery through the diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID). But the GID diagnosis pathologizes everyone who is gender-variant as a gender deviant. As I like to say, I do not have a gender identity disorder; it is society that has a gender identity disorder. We need to eliminate the pathologizing of transgender and gender variance.

We need to create a society in which no one is denied employment or housing or health care because of their gender identity or expression. We need to recognize the multiple oppressions that face transgendered people of color, including immigrants of color. We need to recognize that the root of our oppression as transgendered and gender-variant people is the sex/gender binary — the policing of rigid gender norms by the police and public authorities, corporations and other employers, and conventionally gendered people in our society. We need to bring feminist consciousness to the project of challenging, deconstructing and dismantling the sex/gender binary.

We need to create a society characterized by social and economic justice, not governed by rigid gender norms and corporate profits. And as a step towards that goal, we need to make sure that this space is safe for everyone, including our transgendered brothers and sisters. As the Mahatma Gandhi said, we need to be the change that we want to see in the world.

Thank you.

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Jane Garra, a tall, leggy blues guitarist with hair flopping into her eyes, is often interrupted during performances at Brooklyn’s Buttermilk bar and the Ace Café in Manhattan, accosted by young women with a simple question not about her unusual instrument — a dobro guitar, which is used in Hawaiian music and is familiar enough to music aficionados at the CasHank Hootenanny Jamboree, a regular jam session held every month at Buttermilk.

No, Galla said, “The girls tell me, `We love the way you dress! How do you do it?'” I tell them every time: “If you want to look like this, go shop at Loehmann’s!”

For more than two years, Galla has been a regular at the 86-year-old discount clothing store on Seventh Ave. and 17th St. In fact, many of Loehmann’s employees know her well enough to ask where she has been when they don’t see her for a while.

Now, Loehmann’s employees also know Garra as a plaintiff.

That is because she was denied access to Loehmann’s public restrooms and fitting rooms on two occasions last year, leading her to file a complaint with the New York City Human Rights Commission.

Perhaps it was her height, her angular face, her gravelly voice that caused someone to suspect that Garra was born a boy. Garra may never know for certain. What is clear is that it was illegal for the store to order her out.

Last week, Garra and her lawyer, Michael Silverman of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, announced that the case had been settled. Loehmann’s agreed to train their employees to act with sensitivity toward transgender women and men, and to grant them full access to public facilities as required by New York City’s Human Rights Law, which was amended in March 2002 to “eliminate discrimination based on an individual’s actual or perceived gender.”

In the five years since that groundbreaking legislation was passed by the City Council, a steady stream of cases has come to the Commission’s attention, as more and more transgender women and men have felt free to speak up about what they are experiencing.

Many of the cases have involved public employees. Last summer, a 70-year-old Verizon worker won a landmark settlement against the Metropolitan Transit Authority after she was repeatedly arrested and cursed at by transit police for using restrooms at Grand Central Station, where she worked. Last fall, a handful of transgender teens were arrested in Port Authority for the same reason, and last month, a young transgender employee of Housing Works filed suit against the MTA, charging harassment by numerous workers she’d asked to help her.

The Loehmann’s case is in some ways typical of the harassment endured by transgender people, said advocates and the Human Rights Commission, as they applauded both Loehmann’s agreement to settle and Garra’s bravery in coming forward about the issue. They differed on whether the relatively small number of cases surfacing each year is a sign of progress, indifference or changes occurring haphazardly, just under the surface.

New York’s Human Rights Law, also known as Title 8 of the Administrative Code, has contained anti-discrimination provisions for many years. But it wasn’t until 2002, after years of hearings before overlapping committees, that “gender identity” was added to the statute, banning discrimination when an individual’s “gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to an individual at birth.”

It took nearly two years for the changes in the law to become translated into policies and recommendations for city agencies, during which time Michael Silverman, a longtime attorney with Lambda Legal Defense Fund with a 10-year history of working on behalf of LGBT civil rights, decided to found TLDEF, a legal advocacy group specifically for transgendered people.

TLDEF then advised the city on how to educate employees about transgender issues and helped them create new guidelines on employment, harassment and access to public facilities — like the restrooms and fitting rooms denied to Jane Garra.

Garra’s own personal journey has been rather rapid. A former English teacher in a Brooklyn public high school, she told Chelsea Now that it wasn’t until she left the Board of Education, about five years ago, that she came clear about what she’d only suspected: that she was a woman in a man’s body. A few years of deep work with therapists and doctors helped her settle into her new identity. Sometime in 2004, she began shopping at Loehmann’s, finding their clothes the perfect fit for her life as Jane.

“They have a fabulous selection of clothes,” Garra said, “and you can’t beat the prices.” She favors “Western wear,” as befits a country-western musician, and confesses, “I’m a clearance-rack girl.” She started going two to three times a month, she said, becoming such a regular patron that employees noticed when a week went by without her.

It was a shock, then, in spring 2006 when a young employee came up to her in the women’s room, saying nervously, “We got a report you were here…you have to go use the men’s room.” Garra was stunned but decided to let it go, since the woman wasn’t an employee she knew. But a few months later, when Garra was about to try on some casual wear in a private fitting room in the women’s department, a middle-aged store manager came up to her and told her, “Management says that you can’t be in this fitting room.”

“I said, `I’ve been using this particular facility for several years,'” said Garra with a deep chuckle. After that second incident, Galla called Silverman and TLDEF, and Galla v. Loehmann’s was born.

Silverman was already working with Helena Stone, the 70-year-old telephone technician who had been arrested three times for using the restroom at Grand Central during her breaks from working on the station’s phone system. One officer called her “a freak, a weirdo and the ugliest woman in the world,” according to Stone. In October, MTA settled with Stone, paying her legal fees and agreeing to mandatory staff train regarding their legal obligations toward the transgendered.

But just as Silverman was telling the press that the settlement was a “milestone,” Port Authority police were arresting three transgendered teenagers. Meanwhile, Tracy Bumpurs, an employee of the social service agency Housing Works, was still fighting to get MTA to simply apologize for her treatment in July 2006, when her request for help with her MetroCard was met, she said, with a homophobic tirade.

David Thorpe of Housing Works said that he and Bumpurs met repeatedly with MTA officials and were told that the employees involved would be subject to a disciplinary hearing, but there has been no word on her other requests. The suit, filed on Jan. 30, requests not just compliance but financial redress to compensate Bumpur’s sleepless nights and lost work since the incident.

Thorpe added that Housing Works, which runs a residential facility for homeless people with HIV, has a long and successful track record when it has pursued litigation against the city, and that “this was an employee of ours, as well as a civil rights issue. We had to do it.” And while the MTA has scheduled transgender sensitivity training for its employees, Thorpe and Bumpurs say they have yet to see tangible result.

TLDEF’s Michael Silverman said he is working with both the MTA and the Port Authority police on employee training, but many agree with Housing Works that the pace is painfully slow. Even the very city officials charged with enforcing and publicizing the human rights law admit that progress is painfully slow.

Avery Melman, of the New York City Human Rights Commission, who helped broker the Loehmann’s settlement, said that “the more publicity cases like this get, the more information people have about their rights under the human rights law.” He said that half the battle is getting the word out to people who may not realize they are being discriminated against.

“I’ve spoken at numerous forums regarding the rights of transgendered individuals under the human rights law,” said Melman, “and I’ve had relatively few people approach me in those five years.”

Melman pointed to the Guidelines on Gender Identity (available on his agency’s Website at http://nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/trans_guide.html developed with Silverman and other advocates, and said that there is now “ongoing training at all city agencies” based on the guidelines. He pointed to the relative handful of cases as a hopeful sign: Perhaps most people were getting the message.

Silverman respectfully disagrees with that assessment. “I think it remains more the case that people don’t know their rights,” he said. Even so, his office is subject to a stream of calls — more than his attorneys can take on. “We can only take on a small handful.” Public education is a growing, ongoing need, he said.

Pauline Park, director of the New York Association of Gender Rights Advocacy, pointed out that most of the materials printed by the Human Rights Commission are still sitting in that agency’s office, waiting to be distributed. “This law has been on the books since April 2002. To the extent people don’t know about it, I lay this at the feet of the Bloomberg administration,” she said.

If Loehmann’s failed to understand they were breaking the law by excluding Jane Garra from public accommodations, Park added, that is a clear indication that this mayoral administration is not doing its job.

“They should be educating employers, landlords,” said Park. “They don’t really take action until they’re pressured.”

None of the slow overall progress detracted from the sort of wary glee with which Garra last approached Loehmann’s recently, when she returned for the first time since the lawsuit began.

Garra had said earlier that her case was “just so important for people, for how they perceive us. New York’s a diverse place. We’re here, and we don’t want to be in the closet any more, so to speak.”

But last Wednesday, she just wanted to fill her own closet as she perused the latest circulars. “I can’t wait to cash in on the sales,” she grinned.

photo caption:

Michael Silverman, lawyer for the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, with his client Jane Galla outside Loehmann’s department store earlier this week.

photo by Jefferson Siegel

This article originally appeared in the 23 February -1 March 2007 issue (Volume One, Issue 23) of Chelsea Now.

The post Loehmann’s settles human rights complaint with transgender woman (Chelsea Now, 2.23.07) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Transgender Rights

editorial
New York Times
29 August 2000

People who have had sex-change surgery, cross-dressers and others whose gender identity does not conform to societal norms are often targets of violence and bias that force them to live in fear for their safety or the loss of their jobs and shelter. A bill now before the New York City Council would give this marginalized population basic protection against discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.

The city’s human rights law has long barred discrimination based on gender. Since the 1980’s, the law has also prohibited discrimination based on ”sexual orientation.” But that provision focuses on issues of heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality. It does not protect those who identify themselves as transgender. The new legislation, which has 28 sponsors in the City Council, would broaden the definition of ”gender” to include not only a person’s sex, but also a person’s expression of gender identity, self-image and appearance.

Similar anti-bias laws have been enacted in nearly two dozen cities, including Atlanta, San Francisco and Minneapolis. The proposed measure has strong support from civil rights groups and political leaders, including Public Advocate Mark Green and City Comptroller Alan Hevesi. Council Speaker Peter Vallone, however, has not taken a position on the measure. Mr. Vallone should move swiftly to get the bill passed, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani should sign the measure.

This was the first editorial published by the New York Times endorsing transgender-specific legislation — in this case, Int. No. 24, the transgender rights law ultimately enacted by the New York City Council in April 2002; the editorial originally appeared in the 29 August 2000 issue of the New York Times.

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New Yorkers Join National Fight for Trans Equality
By Brett Krutzsch
NY Blade
Friday, May 18, 2007

Personal stories of harassment and discrimination were a uniting theme Tuesday night at the LGBT Center in Chelsea during a panel titled “Clock In/Speak Out: Gaining Momentum for Workplace Equality in New York and the U.S.”

Almost 50 people attended the discussion on transgender rights, sponsored by the LGBT legal advocacy group Lambda Legal. The debut program was one of seven flagship events across the country that took place on Tuesday to raise awareness for the  Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Introduced in Congress on April 24, ENDA could make it illegal to fire, prevent promotion, or refuse to hire anyone based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

At Tuesday’s event, the panel discussed key issues facing the transgender community, including problems with the healthcare system, workplace discrimination, and harassment of transgender youth in New York City schools.

“As an American citizen, I can work just like anyone else,” said panelist Elizabeth Rivera, Program Coordinator of TransJustice at the Audre Lorde Project. Rivera, who is transgender, said it can be very difficult to get a job when you are in an “in-between state” of male and female.

New York is one of 17 states that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, explicit statewide employment protection for transgender individuals does not exist.

Transgender youths are also at risk, and are not protected under New York State  law. Truman High School student Andy Santana, who identifies as “gender queer,” has been verbally and physically assaulted by other students, and said complaints to school officials have fallen on deaf ears. Santana said that when he was jumped by another student in a stairwell, “There was a security guard who saw me screaming, and walked away.”

“Fear of going to school harms people,” said Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. “You are less likely to be hired if you don’t have the skill set you need.”

Panel moderator and chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights and Advocacy (NYAGRA), Pauline Park, said that, “Since so many transgender people are forced out of high school, they don’t go to college. It’s no surprise that so many transgender people are forced into sex work or extremely low-paying work.”

Santana’s experience at Truman High School in the Bronx captured the attention of the audience and became a focal point for much of the evening.

“Gay bashing definitely happens,” Santana said. “Gay and transgender students in my school get their names posted on a wall by other kids. After a student gets jumped, their name gets crossed off.”

Park said her group has sponsored trainings related to transgender issues at Truman High School, but, “The principal has been hostile since day one,” and that the “Department of Education doesn’t do anything to take these issues seriously.”

Hayley Gorenberg, the deputy legal director of Lambda Legal, wanted the audience to know that transgender people can still take cases to court in states such as New York where there aren’t specific laws to protect transgender individuals.

“People are discriminated against all the time without knowing we have tools to fight,” she said.

The evening ended with a call to action. People were encouraged to sign a petition in support of ENDA. Everyone was also given information about New York State’s Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) that would protect against discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations and education. Those present were given phone numbers of State Assembly members on the Codes Committee who will be voting on the issue.

Marcy Farrell, who volunteers with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said that panel gave “all of us enough courage to be public about our transgenderness and to advocate for understanding, to be seen as human beings, despite our gender issues.”

Maurice Harrison, who was also in the audience, wished that the event could have been held somewhere other than the LGBT Center. “We have problems with the heterosexual community,” Harrison said. “And they have no idea about these meetings.”

Leslie Gabel-Brett, director of education and public Affairs at Lambda Legal, said she hopes Santana’s and others’ stories “raise visibility of transgender issues, and generate more activism on the state and national level.”

As Santana said before the panel ended, “If I had transferred out of the school, I would have shown my bashers that they had won.”

Now Santana’s story is inspiring others to fight for transgender individuals.

This article originally appeared in the New York Blade on 18 May 2007; the Blade is now defunct.

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If you ever wondered why the New York Post is reviled by progressives and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in New York City, the Rupert Murdoch footprint daily demonstrated why in April 2005, when the tabloid printed an op-ed by Nicole Gelinas of the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

In the op-ed, Gelinas inaccurately claims that the guidelines for implementation of the 2002 New York City transgender rights law (adopted by the City Commission on Human Rights in December 2004) say that “people can pick whichever gender they want to be.” Not true. The guidelines recognized that transgendered people face pervasive discrimination and violence in this city, even after enactment of that landmark law. These sensible and practical regulations were intended to enhance public safety at minimal cost, including the safety of transgendered women who, if forced to use the men’s room, would be vulnerable to humiliation as well as harassment and assault.

But truth and the Murdoch press have been long estranged, and so the transphobic op-ed from Nicole Gelinas — complete with offensive headline — came as no surprise to any of the transgender activists that I know.

Tranny Time
By Nicole Gelinas
New York Post
18 April 2005

Human rights are self-evident and sacred: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But Gotham has gone one further: New York’s Commission on Human Rights has determined that everyone in the city has the inalienable right to . . . dress up in women’s clothing and use the women’s restroom?

Last year, Pauline Park, who is biologically male but views herself as a woman and dresses as one, used the women’s public restroom at the Manhattan Mall. After she used the same restroom again, five security guards from Advantage Security stopped her. Park told The New York Times: “The female security guard demanded to know, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ I said to her that I identify as a woman. And she said, ‘One of my colleagues thought you were a man.’ ”

The same thing happened to Justine Nicholas, who, like Park, is biologically male but identifies as a woman: Park was stopped by Advantage guards after using a women’s restroom at a different location.

Enlightened people would view the above incidents as awkward situations — but Mayor Bloomberg has turned them into human-rights violations. Bloomberg outlawed “gender-identity” discrimination in 2002 — and last December, the Human-Rights Commission released guidelines to enforce the new law.

The law covers people whose “gender identity and/or gender expression does not match society’s expectations of how an individual who was assigned a particular sex at birth should behave in relation to their gender.” It covers, but is not limited to, pre-operative transsexuals and, as the commission notes, “drag queens or kings.”

Sounds complicated — and it is. It’s also expensive. Violations carry fines up to $250,000.

The law is a waste of taxpayer money — the Human Rights Commission’s budget could go toward keeping libraries open late.

Worse: The law will compromise public safety and punish employers. The law covers “challenging an individual’s gender” — so Park and Nicholas filed complaints. Under a settlement reached two weeks ago — one of the first — Advantage will fork over $2,500 apiece to each woman. (Park, as a co-chairman of New York’s Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, had lobbied for the law in the first place.)

Five grand won’t put Advantage out of business — but it’s a humiliating result for a company that did nothing wrong. Security guards are supposed to look out for unusual activity — and a man in women’s clothes in public restrooms is an unusual occurrence, and a possible security risk.

Worse, Advantage has now agreed to allow people to use bathrooms at locations it polices around the city, “consistent with their gender identity” (apparently to be unchallenged on sight). This forces guards to put gender politics above common sense, comfort and safety.

The law will also cause headaches and cost more money. It covers “housing institutions” — so what happens when a man who identifies as a woman shows up as the roommate of a female student at NYU?

The law also recommends that employers and retail stores label single-stall restrooms as “gender-neutral” — and construct private spaces in locker rooms and changing rooms. The implication: If companies don’t do these things, they could be seen as promoting an environment ripe for discrimination — and bullied into paying a fine if an awkward incident occurs.

And the law recommends that employers educate their workers, so that they don’t face hefty fines for crimes like not addressing customers “with names, titles, pronouns and other terms appropriate to their gender identity.”

Finally: The guidelines are just plain nonsensical. They note that “Nothing in the Human Rights Law prohibits restrooms from being designated by gender.” But people can pick whichever gender they want to be — which makes any attempt at gender segregation at public facilities futile.

If Park or Nicholas were ever threatened or assaulted because of her gender identity, officials would, and should, prosecute the perpetrators. But mind-boggling new regulations over “he vs. she” is the last thing New York’s businesses, and its tolerant citizens, need.

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