Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
and
President of the board of directors and acting executive director
Queens Pride House

Day of Silence
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
11 April 2014

I would like to thank Infusions for inviting me to speak at the Day of Silence event today and I would especially like to thank Danny Wenan Zheng, the president of Infusions, who was instrumental in bringing me here. It’s hard to believe that it’s now 20 years since I finished my Ph.D. here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) way back in 1994, and I’m grateful for every opportunity to come back to C-U to visit the old alma mater, and I’m absolutely delighted to be here and to have the opportunity to talk about LGBT identities, multiple oppressions, intersectionality and community empowerment with you today. And in fact, I’ve entitled my talk “Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions” because it seems to me that those are three of the crucial elements in our task.

My perspective is informed by work in the academy both in faculty and staff positions and of course as a student as well as work in the community, most intensively with Queens Pride House, which I co-founded in 1997, and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which I co-founded in 1998. Queens Pride House is the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, and we offer support groups — including a transgender support group, which I serve as co-coordinator — free mental health counseling for members of the community, and other services; we are just completing our first funded advocacy program which focused on advocating for members of the community — especially transgendered women of color — who are victims of police harassment and brutality.

NYAGRA is a co-founding member of the coalition seeking enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), the transgender rights bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and I represent NYAGRA in that coalition, as I did in the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) in 2011. The Dignity Act came into effect this July and prohibits discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state of New York. I mention safe schools legislation in the context of this discussion because the New York State Dignity legislation includes a comprehensive list of ‘protected categories,’ including race, religion, ethnicity, and disability as well as sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. Safe schools legislation such as DASA can help move us out of a purely ‘identitarian’ conceptual framework, which can be limiting.

For example, with both the New York State Dignity for All Students Act and the New York City Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA) enacted in 2004, the diversity of the coalition itself was a major source of strength. LGBT organizations certainly constituted a core component of both coalitions, but both coalitions also included substantial participation by organizations of color; in the case of the NYC DASA Coalition, it was Asian American groups that played an especially significant role. The Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF) and the Sikh Coalition, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), were key members of the coalition, along with LGBT organizations such as NYAGRA and the Empire State Pride Agenda.

As I like to point out, when it comes to legislative work, the active participation of people and organizations of color is crucial in the success of such work; and the two DASA coalitions in which I participated demonstrate that LGBT organizations that actively engage non-LGBT-specific organizations of color can find such engagement and participation in safe schools coalitions to be fertile opportunities for collaboration and relationship-building.

It should be obvious — but may not be to everyone — that the work of breaking the silence has focused substantially on the problem of bullying and bias-based harassment in elementary and secondary schools, since so many LGBT students drop out of school because of such bullying and never make it to college; and that is as it should be, since our ability to break the silence must include our ability to make schools throughout this country safe for every student, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability and every other difference that is used against students by their peers, by faculty or by non-teaching staff in our schools.

But while the origin of the Day of Silence begin with anti-bullying work, I would argue that our work in breaking the silence cannot end there; it must encompass everything that is currently diminishing the ability of both LGBT and non-LGBT people to participate fully in this society. So, for example, it must include access to health care, both in schools and on college campuses and elsewhere.

In 2009, NYAGRA published the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York metropolitican area; and while directories of this kind have been posted on-line for cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the NYAGRA directory was the first such directory in the United States ever published in a print edition; we are updating it continuously as we identify more transgender-sensitive providers in the area and it is now available on-line as well.

In addition to the work I do on behalf of NYAGRA in the legislative arena, one other important component of my work is transgender sensitivity training; I’ve conducted sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations, ranging from one-hour workshops to full-day trainings. A small part of my training work has been with academic institutions, focused on issues related to transgender inclusion — including, for example, gender-neutral housing, which has become a major issue on many campuses.

One of the biggest issues for transgendered people both on campus and off is access to health care, which is why I co-founded the Transgender Health Initiative of New York back in 2004. THINY (as we call it) and its members have worked tirelessly to try to open up health care to members of our community in New York, who face significant impediments to accessing quality health care, just as they do throughout the country.

In 2006, I co-facilitated a series of trainings 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. Sadly enough, St. Vincent’s went bankrupt last year and closed after failing to resolve a situation in which the hospital had accumulated over a billion dollars in debt. Sad, too, because these were the first transgender sensitivity trainings for any major hospital in the city and they 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. In that regard, I am delighted to hear that UIUC will make its student health insurance fully transgender-inclusive starting in the fall semester 2014, covering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) 100% and providing 80% coverage for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (which some call gender confirmation surgery); this is a significant advance and I congratulate all those who made this happen.

But 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 surgery. In fact, the biggest challenge for transgendered people really is accessing healthcare for all of those medical issues unrelated to gender transition. And it is poor people, immigrants and people of color who are most likely to be under-insured or entirely uninsured. Which leads me to an important theme of my talk today, the need to address multiple oppressions through the lens of intersectionality in order to break the silence. Let me suggest that to do so effectively, we must avoid the erasure of multiple identities that so often accompanies the dominance of white-dominant organizations in the LGBT community.

And what precisely is the silence that we must break? First, we need to address racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community; second, we must also address homophobia and transgenderphobia in the LGBT community; and last but not least, we need to embrace an ethic of ethic of accountability and responsibility that enables us to empower all our communities. These are the three distinct but interrelated principles that I would like to articulate here.

Racism &  Ethnocentrism in the LGBT Community

Let me begin with a story that seems to me to illustrate the compelling need to address racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community. In October 1998, the Audre Lorde Project (ALP) and the Gender Identity Project of what was then the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center worked together to organize TransWorld I, the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color.

The Center GIP had held three previous conferences known as ‘Transgender/Transsexual Health Empowerment Conferences.’ While providing useful information about hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sex reassignment surgery (SRS), and other procedures to those pursuing a medical transition, these conferences had featured a roster of speakers who were almost all non-transgendered white men – mostly endocrinologists, surgeons, psychiatrists and others in the ‘gender industry.’

Those of us who were members of the organizing committee for TransWorld I decided that we would invite only people of color to play formal roles in speaking at the conference, in an effort to make TransWorld truly a ‘speak-out’ for transgendered people of color. I decided to call up Riki Anne Wilchins, the executive director of GenderPAC, to invite her to attend TransWorld. Riki had been, after all, instrumental in helping set up the GIP with Barbara Warren several years before as well as organizing the first Transgender/Transsexual Health Empowerment Conference. And I had taken Riki’s bona fides as an ‘anti-racist’ seriously when she had asked me to talk to participants in GenderPAC’s annual lobby day in Washington, D.C. in May 1998 on the subject of how to address issues of discrimination based on gender identity and expression when speaking with members of Congress and their staff members who were people of color.

I was all the more shocked by Riki’s response to my invitation, then, when she denounced TransWorld as a ‘racist’ conference for ‘excluding white people.’ I pointed out to Riki that everyone was invited to attend and even to speak from the floor during plenary sessions and workshops, but that we had made a point of inviting only those who identified as people of color to speak as presenters in order to make the conference truly a conversation among transgendered and gender-variant people of color.

It seemed to me that Riki’s characterization of TransWorld as a ‘racist’ event was based on a failure to understand the difference between the historic exclusion of people of color – not to mention women and LGBT people – from positions of power and privilege and the creation of ‘safe spaces’ for members of disadvantaged and oppressed communities.

There is a fundamental difference between the exclusion of people of color as well as women and LGBT people from all-white and all-male private clubs and the construction of spaces for discussion and support for such people. The difference lies in the asymmetry of power between conventionally gendered heterosexual white men and all those deemed ‘other’ in this society based on their race, ethnicity, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, or other characteristic. There have been organizations for LGBT/queer Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) for at least 20 years, but there are still people – mainly gay white men – who still label such groups as ‘racist’ if and when they insist on limiting some of their events (usually discussion groups) to queer APIs.

This is not to suggest, of course, that there are not at the very least boundary issues – for example, what constitutes ‘Asian/Pacific Islander’ for API groups or what qualifies one as a ‘person of color’ for POC organizations or who counts as a ‘woman’ in ‘women-only’ spaces. In truth, all identities and identity formations are social constructs. But those social constructions that take into account relations of power – and crucially those asymmetries of power that exist in this society as in every society – would seem to me to be the most useful.

It is when members of our community sorely uninformed on issues or race and ethnicity bring their prejudices into the public arena in campaigns for LGBT rights legislation that those prejudices can have potentially still greater consequence, as another story will illustrate. In February 2000, NYAGRA – working in partnership with the Empire State Pride Agenda, the largest lesbian and gay political organization in the state – launched the public phase of our campaign for Int. No. 24 – the transgender rights bill enacted by the New York City Council four years later. Standing on the steps of New York City Hall between two African American members of the City Council – one straight, one gay – and next to a Latina Lesbian member of the Council, I was struck by the important symbolism of having a transgendered woman of color lead the campaign for that legislation, in a city that is two-thirds people of color. Following my speech, a white transsexual activist named Melissa Sklarz spoke, loudly declaring, “When I transitioned, I lost my white skin and my white skin privilege.” Truth be told, she still looked pretty white to me. I was mortified that Melissa would make such a statement – standing on the steps of City Hall with two African American Council Members, a Latina Council Member, the executive director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, and a representative of the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund – and that her statement would be quoted in the news story on our press conference in Lesbian & Gay New York, the leading LGBT weekly in the city.

The working group coordinating the campaign had decided on a strategy of securing the support of people of color in the City Council and Melissa’s statement could only put into question the credibility of our commitment to forefronting the discrimination faced by transgendered people of color in the five boroughs. Fortunately, the African American who was the lead sponsor of the bill did not make an issue of Melissa’s comment.

But I am dismayed to see activists of the prominence of Riki Anne Wilchins and Melissa Sklarz make comments that clearly show a failure to understand fundamental differences between and among different forms of exclusion and oppression, and such comments and the attitudes that are made manifest by them demonstrate the need to address issues of racism and ethnocentrism within the white-dominant LGBT community.

Homophobia & Transgenderphobia in Communities of Color

At the same time, I am dismayed by the apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of at least some LGBT people of color for addressing the homophobia and transgenderphobia that is prevalent in our communities of color.  I recall one occasion when I raised the issue of homophobia and transgenderphobia in API communities at a public forum on organizing in queer API communities.  At this event at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan in September 2001, my comment elicited a response from Joo-Hyun Kang, then executive director of the Audre Lorde Project, a center for LGBTST people of color based in Brooklyn. “Are you saying that people of color are more homophobic than white people?,”Joo-Hyun asked. It seemed to me a somewhat rhetorical question, to which the response was simply, “no.” I was making no comparison, but rather simply asking if we as queer APIs thought it as important to address homophobia and transgenderphobia that is prevalent in our communities of color as it is to address racism and ethnocentrism in the white-dominant LGBT community. And I would answer my own question with a definitive ‘yes.’ Indeed, to fail to do so is to abdicate our responsibility as LGBT people of color. To fail to do so would also concede our right to live openly as LGBT people in our communities of origin.

I am struck by the defensive tone of some LGBT people of color when I raise the issue of homophobia and transgenderphobia in our communities of color and the accusation implicit in their defensive response, “Are you saying that people of color are more homophobic than white people?,” that we are somehow “letting down the side” even to be admitting to the presence let alone the prevalence of homophobia and transgenderphobia in our communities of color. Such an implicit accusation is based on a binary opposition of ‘good/bad’ that suggests that we are somehow condemning our communities altogether by raising the question of anti-LGBT sentiment in those communities. But it seems to me that if we care about our communities of origin, we have both a right and an obligation to challenge homophobia and transgenderphobia in them; after all, if we don’t, who will?

I think the real question is whether or not LGBT/queer people of color are actively involved in the examination of homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color rather than a situation all too prevalent in which white leaders and white-led organizations engage in such a critique without being informed by any critical race consciousness. The current debates over how to respond to countries such as Uganda and Nigeria which earlier this year enacted explicitly homophobic legislation effectively criminalizing not only same-sex sexual relations but LGBT people themselves are a case in point; I would argue that we as LGBT people of color owe it to our brothers and sisters in Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica, Malaysia and elsewhere to be actively involved in that examination; we need LGBT people of color with critical race consciousness to ensure that such discussions do not fall into the trap of a binary opposition of white LGBT ‘saviors’ and oppressed LGBT people of color as mere victims without agency or voice.

Back in November 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage throughout the state after thousands of same-sex couples had already received marriage licenses from San Francisco to San Diego. I participated in a massive demonstration in New York that passed by the Mormon temple on Broadway and 66th St. on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I remember some very good placards, including some which were very clever in taking on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and its role in the Prop 8 campaign. But I also remember some signs that I found problematic, including one held aloft by a gay white man declaring that “gay is the new black.” Now, those of us who are people of color know from personal experience that there are significant differences between discrimination based on race or ethnicity and that based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, and it is problematic to conflate or elide them.

Let me also mention an important element in racial and quasi-racial discourse that has become very nearly the dominant discourse in the United States since 9/11, and that is Islamophobia. Granted that Islam is a religion and not a race, but ‘Muslim’ and ‘Arab’ are often conflated by Americans, such as the elderly white woman who asked Sen. John McCain at a campaign event in 2008 if Barack Obama was an ‘Arab.’ I’m quite sure that woman was completely unaware of the fact that the largest Muslim-majority nation on earth is not an Arab country at all (viz., Indonesia). But given the conflation of Islam and Arabs, the rising tide of Islamophobia has had a powerful effect on communities of color in this country as well as in Europe.

After September 2001, many people of color were assaulted on the street, unfairly linked in the minds of some white Americans to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. I live in Jackson Heights in western Queens, a neighborhood with a large South Asian population; just around the corner from me is a two-block stretch of 74th St. popularly referred to as ‘Little India’ in which Sikh men with large turbans are ever-present. I vividly remember Sikh men wearing saffron-colored turbans standing on street corners and outside of subway stations handing out brochures explaining that Sikhs are neither Arab nor Muslim; of course, no one should have been harassed or assaulted because of their actual or perceived race, religion or national origin in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; but it was heart-rending to read of the attacks on Sikhs and South Asians as well as those of Arab origin and descent and anyone perceived to be Muslim in the  immediate aftermath of the fall of the Two Towers. Under no circumstances should Sikhs have to explain either their religion and headdress nor their differences with others perceived (incorrectly) to be a threat to American security. I have friends — including South Asians — who have been interrogated and even harassed by Transportation Security Agency (TSA) agents at airports because of this widespread misperception of security threats. I have a friend of Libyan descent who was born and raised in the United Kingdom who was interrogated by the TSA at the airport because he has an Arab name; ironically enough, he is estranged from his family after they rejected him when his sister ‘outed’ him to the rest of the family as gay.

Another area in which Islamophobia has reared its ugly head is in discussions of Israel/Palestine, where the fact that the majority of Palestinians are at least nominally Muslim has been used in a campaign of ‘pinkwashing’ — an attempt to justify the continued illegal occupation of Palestine by the Israeli military on the pretext that Palestinian society and neighboring Arab societies are monolithically and profoundly homophobic, in contrast with a liberal Israel ostensibly better on gay rights. In fact, the actual situation is far more complex than that; but the attempts to justify the illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip is based on an entirely false premise, namely, that Israel is a haven for LGBT Palestinians; in fact, queer Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not permitted to enter Israel without special permission (which is rarely granted in practice) and Israeli law does not recognize economic or political refugees who are non-Jewish — a fact that I often find myself compelled to mention in the context of my Palestine solidarity work through New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA).

All of that being said, while we must recognize and address the racism and ethnocentrism — including the Islamophobia where it rears its ugly head — in much discourse on homophobia and transgenderphobia when discussing communities of color as well as countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, we must also challenge  homophobes and others who deny the legitimate points of comparison between discrimination and violence based on homophobia and transgenderphobia on the one hand and that based on racism and ethnocentrism on the other, and I see significant parallels as well as quite a few significant differences. Above all, it seems to me that the failure or even outright refusal by some of our organizations to address homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color and in our countries and continents of origin is tantamount to an abdication of responsibility, and the consequences of that abdication of responsibility can be very real indeed for those who suffer such oppression, including the state-sanctioned oppression of LGBT people by the murderous regimes of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, not to mention Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Racism, Institutional Power and the Noble Savage Revisited

The need for LGBT people of color to speak out in situations such as those involving the effective criminalization of LGBT people in countries such as Jamaica, Uganda, Nigeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others,  speaks to another issue of signal importance, which is that of the construction of racism and a discourse of anti-racism in this country.

Let us begin by acknowledging that the problem of race and racism goes back to the founding of the republic and even before. Slavery was recognized in the Constitution of 1787 and so deeply embedded in the constitutional order of the regime that it took a civil war to resolve the question and then another hundred years of struggle to end state-sanctioned segregation. Anyone who has seen “Twelve Years a Slave” — a film based on the live of Solomon Northrup that won a well-deserved Academy Award in February — will understand how profoundly the institution of slavery has shaped the history of this country.

But we would make a mistake if we regarded the issue of race as a regional problem. It would not surprise anyone to learn that a Southern city (Charleston, South Carolina) had the largest slave population before the Civil War. But do you know which city had the second largest slave population? It was New York. After Brown vs. Board of Education prompted the formal desegregation of public school systems in the South, many in the North remained segregated due to informal systems of control, often under the guise of ‘neighborhood schools.’ Growing up on the south side of Milwaukee, my brother and I were the only non-white children in our elementary school and Milwaukee, in fact, had one of the most thoroughly segregated public school systems in the country before court-ordered desegregation in 1977.

One of the difficulties in discussing racism is the way in which it is differently construed in different communities. To many white people, ‘racism’ is an individual-level issue and the charge of ‘racism’ is often read as an accusation of personal prejudice. Most people of color, on the other hand, recognize that racism involves institutional power as well as individual bigotry. And there are some who insist that people of color cannot be ‘racist’ because they do not exercise institutional power or control institutional resources; but a simple review of the facts will demonstrate that this is not in fact the case.

As we all know, the United States elected its first African American president in 2008, and given the history of slavery and segregation in this country, Barack Obama’s election was certainly an enormous symbolic victory; but was it in fact a practical advance for people of color, including LGBT people of color? I would simply point to the fact that since his election, Obama has killed twice as many people of color in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone strikes than George W. Bush and deported more than four times as many undocumented immigrants than Bush; how many of the victims of drone strikes or the deported immigrants were LGBT we cannot know, but some almost certainly must have been. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have pointed out that Obama’s drone strikes are illegal under international law and may well constitute war crimes under the clear meaning of the term. And La Raza has called Obama the ‘Deporter-in-Chief.’

Obama’s defenders no doubt will point to his decision to abandon the defense of the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton and his appointment of two justices — one of them a Latina — who voted to strike down key provisions of the federal DOMA. But the key question I have posed here is whether people of color do in fact exercise institutional power in this country — the crucial point, in the view of critical race theory, as to whether people of color can be racists. And here I would point out that there are now so many African American mayors that they have formed a National Conference of Black Mayors, which counts nearly 50 mayors of cities with a population over 50,000; that’s not to mention African Americans as governor of large states, such as New York (the former governor, David Paterson) and Massachusetts (Deval Patrick) and members of the US Senate (most recently, Cory Booker, who was elected to represent New Jersey last November. We have also had two African American U.S. Secretary of States – though I doubt that most people would describe either Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice as progressive in their policy-making when they served in the Bush administration.

Latinos and Asian Americans are also coming into political prominence, though here, too, there are to be found both progressive and exceedingly unprogressive figures. To the latter category we must surely assign Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general of the United States in the Bush administration; the record of Obama’s African American attorney general, Eric Holder, is distinctly mixed, to say the least. I might also mention John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General (in the Office of Legal Counsel) and Diet Vinh, who served as Assistant Attorney General under Gonzalez in George W. Bush’s first term. Along with Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo (now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law) co-authored “Legal Arguments for Avoiding the Jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions,” the notorious 42-page memo that effectively authorized the use of indefinite detention without trial as well as the use of torture by US forces in Guantanamo and elsewhere (Neil A. Lewis, “Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights,” New York Times, 21 May 2004).

And Diet Vinh was the central figure in drafting the USA Patriot Act (Eric Lichtblau, “At Home in War on Terror: Viet Dinh Has Gone from Academe to a Key Behind-the-Scenes Role”, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2002), which surely must be accounted the most Orwellian legislation ever enacted by the US Congress, a frontal assault on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that sadly many leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton voted for and continue to support.

It would be all too easy – and simply wrong – to dismiss figures such as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Diet Vinh as mere ‘tokens.’ They are not tokens; in fact, they are much worse: they are people of color who exercise or have exercised real institutional power at the highest levels of government. And they have used that power largely to the detriment of people of color, both here in the United States and abroad.

As a direct result of the legal work that John Yoo did for Alberto Gonzalez, the Bush administration overturned the principle of habeas corpus, a central principle in the tradition of English common law that goes back to the signing of Magna Carta by King John in 1215. John Yoo’s work gave pseudo-legal cover for the Bush administration’s indefinite detention without charge of thousands of people in Guantanamo and in secret ‘black prisons’ in Eastern Europe. When the full record of this gross violation of human rights is finally written, it may well show that most of those detained without trial and even without legal counsel were completely innocent of the accusation of involvement with terrorism – one cannot say ‘charges’ of terrorism because most of these unfortunate individuals were never charged. Significantly, most of these individuals were and are people of color – mainly of Middle Eastern origin.

And so I would argue that the evidence shows that people of color at the highest levels of the Bush administration and the US government have participated in a concerted use of institutional power in a way that can only be described as ‘racist.’ It would seem to me that the attempt to deny our ability and capacity as people of color to commit acts of racism is to deny the reality of the complicity of at least some of us in the most unspeakable violations of human rights in decades. It hardly exonerates the likes of Rice, Gonzalez, Yoo, and Dinh that they served as the happy black, brown and yellow faces of a white administration.

I would argue that we owe it to the victims of Guantanamo to hold those responsible for such abuses accountable regardless of whether they are white or people of color. And I would also argue that we must reclaim our full humanity as people of color only by conceding the possibility of our doing evil as well as good. Only by acknowledging the bad that some people of color do in this world can we hope to have the good that some of us do as people of color fully appreciated.

And of course, Barack Obama himself is the ultimate example of the achievement of political power in this country. I know that there are a few who would argue that Obama, like any president, is a captive of the system; but if that is true, then no individual holds real power and no individual can be held accountable for his or her actions, a conclusion that I find absurd, however constricted the powers of even the president of the United States might be.

There are those in our communities of color who would exempt their fellow people of color from the capacity for racism and for evil more generally; in doing so, they pay unwitting homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s celebration of the Noble Savage, incapable of evil as he is incapable of good. Writing in 1755 in A Discourse on Inequality Among Men, the French Enlightenment philosopher declared,

“Men in a state of nature do not know good and evil, but their independence, along with ‘the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice,’ keep them from doing ill.”

It seems to me that there is behind the notion that people of color are incapable of racism the very white idea of the Noble Savage. So I see a rather enormous irony here, because those who follow Rousseau in exempting their fellow people of color from the capacity to commit this particular form of evil – namely, racism – I am certain would be among the loudest in criticizing colleges and universities for requiring the reading of the canonical texts of dead white men. And so those who limit the capacity for institutional racism only to white people unwittingly echo the words of Rousseau, among the deadest and whitest of dead white men.

I am sure that some would object that people of color do not exercise the same degree of institutional power in the United States as white people, even if they are willing to acknowledge access to institutional power by people of color at all. And I would agree. But the people of color who are being deported, who are suffering in indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and are being targeted (accurately or inaccurately) for drone strikes most likely will not find it a comforting thought that they are denied legal redress as the result of by the actions of prominent people of color in the Obama administration as in the Bush administration.

I would urge us therefore to avoid falling into the trap of revisiting the discourse of the Noble Savage, which would deny us as people of color our capacity for good as surely as it would deny us our capacity for evil. Rather than denying the evident reality that we as people of color are beginning to come into real institutional power in this country, I would urge us to escape the limitations of an overly narrow identity politics that would have us identify with either LGBT people and/or people of color simply because they are one or the other or both; instead, we need to focus on the actions of people in power and people with power and the impact of their actions on real people, whether LGBT people and/or people of color.

I would also urge us to embrace the possibility of attaining even greater institutional power. I would urge us to embrace the possibility of using that power responsibly on behalf of our communities, in order to further empower LGBT people, people of color, and especially LGBT people of color. Rather than retreat into a discourse that would deny us our full humanity, I would urge us to embrace that full humanity. And rather than focusing exclusively or primarily on racism and ethnocentrism in the white-dominant LGBT community, I would urge us to address both racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community and homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color.

And that means approaching politics and policy from an intersectional perspective, understanding the multiple oppressions under which LGBT people of color labor as well as the opportunities for the achievement of power and therefore the need for an ethic of accountability and responsibility.

Just as those of us who are LGBT people of color cannot leave behind our racial or ethnic identities or skin color when we participate in the LGBT community, we also should not have to leave behind our LGBT identities when we participate in the life of communities of color. We owe it to our communities and we owe it to ourselves to pursue the broadest possible conception of social change and the most rigorous and inclusive as well as historically informed agenda of social justice.

And so it seems to me that we must insist on an ethic of accountability and responsibility and an analysis of politics and policy informed by critical race theory in order to understand our world and to make change in it, engaging in a process of social change that produces genuine justice and social transformation. As the Mahatma Gandhi would say, we must be the change that we seek to make in the world.

Thank you.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York, which she co-founded in June 1998, and president of the board of directors and acting executive director of Queens Pride House, the LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, which she co-founded in 1997. 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. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered person chosen to be grand marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March, the country’s oldest and largest pride parade. She 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. Park has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions (UIUC, 4.11.14) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Tom Duane

Melissa Sklarz

NYAGRA history: 2000

With the crisis over Chelsea Goodwin’s membership — and that of her partner, Rusty Mae Moore — resolved in December 1999, the new year brought new opportunities to re-establish a firmer foundation for the organization. And so in January 2000, I proposed to the board that we incorporate as a not-for-profit corporation under state law and apply to the Internal Revenue Service for 501(c)(3) status. I argued that NYAGRA was limited in what it could do on a purely volunteer basis and the board accepted my assessment, and so we began a process that would lead us in a direction unanticipated by most of our founding members. The original vision that I had was to make NYAGRA into the transgender community’s Empire State Pride Agenda — a statewide organization with real clout in Albany. It seemed to me obvious that NYAGRA could not hope to challenge the Pride Agenda on transgender inclusion unless we had a substantial membership and funding base. And the organizational weakness of NYAGRA as an infant organization at our first meeting with ESPA in November 1998 was for me incontrovertible evidence of the need to build organizational capacity.

With the approval of the board, I drafted our first grant proposal, which ultimately won NYAGRA $10,000 from the Stonewall Community Foundation. Though small for the leading LGBT organizations in New York, that grant seemed enormous to us as members of an infant organization with no funding. That Stonewall grant also made us the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in the country to secure grant funding. Our second grant from the Paul Rapoport Foundation for $10,000 would further advance our capacity-building, and a third grant for $50,000 from the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation would put us in the position to hire paid staff for the first time.

In retrospect, I now see that my willingness to be a one-woman fundraising and grant-writing committee led to a fundamental weakness in the organization: no other board member actively participated in the effort to secure resources for NYAGRA. True, both David and Melissa joined me for the meeting with a contact at OSI through whom we were able to secure the Soros grant; Gara La Marche was the friend of a friend and colleague of Melissa’s who arranged our lunch meeting with him. And to his credit, David did write the first draft of the grant proposal to OSI, but it was more of an academic treatise than a grant proposal, and I had to completely re-write it. I was the only NYAGRA board member who consistently participated in grant-writing and fundraising efforts on behalf of the organization. And until 2002, when we hired Jeanne Bergman as a grant writer, I had no significant help in that regard, with the sole exception of the November 2001 fundraising event.

My willingness to take on this task was an expression of my commitment to the organization. Because I did not have a full-time job, I had more time (at least in theory) than other board members for organization-building activities such as this; but I recognize in retrospect that my failure to insist on their participation in fundraising and/or grant-writing as a condition of membership of the board was a mistake. My few attempts to propose a ‘give-get’ condition of board membership – considered standard for (c)(3) organizations – were rejected by my board colleagues. Donna led the rejectionists, accusing me of trying to turn the NYAGRA board into a ‘corporate board’ by proposing the insertion into the bylaws of a ‘give-get’ provision – in which a board member is required either to give or to fundraise or grant-write a certain minimum sum per year. $2,000 seemed to me a rather modest minimum for the board of an ostensibly statewide advocacy organization. And ironically enough, Donna would later join the board of another transgender organization with just such a ‘give-get’ rule. But the advice from Jane Schwartz, the executive director of the Rapoport Foundation, that I insist on such a provision, did not reckon with such stiff resistance, and the simple reality was that I did not have a majority of board members willing to accept it. So the task of funding the organization remained mine simply because no one else was willing to help me with it. (David showed some willingness to help but had no background in grant-writing, and as the need to complete his dissertation became increasingly acute, the time that he had available to volunteer for NYAGRA diminished significantly.)

At the same time that I was pressing the HCBC on transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill, I was also working to ensure full transgender inclusion in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), legislation intended to prohibit discrimination and harassment of students in public schools throughout the state based on a wide range of characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, and sexual orientation, as well as gender. The lead sponsor of the bill in the New York State Senate was the chamber’s only openly gay member, Sen. Thomas K. Duane (D-29), who was elected to the Senate in 1998 after having served seven years in the New York City Council.

But gender was not defined in the original Dignity bill, and in February 2000, Ross Levi, now the legislative counsel of the Pride Agenda, called me and asked me what NYAGRA and the transgender community would think of a DASA bill without anything more than ‘actual or perceived’ before the list of protected categories. I told him that to my knowledge, the phrase ‘actual or perceived gender’ had never been interpreted by any court in New York or any other state to include all transgendered and gender-variant people in the absence of a definition of gender in the text of the law that included the phrase ‘identity or expression.’ The very same week, I said the same thing to Mark Furnish, Tom Duane’s legislative counsel, and urged him to add a definition of gender with at least identity and expression in it to the DASA bill that he was in the process of reviewing and redrafting. Mark did not seem to understand the need for such a definition and felt that ‘actual or perceived gender’ would be sufficient; but without any experience in drafting transgender-inclusive legislation and without any expertise in transgender law, Mark’s opinion on the matter did not strike me as being in the least bit persuasive; quite the contrary.

I had genuine concern that Tom Duane and his staff would fail to support NYAGRA’s commitment to full transgender inclusion in DASA and in the hate crimes bill, and I shared those concerns with my NYAGRA colleagues through the board listserve. In my messages to the NYAGRA board over the course of the spring and summer of 2000, I laid out a strategy for getting Tom Duane’s support for NYAGRA’s call for inclusion of gender identity and expression in both DASA and the hate crimes bill.

I took for granted that ever member of the NYAGRA board was committed not only to the organization and its legislative agenda but also to the transgender community on whose behalf we advocated. It never occurred to me that a board member would violate the confidentiality of the board list. And so I wrote frankly to board members that I believed that we would have to aggressively pursue Tom Duane’s support for even, if necessary, embarrassing him publicly into doing the right thing.

After consulting the board, I wrote Tom a letter on behalf of NYAGRA requesting his help in persuading the HCBC to support a fully transgender-inclusive draft that would include identity and expression in a definition of gender. Neither Tom nor Andrew Berman (then his chief of staff), who frequently represented Tom at the coalition meetings ever responded to that letter, nor did they ever publicly or privately support our call for a fully transgender-supportive bill. Only later would I learn that Tom and his staff were actively working to undermine our efforts.

That spring, NYAGRA joined ESPA and several other organizations – including the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) – in founding the New York State DASA Coalition. From the beginning, I told the representatives of the coalition member organizations – including Tony O’Rourke, who represented GLSEN in the coalition – that only a definition of gender that included ‘identity or expression’ would be sufficient to make the legislation fully transgender-inclusive.

As the first meetings of the state DASA Coalition got underway, there was indication that the hate crimes bill might move forward.  At a crucial April 2000 meeting of the HCBC, I spoke at length to the need for revising the hate crimes bill to add a definition of gender. Howie Katz was dismissive, not surprising, given his hostility to me and to transgender inclusion in the legislation. Given that Howie (then on staff at the Anti-Defamation League) was the coordinator of the HCBC and had relationships with the lead sponsors of the bill in the Assembly and the Senate, his opposition to inclusion of gender identity and expression in the bill would be a nearly insurmountable impediment to securing that inclusion.

Just before a previous HCBC meeting, Howie had told me to forget about transgender inclusion in state legislation and instead to focus my efforts and NYAGRA’s exclusively on the local level. I had spoken at great length with Tim Sweeney and after much discussion had managed to persuade him to go to Matt Foreman, but while the deputy director was willing to support transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill, the executive director was not, and without Matt’s support, ESPA’s position could not be changed; and without ESPA’s support, neither ADL nor Howie Katz as coordinator could be pressured to support transgender inclusion in the bill. Earlier, Tim had suggested that Howie facilitate a meeting between me and David Paterson, the leading Democratic sponsor of the bill in the Senate, but Howie had never made any serious effort to organize such a meeting, and in the rush of excitement over the bill’s movement forward in April 2000, Howie dropped even the pretense of approaching the bill’s sponsors about the possibility of adding transgender-inclusive language.

Ironically enough, it was the HCBC member organization representative who had greeted my participation in the coalition with the greatest enthusiasm who was most dismissive of my call for transgender inclusion in the legislation. When I first met Zell Andrews, who at that time was the LGBT community liaison to the Westchester County Executive, she had gone out of her way to make me feel welcome at coalition meetings, seeming genuinely delighted to see a transgender advocacy organization represented in the coalition. But at the April 2000 HCBC meeting, when I argued for transgender inclusion in the bill, Zell cut me off sharply, telling me that transgendered people would simply have to wait their turn; the coalition needed to move forward with the bill as it was written, and if there were any ambiguity about transgender inclusion in the legislation, those could be dealt with after enactment. The almost exaggerated enthusiasm for my participation in the work of the coalition that Zell had shown throughout 1999 now dissipated in a sneering dismissal of the need for explicitly inclusive language. It was revealing confirmation of the utter insincerity of Zell’s professed commitment to transgender inclusion in her work when as executive director of the Loft – the LGBT community center in Westchester County – she supported the lesbians who insisted on excluding transgendered women from a women’s support group that met at the Loft’s space in White Plains. Ultimately, after leaving her position as executive director of the Loft, Zell joined the lesbian separatists who founded a rival community center that openly prided themselves on excluding transgendered women from their women’s groups.

As a result of my interaction with Zell Andrews and others in the HCBC, I realized that one could not rely on the mere assertion of support for transgender inclusion; the proof was in the pudding. Another important lesson that I learned from this whole episode was that a small transgender advocacy organization could not rely on the goodwill of any other organization, even an LGBT organization that claimed to be an ally; direct communication and relations with legislators was crucial for any hope of success in pursuing an organization’s legislative agenda. But I also learned that even in defeat, I could affect the public perception of the legislation.

After the Senate passed the hate crimes bill in June 2000 to much rejoicing by many lesbian and gay activists and community members, Tom Duane and Matt Foreman publicly described the legislation as transgender-inclusive in their comments not only to the gay press but to the mainstream media as well. I thought it was outrageous that a state senator who had refused to lift a finger to move the HCBC toward supporting the addition of transgender-specific language and an executive director of a leading coalition member organization who had actively blocked my efforts to make the bill fully inclusive would seek to take credit for passage of a bill that they inaccurately and disingenuously characterized as fully inclusive. With the support of the board, I publicly challenged Tom and Matt in the pages of the two weekly gay newspapers, Lesbian and Gay New York (LGNY) and the New York Blade News, as well as in the mainstream media.

But Tom Duane seemed determined to cover up his refusal to support transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill. His chief of staff, Andrew Berman, claimed in an interview with LGNY that Governor Pataki’s legislative counsel, Jill Conviser, had assured Tom’s office that the governor’s legal opinion was that the text of the bill as passed by the Senate in June 2000 and signed into law by the governor in July included all transgendered and gender-variant people. But when Paisley Currah called the governor’s counsel to confirm Andrew’s assertion, Jill Conviser said that the issue had never come up in any of her conversations or meetings with Tom Duane and his staff.

In the end, because of my insistence on an accurate characterization of the text and the terms of the hate crimes bill, both Tom and Matt were forced into what must have been for them a humiliating climb-down from their previous assertion that the legislation was fully transgender-inclusive. As a result of NYAGRA’s public statements on the legislation, many more LGBT activists and community members understood that the new statute was at best ambiguous with regard to the inclusion of transgendered and gender-variant people. To his credit, Matt did support the work that Ross Levi (as ESPA’s legislative counsel) and I did to get Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to include in his guidelines for implementation of the new hate crimes law language that indicated that it was the attorney general’s opinion that the law included transgendered and gender-variant people. But helpful as that legal opinion was, it was not binding on district attorneys throughout the state, who retained discretion as to whether to prosecute hate crimes based on gender identity or expression, because such language was not included in the text of the law that was enacted.

Of course, the issue of transgender inclusion was not the only one that had faced the HCBC. The bill was controversial in communities of color, as many advocates and activists feared that a state hate crimes law based on enhanced penalties would be used disproportionately against men of color. Importantly, NYAGRA’s position had been that regardless of whether or not enhanced penalties hate crimes legislation was effective in addressing hate crimes and regardless of whether or not such laws could be used disproportionately against men of color, if the legislation included everyone else, it should explicitly include transgendered and gender-variant people as well.

Throughout the debate within the HCBC over transgender inclusion and the subsequent public debate in June and July 2000 over whether or not the new hate crimes law did in fact include all transgendered and gender-variant people, I had kept my comments confined to the public policy issues involved. Unfortunately, Tom Duane chose to personalize the debate and to use his protégé, Melissa Sklarz, to prosecute his own agenda. I had known for some time that Melissa was close to Tom’s and to a lesser extent to Christine Quinn, Tom’s chief of staff when he was the Council Member representing the third Councilmanic district and then his successor as Council Member from that district. It was my distinct impression that Melissa had tied her political cart to Tom’s rising star. And I had never done anything to discourage Melissa’s political ambitions or her relationship with Tom. But I had noted with dismay Melissa’s vociferous objections to my aggressively pursuing a strategy for securing Tom’s support for transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill and DASA during the spring and early summer of 2000. With the rest of the board fully supporting me and my strategy, Melissa was simply out-voted. But when she suggested that the board meet with Tom to discuss how he and NYAGRA could work together following the end of the 2000 legislative session in Albany, I readily agreed to the meeting, along with the rest of my board colleagues.

And so on August 29, Melissa and I, Donna Cartwright, Paisley Currah, and Sophia Pazos represented NYAGRA at a meeting at Tom Duane’s office on Seventh Ave. The night before the meeting, I had received a phone call from Diana Montford, a transgendered member of both the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City (SDNYC) and Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats (GLID), the latter club being dominated by Tom Duane and Chris Quinn; I invited Diana to join us for the meeting. Along with Tom, Andrew Berman, his chief of staff, and Scott Melvin, his unofficial liaison to the transgender community, joined us in person, and Mark Furnish, his legislative counsel, joined us by speakerphone from Albany. It was not entirely clear at the beginning of the meeting whether Melissa considered herself to be participating as a representative of NYAGRA or as a personal friend and protégé of Tom’s.

After introductions on both sides, NYAGRA board members were taken aback as Tom launched into a bitter tirade against me. His face red with anger, Tom jabbed his finger in my face, saying, “There’s someone who’s been bad-mouthing me all over the transgender community, and her name is Pauline Park!” Tom’s voice rose to a shout as he continued his vicious personal attack on me for well over half an hour, barely tolerating even the briefest interruptions. My NYAGRA colleagues were shocked and insulted by his verbally abusive behavior and Donna and Paisley both challenged Tom, asking him what proof he had that I had been ‘bad-mouthing’ and ‘trashing’ him. At that point, Scott Melvin startled everyone by loudly declaring that someone had been forwarding board e-mail messages from the NYAGRA board listserve to Tom’s office regularly over the course of the previous several months, turning to Melissa to indicate quite clearly that it was she who had been the conduit of those confidential communications.

After the meeting, when her NYAGRA colleagues approached Melissa and demanded to know if it had in fact been she who had forwarded the confidential board e-mail to Tom Duane’s office, Melissa refused to deny it, saying simply, “Everyone knows that I’m close to Tom.” That response and Melissa’s uncomfortable body language were sufficient to persuade everyone present that it had indeed been Melissa who had violated the confidentiality of internal NYAGRA communications. Significantly, during the meeting, Melissa had sat apart from her NYAGRA colleagues, watching the proceedings from a distance. Now that Scott Melvin’s astonishing admission of collusion between Melissa and the senator’s office had shocked NYAGRA board members into a full appreciation of the extent of unethical behavior on the part of both Melissa and Tom, it also became clear that the purpose of the meeting was not for Tom and his staff to reach out to NYAGRA to try to establish a more collaborative relationship with our organization. It became apparent to me at least that Tom and Melissa had intended to use the meeting to isolate me from my board colleagues. I surmised that Tom’s extraordinary outburst, filled with personal invective and vitriol, had been calculated to try to suggest to my board colleagues that I had become a liability to NYAGRA by having thoroughly alienated one of the leading openly gay elected officials in the state; it must have been Tom and Melissa’s expectation that the NYAGRA board members present would be so shocked by my apparent fall from favor with the senator that they would oust me from the board and embrace Melissa’s approach, which was to eschew any public or private challenge to Tom Duane and instead to abandon an aggressive pursuit of transgender inclusion in state legislation.

If that had in fact been their intention, Tom and Melissa seriously miscalculated the effect of their plan. Tom’s unprofessional, rude and verbally abusive had only succeeded in alienating all of my board colleagues and Melissa’s apparent willingness to undermine her own organization and betray the her own community in order to advance her own political career only served to discredit her with her NYAGRA colleagues.

Tom’s abusive behavior and Melissa’s betrayal of the organization prompted Donna, Paisley, Sophia and Diana to cut the meeting short, and we all exited Tom’s office, decamping to a nearby diner to discuss the meeting and its implications for the organization. Speaking of Melissa, Sophia, the most mild-mannered of NYAGRA’s board members, declared loudly as we walked to the diner, “I want that bitch out, and I want her out now!” Paisley, Donna, and Diana shared her sentiment, vying with each other to see who could denounce Melissa the loudest. We all agreed that Melissa would have to be removed from the board, and as soon as Paisley got home, as we had all agreed, she posted a message to the board list stating that the security of the listserve had been breached.

Nebuchadnezzar-like, Melissa could see the veritable writing on the wall, and within minutes of Paisley’s message, Melissa posted her own message announcing her immediate resignation from the board, without explanation. It was clear to all of us that Melissa resigned from the board rather than be voted off. In the face of her imminent removal from the board, Melissa must have decided that it would look better if she could say that she resigned rather than that she was voted out.

Despite Melissa’s profoundly unethical behavior – behavior that no board of directors could or would tolerate – we had decided at the diner that we would not mention the purloined e-mail to Lesbian & Gay New York when we went public with the dispute with Tom. When the article in LGNY appeared, it provoked an outcry in the transgender community and severely embarrassed Tom Duane and his staff. Tom was, after all, one of only two openly gay or lesbian members of the state legislature, and he and Chris Quinn had been aggressively marketing themselves to the transgender community as champions of transgender rights. For Tom to have heaped abuse on one of the leaders of the leading transgender advocacy organization in the state and to for him to be openly and publicly at odds with that organization could only undermine his marketing campaign to the community upon whose behalf NYAGRA advocated. And so he and his aides saw that it had become imperative to seek a rapprochement with me and the NYAGRA board. The intermediaries would be Tim Sweeney of ESPA and Charles King of Housing Works, both of whom had worked closely with Tom over the years, even if relations between Tim and Tom (just as between Tom and Matt Foreman) frequently had been strained.

After innumerable conversations and consultations, the meeting was finally held at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The director of the Center’s Gender Identity Project, Rosalyne Blumenstein, who had had no involvement with NYAGRA since her departure from the working group in December 1998, attended, along with a number of NYAGRA board members and transgender community notables. Donna Cartwright and Paisley Currah flanked me on each side, taking on the character almost of bodyguards as well as colleagues; both were clearly determined to see Tom apologize forthrightly, but they need not have worried. Tim Sweeney and Charles King had already spoken extensively with Tom as well as with me, and so the whole meeting took on the character of an elaborate set piece, scripted in detail beforehand. Tom would apologize to the NYAGRA board and to me above all for his unacceptable behavior at the August meeting and I and my NYAGRA colleagues would accept his apology and agree to try to forge a more collaborative relationship.

The carefully choreographed dramatic scene de ballet resulted not in a permanent peace between me and Tom, but more of a temporary truce. I suspected at the time that Tom’s self-abasement before me at the October 2000 meeting would only intensify his resentment towards me; after all, despite numerous reports of similarly abusive behavior towards other activists, Tom had never before been forced to apologize in a semi-public fashion as he had on this occasion. August 2000 would not be his last contretemps with me and with NYAGRA.

If the intention behind Tom and Melissa’s ambush had been to remove me from the NYAGRA board, the effect of this whole episode was precisely the opposite: in the wake of the August confrontation meeting and the October apology was to confirm for my NYAGRA colleagues that I had been right about Tom – and about Melissa – all along. My position on the board was now more secure than ever. And with Melissa’s departure, a crisis that could have shattered the organization led everyone to close ranks and present a united front to the world. Unfortunately, the unity and the exceptional esprit de corps that the board enjoyed in the fall of 2000 would not survive our next crisis, which befell us in the summer of 2001.

The post NYAGRA history: 2000 appeared first on Pauline Park.

Chelsea Goodwin

NYAGRA history: 1999

NYAGRA’s first crisis was precipitated by Chelsea Goodwin and Rusty Mae Moore, who joined the working group in early 1999. I had warned Donna, Paisley and David that Chelsea’s membership of the working group would pose a significant challenge for the fledgling organization, but they would not listen to my warning. Paisley insisted that since transgendered people had historically been excluded from American society, it would be wrong for a transgender advocacy organization to exclude anyone from membership, even membership in the leadership of the organization. I argued that this was a false analogy, as the two types of ‘exclusion’ were fundamentally different in kind. To my mind, the argument that Paisley made was a fallacious one: the exclusion of a marginalized population from mainstream society simply could not be equated with the ‘exclusion’ of a disruptive individual from an organization advocating on behalf of that population. As I saw it, if an individual so seriously disrupted an organization that it threatened the organization’s ability to do the advocacy work for which it was formed, then the group not only had the right to keep that individual out of its leadership but the obligation.

Chelsea’s disruption of the organization began from the very first NYAGRA membership meeting that she and Rusty attended in the spring on 1999. By that point, we had established bi-monthly membership meetings at the Center, beginning in January and continuing through the odd months of the year (March, May, July, September, Novermber). Chelsea’s attempts to disrupt the May meeting became even more aggressive at the July meeting, where she shouted and screamed at everyone who dared disagree with her.  After the meeting was over, Chelsea even followed me into the women’s room to continue to harangue me about my views on gender identity disorder (GID), a diagnosis that I find very problematic but which she supports. Chelsea was shouting and screaming at me so loudly that Donna, Paisley and the others who by that time were in the hallway outside could clearly hear Chelsea’s hysterical tirade. A number of newcomers were so put off by Chelsea’s behavior that they never returned.

At the same time that Chelsea was disrupting our membership meetings at the Center, she was flooding the working group’s e-mail listserve with posts forwarded from other lists that had nothing to do with NYAGRA’s work. As Joann Prinzivalli (another member who joined the group in 1999) recalled, when Chelsea posted a multi-page message about AIDS in Kenya forwarded from another list, even Joann realized that this must be part of a deliberate attempt to disable the listserve. With members now no longer even bothering to read messages posted to the NYAGRA listserve and with Chelsea driving people from our bi-monthly membership meetings, it was clear that we were now in the midst of our first crisis.

Paisley, Carrie, David, and Melissa Sklarz – who had joined the group around the same time as Chelsea – were ready to give up on the organization. My warning about Chelsea had proved prescient, as had my concern about the ‘come one, come all’ policy that Paisley, Donna, David and Carrie had insisted on; that policy – of allowing anyone to join the working group and its e-mail listserve – was precisely what had led us to this impasse.

Chelsea’s attempts to disable the working group listserve by flooding it with messages irrelevant to NYAGRA’s organizational business seemed obviously to me aimed at deliberately disabling the working group itself, and in that larger aim, she was successful. The business of the organization all but came to a halt, as WG members gave up on the listserve and members stayed away from in-person bi-monthly meetings at the Center because of Chelsea’s repeated disruptions. After one membership meeting in July 1999, Paisley, David, Carrie, Melissa and I walked out of the Center feeling despondent about the situation and everyone but me was muttering about the end of NYAGRA; no one seemed to have any ideas about how to put a stop to Chelsea’s destructive behavior, nor would anyone acknowledge that the ‘come one, come all’ policy that founding members had insisted on had brought us to this juncture.

Worst of all, there seemed to be no collective will to do anything about the situation. No one else was committed enough to the organization to take the proverbial bull by the horns. It became clear to me that something had to be done in order to save NYAGRA from an early grave, and if I did not act, the little organization that had begun with such high hopes would be dead within a year of its founding.

I proposed a board election, an idea that Donna, Paisley and everyone else readily accepted. Fortunately, members of the working group were able to reach consensus that Chelsea’s behavior was destructive and that she must be voted out if the organization was to continue. The only question was whether or not her partner should also be voted out of the working group. On the face of it, of course, Rusty Mae had done nothing herself to warrant expulsion from the WG. But Rusty had supported Chelsea throughout, and defending Chelsea when she flooded the WG listserve by telling members that they could simply delete them if they found them annoying. Most any disinterested observer would label Rusty’s behavior co-dependent; a psychotherapist would say that Rusty enabled Chelsea’s dysfunctionalities.

In any case, the working group did vote decisively to remove Chelsea; but unfortunately, a narrow majority voted Rusty onto the new board, thus unnecessarily prolonging the conflict until the end of 1999.

On October 19 of that year, David set up a new listserve to replace the old list that Chelsea had so effectively disabled. Posting the following message to the ‘NYAGRA-WG’ listserve at 1:01 p.m., David wrote:

Hi folks,

so far Paisley, Pauline, Lisa, and Billie Jo have joined one list (and

so you are the only ones getting this email). Please continue to use

the old cc: list until everyone has joined for messages that you want to

go to the entire list.

David

But a new listserve was no match for Chelsea’s talent for disruption. Just as I had predicted, Rusty’s election enabled Chelsea to continue to make trouble, and throughout the fall, Chelsea would use Rusty’s e-mail address to continue to flood the WG listserve with irrelevant e-mail and Rusty refused to limit Chelsea’s access to a board list that she no longer had any right to post to.

In December, a misunderstanding between Donna and Rusty over NYAGRA’s approach to a viciously transgenderphobic article (“Suddenly Susan”) in the Village Voice by the notorious right-wing lesbian Nora Vincent led Donna to press for Rusty’s removal from the board.

Rusty had joined the NYAGRA-WG listserve on December 2. Three days later, Donna sounded the alarm, informing WG members that there had been a breach of the confidentiality of the list. In her message on December 5, Donna wrote:

Well, gang, I am upset . . . late last week, in a note to the working group

list about organizing the Voice action, I happened to mention a conversation I had with Wonbo Woo of GLAAD about the issue. The text of what I sent around follows:

> FYI, I happened to mention the action to Wonbo Woo of the GLAAD New York office yesterday . . . He seemed a bit taken aback on the phone, and today he E-mailed me suggesting that a demo might be counterproductive, piss off sympathetic people at the Voice, etc. I think he is wrong, for a number of reasons: primarily, this is hardly the first time the Voice has treated us with gross insenstivity — it goes all the way back to the Donna Minkowitz/Brandon Teena controversy five years ago; secondly that my own contact, a former Voice staffer, suggests that there is unhappiness among staffers there about current management and we might touch a sympathetic nerve among some of them; lastly, I think making a little public noise may “get their attention” in a way that nothing else can. I will E-mail Wonbo back, making these points. But given the uneasiness of even close allies, I think we should be mindful of the need to conduct the action in a relatively polite, helpful way.

I think I made perfectly clear here that I would handle responding to Wonbo, and that I only mentioned it to stress the possible delicacy of our position, even relative to our allies. Today when I came to work I picked up my Voice mail and got a message from Wonbo, saying he had received an E-mail from Chelsea Goodwin in which she “seemed upset” at Wonbo’s reservations about the Voice action. I was appalled by this breach of discretion and just plain good manners.

1. My original message was to the Working Group, of which Chelsea is not a member. She has no business picking up or acting upon Working Group business.

2. My ability to have frank and forthright conversations with Wonbo (and

GLAAD) has been compromised. I went to some difficulty to cultivate a good working relationship with GLAAD; I don’t know how bad the damage is, yet, but I am very concerned.

3. My conversations with Wonbo are my business, and no one else’s. If I choose to share some of what I find out, I expect at a minimum that people will use that information in a sensitive and reasonable manner. I will not allow this to happen in the future. If that means I cannot discuss things in confidence with the working group, then I guess I will have to limit my dealings with the WG and with NYAGRA.

Best

Donna Cartwright

(Re: Voice, GLAAD, and discretion, NYAGRA-WG message #39 of 6568, 1:42 p.m., 12.5.1999)

I responded less than an hour later, posting to the NYAGRA-WG listserve the following:

Dear NYAGRA colleagues,

Chelsea’s communication with Wonbo Woo constitutes a breach of ethics and of the rules of this organization, since she had no authority to communicate on behalf of NYAGRA. Since the listserve is closed, one can only conclude that Rusty shared the message with Chelsea, in direct contravention of the bylaws and of the stated consensus of the working group. I would therefore like to survey the working group on whether we should proceed to suspend Rusty from the working group’s listserve and/or to expel Rusty from the working group for her breach of confidentiality.

I also believe, given Rusty and Chelsea’s breach of confidentiality, that

neither should be allowed to take part in the demonstration against the Voice, and I’d like to hear back from other working group members on this issue as well.

Pauline

(Re: Rusty’s breach of the bylaws, NYAGRA-WG message #39 of 6568, 2:35 p.m., 12.5.1999)

Rusty responded defensively and indignantly the next day, in one of several messages insisting that “I made no breech of ethics,” but adding that, “Regardless of this, I am getting angrier and angrier as I read this correspondence.”  (Re: Rusty’s breach of the bylaws, NYAGRA-WG message #46, 10:33 a.m., 12.6.1999)

In a subsequent message, Rusty tried to explain (in my view, explain away) the breach of confidentiality of the NYAGRA-WG listserve with reference to her long-term relationship with Chelsea, writing,

Those people who have had long term love relationships may understand that there are issues of boundaries and respect which come up and are difficult to deal with. This has certainly been true in the three long term

relationships of my life.

(Re: Rusty’s breach of the bylaws, NYAGRA-WG message #47, 11:01 a.m., 12.6.1999)

It was precisely the lack of boundaries in Rusty’s relationship with Chelsea that had provoked the breach of confidentiality of working group communications, and from this message, it was clear that Rusty simply did not understand the responsibility that she had as a member of the working group – our de facto board of directors – after having been retained through the election. That responsibility meant that whatever her relationship with Chelsea, it was Rusty’s obligation to the organization to keep confidential the e-mail that she received through the WG listserve and above all to keep Chelsea from accessing those communications and using them for her own purposes, whatever those may be.

Some members (including David, Carrie, Joann Prinzivalli and Sophia Pazos) temporized, expressing their unhappiness with the breach of confidentiality but stopping short of considering Rusty’s expulsion, though Donna made clear to me in a phone conversation that day that she would resign if Rusty did not resign or were not removed from the working group post haste. I communicated Donna’s ultimatum to other members of the WG (including David, Carrie and Melissa) in phone conversations while messages were still being posted to the WG listserve.

In the end, Rusty left voluntarily before her colleagues had the chance to consider expelling her, posting a brief message of resignation at around noon on December 6 (Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #49, 12:08 p.m., 12.6.1999).

Even then, David posted a message to the WG list urging Rusty to reconsider and rescind her resignation (Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #50, 12:23 p.m., 12.6.1999), and Sophia joined David in pleading with Rusty to stay (Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #53, 6:48 p.m., 12.6.1999), as did Carrie (Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #58, 7:39 p.m., 12.6.1999) and Joann (Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #59, 7:42 p.m., 12.6.1999). But Donna remained adamant, writing,

To the NYAGRA working group:

I spent some time on the phone with Wonbo Woo of GLAAD this morning.

Although I am still not entirely clear on how it happened, he did tell me

that last Friday he got an E-mail from Chelsea Goodwin that said she had

“learned through the grapevine” about the reservations he had expressed to me privately about the Voice action (and that I then mentioned, assuming confidentiality, on the WG list). He said he was quite concerned last Friday about how this happened. I have repaired things with him to the

extent that they can be repaired.

(A fuller and franker report would, of course, be more informative, but

in view of the lack of confidentiality on the NYAGRA Working Group list, I

don’t feel that I can elaborate.)

I must say that beyond the breach of confidentiality last Friday

(SOMEHOW what I said on the WG list was passed back to Wonbo via Chelsea), I am disturbed by the fact that a majority of the WG members who have expressed an opinion so far (Sophia, Carrie, David, and Rusty) don’t seem to feel that confidentiality on the WG list is of any great concern.

In view of the lack of confidentiality on the list, I don’t feel that I

can feel any confidence in it. Therefore I will use it only for the most

routine or formal communications (i.e. voting, making motions, etc.)

Necessarily, this will involve sharply reducing my role in the WG and in

NYAGRA. That is unfortunate but at this point unavoidable.

I will send a separate e-mail about NYAGRA’s participation in the Voice

action (which I think we should cancel at this point).

Sincerely

Donna M. Cartwright

(Re: NYAGRA, GLAAD and confidentiality, NYAGRA-WG message #51, 3:44 p.m., 12.6.1999)

Despite Donna’s message and intense phone conversations, David seemed oblivious to the true significance of the breach of list confidentiality and the crisis that it provoked, writing,

My dear friends,

Can’t you see what’s happening here? NYAGRA seems to be in danger of falling apart, just as we were beginning to do something interesting. And this is what happens in grassroots organizations so often and so sadly Here’s what I think:

1. First, Rusty is not responsible for Chelsea reading her messages. At the same time, I think that Rusty should (as she intimated she would) look into a hotmail account that would be hers alone to read to prevent such future issues. I *have* to take Rusty’s word for this — in that I have to take all of your words. We are all in this because we believe in some ultimate goals of social justice, and on that good faith principle alone will NYAGRA flourish.

2. At the same time, there was clearly a breach of conduct and ethics on the list, and I understand Pauline and Donna’s concerns. I did not at all mean to minimize the impact of this either for Donna personally or for NYAGRA in general, and I think that if possible, it would be good for Rusty to reaffirm her commitment to maintaining the privacy of NYAGRA working group mailings. I apologize to Donna and Pauline for any implication that I don’t see this as an important issue. It certainly is, which is why I worked so hard on getting everyone onto Onelist in the first place.

3. Whether the demo goes ahead or not, I am concerned that the long (or short) term effect of this current event will be the dissolution of NYAGRA in one way or another: a. either by people not posting to the group stuff that is “sensitive” in some way or another or b. the resignation of one or more members who become tired of the in-fighting. Either way, it means that the efficacy of the organization simply dies. If Rusty resigns, or anyone else, NYAGRA will become characterized in trans-circles simply another clique disinclined to democracy. If the list stops being an effective tool for exchanging information because of distrust among group members, the same thing will happen: “power” (whatever the hell that means in a group with virtually no budget, and little clout) will be seen as being in the hands of a few and no-one will bother coming to any of the events that NYAGRA tries to put on. I’ve seen this happen time and time again in many organizations, both in the US and in South Africa.

In other words, and with great respect, love, and admiration for all the work you are all doing, I would ask that everyone take a deep breath,

TALK to one another, and let’s not let this polarize our group. There is simply too much work to do. I sense that the underlying issue for everyone is Chelsea, and I don’t think we should let the actions of a person who is not even in the working group pull apart what is and has been a great group with lots of potential. My suggestion is that we take our passion, direct it into respectful conversation with one another rather than to everyone on the list, and try and move forward.

I would ask publically that Rusty, Pauline, and Donna (all of whom I respect very highly) attempt to heal the wounds that are threatening the group by talking to one another privately in the spirit of the goals we all hold dear.

I hope that you all take my words as they are intended: with love, with respect, and with an intense desire that NYAGRA remains an effective and viable group.

Yours hopefully,

David

(Re: Re: securing the NYAGRA working group listserve, NYAGRA-WG message #61, 9:05 p.m., 12.6.1999)

David did not seem to recognize that his attempts to keep Rusty from resigning could only serve to prolong the conflict over Chelsea’s involvement with NYAGRA. The breach of the confidentiality of the list in December 1999 would foreshadow a much more serious breach of list confidentiality the following year. But the conflict-avoidant behavior that several working group members engaged in throughout the December 1999 crisis bode ill for the resolution of future conflicts.

For me, the lesson was clear: conflict-avoidant behavior could only make future conflict more likely. The larger lesson was this: conflict is inevitable; it is how an organization manages that conflict that determines whether it succeeds or fails.

Fortunately for the cohesion of the group, Rusty herself confirmed her resignation, despite pleas from WG members to reconsider it. While Rusty never seemed to have grasped the significant organizational issues involved with the breach of WG listserve confidentiality, to her credit, Rusty did at least recognize that the compromise regime that WG members had sought to maintain from the board election until Rusty’s resignation – namely, keeping Rusty on after tossing Chelsea overboard – was ultimately untenable:

I resigned from NYAGRA essentially because Chelsea and I are a team, and it is too artificial for us to separate our involvements in trans-activism.

(Re: NYAGRA and the Voice action, NYAGRA-WG message #63, 7:49 p.m., 12.7.1999)

It simply cannot work for me to be a member of NYAGRA’s Working Group because it is more important to me to work closely with Chelsea.

(Re: Resignation, NYAGRA-WG message #65, 7:54 p.m., 12.7.1999)

Despite having incurred Chelsea’s eternal animosity for having challenged her dysfunctional and destructive behavior, I now felt confident that we had a real board of directors and a future as an organization. NYAGRA had survived its first real crisis and the foundation for growth could now be laid.

The post NYAGRA history: 1999 appeared first on Pauline Park.

On the steps of City Hall at the press conference on 29 February 2000 announcing the public launch of the campaign for Int. No. 24, the New York City transgender rights bill. Front row: Council Member Margarita Lopez, Council Member Philip Reed, Juan Figueroa (executive director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund), Pauline Park, Council Member Ronnie Eldridge, Council Member Bill Perkins. Second row: Charles King (executive director, Housing Works), Carrie Davis, Council Member Gifford Miller, Melissa Sklarz, Donna Cartwright, Council Member Christine Quinn.

A history of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
Part I: the founding (1998-2000)

Of all the organizations that I have been involved with, I am probably most closely associated in the public mind with NYAGRA.

The idea for the organization now known as the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) originated in a conversation that I had with Paisley Currah in May 1998.  Paisley and I drove down to Washington D.C. for GenderPAC’s national lobby day, the second that we would participate in. While on the drive back up, Paisley turned to me and said, “You know, Pauline, we can do this in New York.” Paisley (who at that point was still using feminine pronouns but who transitioned several years later) pointed out that there was not a single transgender advocacy organization in the state that was actively engaged in the legislative arena.

I pointed out that I was at that moment on the board of directors of Queens Pride House, on the steering committee of Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), and coordinator of Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY). In short, I honestly felt that I did not have the time to get involved with founding another organization.  But Paisley persisted, and I agreed to help her with the new organization as long as I did not end up as its leader. Paisley’s organizational experience at that point was limited to participation in the Ithaca chapter of ACT-UP, a non-organization of an organization, and so her desire for my active involvement was perfectly understandable.

Paisley asked me to come up with a name for the organization, and so I thought through various possibilities, all of which had to have ‘New York’ and ‘Gender’ in them. It seemed to me that an actual acronym that spelled a word would be more effective and more memorable than a mere abbreviation. After much mental gymnastics, I eventually came up with ‘New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,’ which conveniently spelled ‘NYAGRA.’ That acronym evokes images of Niagara Falls, of course, which is a universally recognized landmark in the state. Paisley loved the name, and so did the other activists who attended our first meeting.

Paisley and I conferred on the activists that we should invite to the first meeting, but she left it to me to convene the meeting, which I did on June 30. David Valentine served as the gracious host for that historic first meeting, though his apartment in Greenwich Village unfortunately lacked air conditioning. Seven of us gathered around 1:30 p.m. on that hot June day in 1998: Paisley, David, and me, along with four others. Rosalyne Blumenstein was then the director of the Gender Identity Project at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (since renamed the LGBT Community Center) and as such was at that moment far and away the best-known and most prominent transgender activist in the city. Carrie Davis was a peer counselor at the GIP and would succeed Roz as director a few years later. David was at that time a Ph.D. candidate at New York University and was actually working on a dissertation on transgender. Paisley was at that point an assistant professor of political science on tenure track at Brooklyn College. Donna Cartwright was a copy editor at the New York Times.

Roz left the new organization after a dispute over her role in it. NYAGRA working group members decided to hold a meeting on October 24, concurrent with the TransWorld conference at the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn. TransWorld was the first conference by and for transgendered people of color in New York (and anywhere in the United States, as far as I knew), and it was jointly sponsored by ALP (a community center for LGBT people of color) and the GIP; given the GIP’s sponsorship, TransWorld was billed as the fourth in a series of transgender conferences organized under the auspices of the Center and the GIP (‘transexual/transgender health empowerment conferences,’ as the conference promotional material described them).

Until the founding of NYAGRA in June 1998, the GIP had been ‘the only game in town,’ as it were, when it came to transgender advocacy in New York City, and the director of the GIP had been the ‘go-to girl’ for media comment on transgender-related public policy issues as well as social services in the city. As such, Roz carried a great deal of weight; but she harbored resentments against those she felt – rightly or wrongly – had slighted her, and she made clear to those present at the NYAGRA meeting that October 24 that she wanted to use NYAGRA to punish Tim Sweeney for what she had perceived to have been a slight to her.

At the founding meeting on June 30, members had reached consensus about approaching the Empire State Pride Agenda to try to secure transgender inclusion in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) then pending in the New York state legislature. As deputy director of the Pride Agenda (or ‘ESPA,’ as everyone outside the Pride Agenda called it), Tim Sweeney would be a key interlocutor in the larger LGBT community; given that, it seemed to me foolish at best to commence any relationship with ESPA by needlessly offending its deputy director simply to redress a perceived slight pre-dating the founding of NYAGRA that had nothing to do with the organization’s legislative agenda, and I said as much to Roz. All of the founding members at the meeting and all of the new members who joined us at that October 24 meeting were in agreement on that point, and our refusal to allow Roz to use NYAGRA to prosecute her own personal political agenda – at the expense of the credibility and effectiveness of the new organization – prompted her to resign.

Fortunately, from that very first meeting (on June 30), there was an agreement that the primary mission of the organization should be to pursue transgender inclusion in legislation, especially in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) and the hate crimes bill both pending in the New York state legislature. All seven activists present at the first meeting agreed on one point: our first inter-organizational meeting should be with the Empire State Pride Agenda. There would be no ‘getting around’ ESPA, which as the leading lesbian and gay political organization in the state, played a leading role in the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition. When it came to SONDA, the Pride Agenda’s role was even more central: ESPA was founded (from the merger of two other organizations) specifically to get SONDA passed, and that gay rights bill was its flagship legislation.

And so on November 19 [check date], several activists representing NYAGRA met with Tim Sweeney (then ESPA’s deputy director) and Paula Ettelbrick (then ESPA’s legislative director) at the Pride Agenda’s office on Hudson Street in Manhattan. The NYAGRA contingent’s aim was to persuade the Pride Agenda to agree to amend both SONDA and the state hate crimes bill to add gender identity and expression in order to protect transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination and hate crimes, respectively.

With regard to the latter legislation, Tim referred us to the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition, which NYAGRA joined in January 1999; ESPA’s opposition to transgender inclusion in that bill would only become clearer in April 2000, as the bill headed for passage in the state Senate. As for SONDA, Tim stated unequivocally that ESPA was not prepared to consider transgender inclusion in their flagship legislation; he and Paula opined that members of the state legislature were simply not going to support transgender inclusion in the bill – a self-fulfilling prophecy coming from ESPA, as no legislator would brook their opposition to such inclusion.  From ESPA’s perspective, we must have seemed like upstarts, a bunch of transgender activists without any experience in legislative work in Albany or even at the local level. And while the NYAGRA name would become famous, at that moment, in November 1998, we were indeed unknown as an organization without a proven track record in legislative work.

Instead, Tim made a ‘counter offer’ of sorts, proposing that the Pride Agenda work with NYAGRA on local non-discrimination legislation, a suggestion that we ultimately agreed to, after significant internal discussion. It was clear to everyone present on the NYAGRA side – including Paisley Currah, Donna Cartwright, David Valentine, Sophia Pazos, Lisa Maurer (who participated by phone from Ithaca) and myself – that ESPA simply would not be moved on the issue of SONDA and that – as a new group without any resources and without any relationships with key legislators – we had no leverage to move ESPA. It was the unanimous consensus of the founding members of NYAGRA to accept an understanding with ESPA that the two organizations would work together on a local transgender rights bill and defer the question of transgender inclusion in SONDA to a later day.

Meanwhile, the new organization required infrastructure, and an organizational website was one of the first pieces of infrastructure that we could see we would need at the dawn of the Internet age. Paisley had set up a website at www.nyagra.org, though no thought was given at the time that it was technically the webmaster who would therefore be in a position to claim ownership of the website, and not the organization, should a dispute arise over its provenance – as in fact did happen. Meanwhile, the working group began to communicate regularly by e-mail, and David would set up a listserve for the founding members.

Slowly but surely over the course of NYAGRA’s early years, members of the ‘working group’ would begin to construct the rudiments of an organizational framework. But the critical decision that the founding members made at the onset to establish a ‘come one, come all’ policy for the working group would come close to undermining the organization within a year of its founding.

While there was initial consensus on legislative approach, there was dissensus from the start about NYAGRA’s organizational structure from the very beginning. At our very first meeting, I proposed a traditional board structure. Not only did I have no desire to be either president or chair of the board of directors, I was hoping that Paisley would agree to accept the top leadership title. But Carrie Davis insisted that there be “no hierarcy” in NYAGRA’s organizational structure, and Donna Cartwright derided a board structure as being ‘corporate’ and therefore inconsistent with the ideals of the organization. Ironically, Carrie worked for an organization (the Center) that had a very hierarchical staff structure governed by a self-selecting board of directors (i.e., one not chosen by its members), Equally ironic, Donna would go onto serve on the board of directors of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) some years later without any compunction. But on that hot June day in 1998, Carrie and Donna carried the day, defeating my proposal for a traditional board. Donna insisted on calling the assembled activists the ‘working group,’ a moniker that I thought was inappropriate for an advocacy organization, and worse still, insisted that the working group be open to everyone.

Hence the working group, as de facto board of directors, was open to everyone, and no vote could be taken to exclude anyone, regardless of behavior. At the time, I had a strong feeling that the ‘come one, come all’ approach that Donna insisted on and that the other founding members agreed to could lead to serious problems, and that intuition was prescient. In fact, the open door policy would very nearly be the undoing of the organization.

The post NYAGRA history part one: the founding appeared first on Pauline Park.