Trans-Form the Occupation

Pauline Park

at

Occupy Wall Street

13 November 2011

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

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

1) The diversity of the transgender community.

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

2) ‘Transgender’ as an umbrella term.

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

3) Sexual orientation vs. gender identity.

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

4) Discrimination.

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

5) Bullying, harassment & violence.

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

6) Housing & homelessness; health care.

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

7) GID.

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

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

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

Thank you.

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Hillary Mann Leverett, apologist for murder

Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are the voice of Iran in Washington — not the voice of the Iranian people, mind you, but the voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran — apologists for the repression, torture, and murder of the Iranian people by a tyrannical regime; as such, they are the very worst sort of self-appointed ‘experts.’

Before the violent suppression of the Green Movement by the Revolutionary Guards on the orders of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei after he stole the presidential election last year, the Leveretts were little more than an embarassment; but since the imprisonment, torture and murder of unarmed Iranian citizens by the Leveretts’ friends in power, the Leveretts are looking more like apologists for authoritarianism and murder.

Neither Flynt nor Hillary have any discernible credentials on Iranian affairs, other than their close friendship with the mullahs who run the country. True, both were once on the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State, but Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of State and once Flynt Leverett’s boss, has publicly questioned the origins of the fax that the Leveretts cite as evidence that the Iranian government was eager to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States over nuclear proliferation. The provenance of the ‘Grand Bargain fax’ that the Leveretts tirelessly cite as conclusive evidence of the pacific intentions of the Iranian regime has been questioned even by the editor of Kayhan, an Iranian newspaper under the supervision of the Supreme Leader’s office, as Lee Smith points out (Grand Bargainers, Planet Iran.com, 2.24.10). “We are even a bit suspicious that the Swiss ambassador wrote that fax himself,” the newspaper’s editor has said. In other words, the central piece of evidence in the (very weak) case that the Leveretts make for a policy of engagement with Iran may well be a hoax, and the Leveretts themselves (who have close connections with the regime) may very well know that it’s a hoax.

Another senior policy maker from the same administration in which the Leveretts served, Richard Haass, has explicitly disavowed the Leveretts’ rosy view of the regime, writing in Newsweek in January 2010 that “we can no longer remain on the sidelines in the struggle for regime change in Iran.” Contrary to the Leveretts’ insistence that there is no evidence that the election was stolen, Haass (who has enormously more sense as well as experience in foreign policy than the two Leveretts put together) puts it quite simply: “The authorities overreached in their blatant manipulation of last June’s presidential election, and then made matters worse by brutally repressing those who protested.”

In stark contrast to the clear analysis of Richard Haass, the Leveretts offer clever non-statements that are impossible to call outright falsehoods, such as Hillary’s declaration that “It was eminently plausible that Ahmadinejad could win the election,” as Leverett stated in an interview with Charlie Rose on March 29. Such a statement is clever because it does not commit either Hillary or Flynt Leverett to an explicit assertion that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually won the presidential election last year, but nonetheless creates the impression that he did, though the Leveretts offer no evidence to support such assertions, other than referencing public opinion polls that they claim indicate popular support for Ahmadinejad both before and after the election at levels that ‘track’ with the vote tally announced by the government in the wake of the stolen election. But no credible public opinion survey can be conducted under an authoritarian regime when that same regime is imprisoning, torturing and executing those who dispute the poll results.

The nicest thing that one could say of them are that Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are ‘influence peddlers,’ as Lee Smith of Planet Iran.com called them, trading on their connections with the regime in order to advance their own peculiar and entirely self-interested agenda. As Smith points out in “Grand Bargainers,” the ‘background dinners’ which the Leveretts present as a kind of salon,” help to generate business for an energy and consulting firm called Stratega, whose CEO happens to be Hillary Mann Leverett.” In other words, the Leveretts have a direct financial stake in the business they generate with U.S. and Western companies operating in Iran and which they promote through their public statements on the current state of affairs there — hardly a disinterested analysis of the politics of the Islamic Republic.

Flynt Leverett, shameless influence peddler

But the Leveretts are shameless in promoting an image of a benign regime with a smiling and popularly elected president as they take their talking points from press releases issued by the Iranian embassy in Washington and defend with as much gusto as they can the regime that has murdered its own people in a so far successful attempt to cling to power. The Leveretts’ key source of information about Iranian government and politics is apparently their co-author, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, “who has emerged as the Iranian government’s chief spokesperson in the English-language media,” as award-winning journalist Omid Memarian has pointed out. The reliance of the Leveretts on Marandi as a news source is no more credible than Judith Miller’s reliance on Scooter Libby — Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — as her primary news source for stories about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, plastered on the front page of the New York Times as the Bush administration beat the drums for war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It is important for me as an openly transgendered woman of Asian birth to point out that the Islamic Republic of Iran has also executed gay teenagers for having engaged in consensual sex — acts of unjustified judicial murder that are not only profoundly immoral and that have prompted international condemnation, but which would seem to belie Ahmadinejad’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran. The problem is not merely the homophobic Ahmadinejad, of course; the power of the president is limited by that of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who cannot be challenged in any election or removed by the judiciary or the people. Paradoxically, his predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, actually issued a fatwah approving of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) for transsexuals in Iran; but the logic behind it was not at all transgender-supportive; Khomeini issued the fatwah because he was persuaded that surgical procedures could be used to change gay men into heterosexual women. Obviously, the fatwah was based on a number of serious misconceptions about sexual orientation and gender identity, but even though SRS is officially sanctioned in Iran, the reality of the lives of transsexual and transgendered people remains bleak, as portrayed in the documentary “Be Like Others,” about transgender life in Iran, where the regime of the mullahs persecutes transgendered and gender-variant people despite the option of SRS available to at least some.

What is particularly shameful about the Leveretts is that they give a bad name to those who argue against the growing drumbeat of war against Iran; while it is absolutely clear to me that the regime is incapable of reform as long as Khamenei and his cohort are in power, I also oppose military action against Iran by the United States or by Israel, which would only strengthen the regime now in power in Tehran. But neither the government of the United States nor the government of any other state can make effective policy unless it is informed by an accurate and probing analysis of the situation in Iran, including a comprehensive documentation of the massive human rights abuses committed by the regime; the influence-peddling Leveretts, trading on their connections with the mullahs to make money off the misery and oppression of the Iranian people, can do nothing but misinform policy-making.

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New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Board of Health
public hearing on proposed amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code
testimony by
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
30 October 2006

My name is Pauline Park and I chair the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy. NYAGRA is the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York and we are perhaps best known for having led the campaign for enactment of the New York City transgender rights law (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002).

On behalf of the board of directors and the members of NYAGRA, I would like to commend you for your efforts to make Article 207 of the New York City Health Code more transgenderfriendly. I would also urge you to reconsider the proposed amendment under discussion here because in many ways the language of the proposed amendment represents one step forward and one step back for the transgender community here in New York.

While we in NYAGRA welcome the removal of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) as a requirement for a change of legal sex designation on one’s birth certificate, and while we commend the change to allow a full change of legal sex designation from either ‘M’ to ‘F’ or ‘F’ to ‘M,’ we also would like to express our deep concern with other aspects of the proposed amendment that we view as misguided and even harmful to transgendered New Yorkers seeking a change of legal sex designation on their birth certificates.

To begin with, I would like to voice NYAGRA’s support for all of the points made in Michael Silverman’s presentation on behalf of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) and the Transgender Health Initiative of New York (THINY), a joint project of TLDEF and NYAGRA. We in NYAGRA share TLDEF’s concern with the onerous and unnecessaryrequirements that applicants for a change of legal sex designation live in the gender with which they identify for two full years before obtaining the change in gender marker; in practice, it may be difficult if not impossible to produce a precise operational definition of ‘living full-time.’

We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s objection to the requirement that the applicant prove medical intervention; most transgendered people do not obtain sex reassignment surgery, because most do not want it, and most of those who do cannot afford it. Also, many transgendered people either do not want hormone replacement therapy (HRT); for medical reasons, HRT may be ‘contra-indicated’ for many others. One can live fully in one’s desired gender without either HRT or SRS, and many transgendered people do. We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s concern with the onerous burden represented by the requirement of an affadavit from a physician “practicing in the field of gender identity disorder or qualified through board certification” in one of a number of specialties; there is no such thing as board certification in transgender issues, and board certification in areas such as plastic surgery, family medicine, or internal medicine may or may not be directly relevant to the ability of a physician to effectively work with a transgendered patient. I shall return to the vexed issue of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) later in my testimony.

The requirement of a legal name change is particularly misguided, as many names are not clearly gendered. Why should someone with a name such as Dale or Dan, Gale or Jamie, Leslie or Lynn have to change his/her name as part of a change of legal sex designation? Also, female infants in contemporary American society are increasingly being given names that were traditionally considered men’s names, such as Ashley (any fan of “Gone With the Wind” will recognize it as the name of the two leading men in the novel and the film of that name) – which, according to the Social Security Administration (http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/) is now the tenth most popular girl’s name – as well as Brooke, Daryl, Hunter, Meredith, Morgan, and Shannon, just to name a few.

We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s concern with the open-ended nature of the discretion given to the Department of Health (DOH) to require “other information or evidence demonstrating the applicants transition to his or her acquired gender.” Such a provision could potentially allow an official at the DOH to delay action on an application indefinitely and for no apparent reason.

One final recommendation: we urge the Department of Health to allow for the continued possibility of a change from ‘M’ or ‘F’ to no legal sex designation for those who were born intersexed. It is crucially important that the new policy allow for newborn intersexed individuals to be issued birth certificates with no sex designation, in view of the widespread practice of intersex genital mutilation (IGM) imposed on such individuals in infancy or childhood by misguided surgeons and panicked parents who fear social ostracism for children whose external (and/or internal) genitalia do not appear to be fully male or female (see www.isna.org or www.bodieslikeours.org for more on intersex and IGM).

Our central concern with the proposed amendment to Article 207 is that it is rooted in a medical model of transsexuality that assumes that there is only one linear medical transition that all transsexual and transgendered people pursue. That medical model of transsexuality is a disease model based on the false diagnosis of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID), which suggests that the mere fact of being transgendered – that is to say, the mere identification with the gender opposite one’s sex assigned at birth – constitutes prima facie evidence of a mental pathology. In fact, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for the hypothesis that identification with the gender opposite one’s sex assigned at birth (in the absence of any other mental pathology) constitutes mental illness per se. In many if not most pre-modern non-Western societies (as well as in many pre-modern Western ones), there was a recognized ‘third sex/third gender’ subject position, an identity formation that accommodated those who identified with the gender opposite their birth sex. Only with the development of psychology and psychiatry in the late nineteenth century were terms and concepts such as ‘transvestism’ and transsexualism’ constructed by European sexologists such as Kraft-Ebbing as pathological. And only with the development of HRT and SRS in the twentieth century were technologies developed that could ‘re-sex’ the body both internally as well as externally.

In other words, the proposed amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code – just like existing policy – is premised on the notion that transgender constitutes a mental illness. Because a change in legal sex designation on one’s birth certificate may be a crucial step in obtaining a change of legal sex designation (or ‘gender marker,’ as it is often called) on other important documents – such as a driver’s license, Social Security card, passport, etc. – the policy that DOH adopts will have implications for policy and procedures at the state and federal levels as well. And because a change of legal sex designation on all of these important identity documents represents a crucial step in the transitioning individual’s ability to obtain adequate education, employment, housing, credit, health care, and social services, the proposed DOH amendment will have a profound effect on the quality of life for transgendered New Yorkers. But the requirement for a diagnosis of gender identity disorder in effect represents a requirement that
a transgendered person have him/herself declared mentally ill in order to legally transition and obtain adequate education, employment, health care, etc. No such requirement exists for any other group in this city or this society.

It is important to recognize that the pathologizing of transgender and gender variance through the GID diagnosis is in fact controversial, just as the listing of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was. As you may know, homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1974 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the fourth edition of the DSM. Unfortunately, DSM-IV introduced GID as a diagnosis, and that diagnosis has been used to pathologize gender variance in children and adolescents ever since then. There is an effort underway to remove GID from the DSM-V (currently under discussion) or at least to ‘reform’ the GID diagnosis (see www.GIDreform.org). It would be an irony indeed if the New York City Department of Health were to institutionalize the GID diagnosis in its policy regarding birth certificate change just at the very moment when the APA was debating removal or substantial revision of the GID diagnosis in the DSM.

It would also be ironic in light of the history of transgender law in New York City. In April 2002, the New York City Council passed Int. No. 24, the transgender rights bill signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg later that month as Local Law 3 of 2002. That statute amended New York City human rights law by adding a definition of gender that included identity and expression (among other terms), thereby prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, credit and education throughout the five boroughs. The guiding principle of that statute was one of self-determination in gender identity and expression, rooted in a conception of gender that recognizes transgender identities as no less ‘natural,’ no less ‘normal,’ and no less deserving of full equality under law as are conventional gender identities. In light of the enactment of that statute in 2002 and the adoption of guidelines for its implementation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 2004, adoption of the proposed new amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code by the Department of Health would represent a setback to the positive and affirmative concept of transgender identities embodied in that statute and those guidelines.

We in NYAGRA therefore urge the Department of Health to revise the proposed amendment to make it consistent with the broad and holistic concept of gender identity embodied in Local Law 3 of 2002 and its implementation guidelines. Following from such a holistic and affirmative concept, a regulation amending Article 207 would require only affirmation by an applicant of his/her intention to live fully in the gender with which s/he identifies, along with either a letter from a physician documenting significant medical intervention or a letter from a psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatrist documenting his/her opinion verifying the self-declaration of gender identity. The treating mental health professional should be licensed, but there should be no specific requirement that s/he be recognized as having expertise in gender identity issues. The medical intervention mentioned above should allow either HRT, SRS, breast augmentation or breast removal as a sufficient condition for approval of the application for
a change of legal sex designation on the applicant’s birth certificate.

Officials at the Department of Health should understand that the decision to live in the gender different from the sex assigned to one at birth is not a decision entered into lightly but indicates a profound identification with that gender, but that there is no one way in which a transgendered individual actualizes that gender identity; instead, there is a great diversity of paths that transgendered people choose to realize their gender identities, and public policy must reflect and accommodate that reality.

The Department now has an opportunity to help further the advances represented by Local Law 3 of 2002 and the guidelines for its implementation. We in NYAGRA urge the Department of Health to substantially revise the proposed amendment to Article 207 along the lines recommended in my testimony, and we stand ready to work with Department officials in drafting language for that amendment in a manner consistent with the broad concept of gender identity and expression and the progressive ethos informing existing transgender law and regulations in New York City.

Thank you.

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