Whoa, deja vu. ;)

Your "bottom line" seems to be that we're a bit stalled on the marriage front, that while you don't dismiss marriage equality as unimportant, you think a better approach would be to concentrate on a broader front concerning LGBT rights.

Ironically, I just finished reading a piece put out by the conservative Heritage Foundation which comes to the dubious slippery-slope conclusion that we're really pushing things like ENDA now because eventually it will lead to public acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Round and round it goes, and where it stops......except that it won't stop anytime soon.

Your "bottom line" seems to be that we're a bit stalled on the marriage front, that while you don't dismiss marriage equality as unimportant, you think a better approach would be to concentrate on a broader front concerning LGBT rights.

Ironically, I just finished reading a piece put out by the conservative Heritage Foundation which comes to the dubious slippery-slope conclusion that we're really pushing things like ENDA now because eventually it will lead to public acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Round and round it goes, and where it stops......except that it won't stop anytime soon.

I've thought for a long time that marriage is one issue on which the needs and rights of all of us in the lgbtqi... spectrum converge.

By that, I'm not suggesting it's automatically the top-priority issue worth fighting for, or that it is the one worth winning soonest.

But, as framed by the anti-marriage-equality crowd, marriage is primarily about gender. And, by the way, the definition of gender is not up for discussion. It is a laughably ridiculous notion, according to them, that two men or two women, as co-parents, could bring a healthy mix of influences into their family which would be considered to be traditionally masculine and feminine.

They might as well be screaming, What about the poor, abused, straight offspring of two dude-dads, or two dyke-moms? How will they survive childhood, and become productive adults, unless they emerge as gender-conforming and straight as our kids already are?

I am not trans, but if I could petition to change my birth certificate and my ID from M to F, that wouldn't be a problem. It has pissed me off for a long time that trans, genderqueer, and intersexed folks don't have that option. Obviously, I'm being overly simplistic about the challenges my trans siblings have lived with forever, but I do so mindful of straight pastors who refuse to sign marriage certificates, and straight couples who have vowed to wait on marriage until it is available to any two people ready to commit.

As a single step on the march to civil rights for all, it doesn't bother me to think of filling out a form and putting in my name under wife of the guy I love. Or mother of the kids we're raising. Or, being ridiculed by a cop for being an unfeminine woman at a traffic stop.

It frustrates me that ideas like these are esoteric, out-there, not mainstream, among queer folk. It just makes sense to me to challenge gender, and marriage, and family, all in the same breath.

Well, what a pity the T's are a minute sector of the LGBT community; and that much like you don't care for gay marriage because it doesn't affect you, I could not care less about transgender welfare because it does not affect me.

People invest their dollars in whatever they damn well please, and that happens to be on marriage equality. If somehow the organizations were not representative of their membership, they'd be scrambling for donations. They're not.

Kalamazoo is a joke race. Very small demographic, thus an easier race. Just ask anyone how easy it would be to run a campaign in California as well.

Anti-discrimination protections are also not plagued with the problems gay marriage has. The issue of anti-discrimination policies is not clouded by primitive reactions to sexual perceptions.

Um, could I remind folks that we trans folk come in all flavors of sexual orientations? So, same sex marriage does have a bearing upon a good number of trans people, since many trans people identify as L, G, or B.

I'm not exactly excited about the institution of marriage—I blame my feminist roots for that. However, I do recognized that if I find myself with another woman and we fall deeply and madly in love together, we might feel a desire to tie the knot. In that situation, we'd both be screwed because my birth certificate now has an F on it.

I suppose I could have gotten married when I still presented as a guy, but I transitioned pretty early in my life—before a lot of people settle down. As trans people transition younger and younger, the option to marry pre-transition simply won't be available for those trans people who eventually identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Plus, there's no guarantee that a marriage will survive transition. Many end in divorce.

So, I'm a little annoyed that some straight trans folk are looking past my inability to marry. Yes, I'm a lesbian but I'm also transgender, too. The T includes me, too.

This is directed toward Bob: If you drop the T or the B from the acronym, then you're pretty much saying that some same sex relationships matter more than others because both trans people and bisexual people can be involved in same sex relationships. Furthermore, those relationships can be with cis lesbians and gay men. So, dropping the T and the B will effect the cis lesbians and gay men who are in relationships with bisexual people and trans people. Why? Because they'll have to suffer through the horror of watching their trans or bi partner face discrimination. Both partners will be faced with a social, emotional, economic, and legal burden. And of course, the same arguments can be made for not including intersex people.

So, I have to ask you, Bob, do you really want to say that some same sex couples matter more than others? Do you really want to ignore the needs of cis lesbians and gay men whose partners will be affected by the omission of those "extra" letters?

Whether folks like it or not, we're all bound together in this mess. The symbology of an acronym never quite captures the complexity of people's lives. Perhaps we should remember that.

I agree with Bob in that there are a lot of divergent interests in the LGBTQ community, and sometimes they're completely incommensurate. I disagree with the idea that that would be solved by focusing just on gay and lesbian folks - there are plenty who have different interests.

Not too long ago, I should point out, there wasn't even unity between the G and the L, and they thought their interests were too divergent to work together. What does a gay man really have in common with a lesbian? Now we seem to have half-forgotten those existed. And, within the G and L group, there's differences in terms of class, race, political ideology, geography, etc. And those differences are important and lead to big debates (like all those Bil and Jerame have about how coastal/urban LG folks don't support nondiscrimination legislation in flyover country, instead focusing on marriage for their own states...). There are many groups of G and L people who don't think that the LGBT movement as a whole is looking out for their interests.

As Lucrece put it, our de facto way of organizing now isn't as a movement, at least at the state and local level. It's issue-based for grassroots folks and people who give whatever time they can to help out; the people who worry about the movement as a whole are either paid or have more free time on their hands. So the issue wasn't LGBT rights in kalamazoo, WA, and ME, they were civil unions, anti-discrimination legislation, and marriage. And people signed up and worked on those issues if they were important to them (including straight/cis folks).

Most people are greedy and work on and donate to and discuss the issues that they think will help them the most. That's the point of this discussion, though - the focus of most of the movement's money has been on the issue that the movement's richest and most numerous care about the most. And since this is, at most, a movement not a democracy, there's little that can be done to change that other than raising awareness about other issues and getting a little well-intentioned support for them.

I think most parts of the movement feel like the other segments aren't reciprocating their support for each others' issues, except for (of course) those folks who a blissfully unaware that there are segments in the community with different interests than their own.

Not that any of this matters to me. Being completely selfish, I don't live in K-zoo, WA, or ME, so none of these are "my rights." And when folks say that health care reform should be postponed to repeal DADT (good luck convincing House Democrats of that one), that's really just asking me to wait on legislation that would benefit me for legislation that will never benefit me since I'll never be a soldier anyway.

It's a useful exercise for people to clearly identify what they want from the LGBT movement so that we can better articulate our needs. But it can't be an ending point, or else than the straight/cis majority can just as easily decide that anti-discrimination legislation, etc., is not in their "rights" and therefore will never happen.

OK, Austen. I've read through your responses on this thread and I understand the spirit of your article. Thank you for responding to me directly, by the way.

Selfishness can be useful, as it helps in drawing boundaries and doing what one needs to do to take care of oneself. However, it's important that people balance selfishness with the ability to empathize with and understand other people's lives.

Consequently, I'm trying to step outside of myself and see things from your perspective. It dawned on me this morning, that it must be a real pain in the ass to be both transgender and straight when one is interacting with the queer community. Being transgender is bad enough: tons of verbiage has been expended trying to get the larger queer rights movement to understand that trans people are often treated as outsiders and that tendency is incredibly off-putting. In spite of being trans, at least I, a lesbian, can find a sense of common cause with the larger movement. However, what if I were straight? That sense of connection and inclusion would be quite tenuous given the way trans people are often invisible to the concerns of the larger queer movement. With respect to the queer alphabet, being a straight trans person must be akin to being a minority within a minority within a minority. That has to be incredibly annoying.

Privilege and power can shift as easily as sand in an ocean. In the outside world, being straight can afford one access to a greater degree of privilege, but being trans and being a woman can take bloody huge chunks out of the level of power that one can access. Inside of the realm of the queer community, being straight and trans and female pretty much pushes one to a position very near the bottom of the pyramid.

This is good illustration of why I tend to favor looking at power and privilege using a model known as kyriarchy. Simply put, the model recognizes that power relations can shift according to social environment and the participants involved. As circumstances change, the roles of privileged and under-privileged can easily switch.

What a great discussion this is! Bob You should be thankful you were treated with respect by the trans-leaders! Thank you for trying to educate Bob! We all matter LBGT are intertwined so tightly that when one is removed it causes failures for all! The Dropping of the T's for the ENDA (2007) ended up with the ENDA not passing as members of congress realized that breaking the group and isolating a portion was a way of defeating the whole! (Think of how wild wolves separate their prey and can eventually eliminate the whole group) Now the distrust is causing problems among US LBGT's! How to bring the LBGT groups together seems to be what is being worked on now! Bil (Bilerico) had been asking questions of us T people and I as one of the T's would hope that the questions will continue again in the future! Bilerico has done a great job! Thank you all!

And that looks to do it for tonight, lol

Saying someone is "transphobic" is name-calling, and I'm sick of it! I've opposed marriage on another thread, and I'll oppose "trans inclusion" here -- for the same reason: both involve adopting conventional definitions and traditional social roles.

And yes, gay identity is endangered by trans identities! Make fun of me all you wish, but a gay man's self-esteem is delicate enough without his having to consider whether his feelings for another man make him a woman.

I, for one, see gay identity as a personal freedom issue coming out of the counterculture and the sexual revolution, and not as an equality issue coming out of feminism -- and I see much of the marriage and "trans inclusion" agenda as invalidating what we had the potential to become after Stonewall made the closet (read "non-disclosure") and "feminized men" (read "aspects of transsexualism) - finally - incipient anachronisms.

I see both the current trans ascendency and the marriage agenda as the result of decades of cultural conservatism (since Reagan) and gay male self-doubt (since AIDS).

Enough of that crap! It's enough to make me want to cut off my dick and let my imagination overrun acceptance of my body so I can "pass" as a woman and find some love in a world that hasn't fulfilled the promise of change that seemed possible in 1969 (whether that's the '69 of Stonewall or the ' 69 of Woodstock).

I don't care what names you call me for writing the above; the damage is done and the name-calling will only deepen it.

One last clarification: when I disparage "trans identities," I mean "trans" as in "transition." I believe transsexualism specifically involves allowing imagination to eclipse reality.

If "trans" meant -- and when "trans" truly means -- transcending (as in transcending [or even ignoring] gender) - I'd have no problem with it.

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One last point: when transsexualism is a genuine case of "mismatched wiring" between the brain or nervous system and the rest of one's body, it can be seen as a genuine disability (possibly even in need of corrective surgery).

Being gay, conversely, is not a disability and should not be lumped in with something that is one.

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If I've been dubious or skeptical regarding feminism, it's because feminism makes gender important, and I don't think it should be. Call me sexist, misogynist, or transmisogynist; see if I care! Once one gets beyond the namecalling, the charge rings hollow, but the damage (as a result of what comes down to nothing but character assassination) is real.

When did a movement for sexual freedom become a movement for a Brave New World of synthetic bodies and synthetic families, anyway?

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A man with breast cancer? I guess that's one way to get coverage for "top surgery"... ;-)

(Actually, an apology: since my sister had breast cancer, it's hard for me to make that a laughing matter...)

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"I happen to like some of the contemporary gender roles, and society holds up these roles as part of the fabricc of our daily lives."

Gee, that doesn't sound very liberated to me. In fact, it doesn't seem very conducive to liberation, period. And I see that as a very real problem.

"What about my life is endangering your gay identity, Mitch? Are you not secure enough in your sexuality and gender identity that you would feel threatened by a girl in Indiana, speaking her mind about the world around her?"

Maybe not -- and I'll be 60 next month. None of us is really all that secure - certainly not those of us who've seen and survived what I've seen and survived. I hear plenty about the pain TGs are subjected to, so turnabout is fair play - and the pain is just as real. In my case, it may be akin to the pain of a holocaust survivor.

More to the point, this has a lot to do with isolation, and a feeling that one has constructed a sort of gay male identity that has become historically irrelevant. I see Stonewall as having been (potentially) the last stand of the drags before their relevance was swept away by the hippie era and by gay liberation itself, where the significance of gender itself was ready to be confined increasingly to the backwaters of the Deep South and other such atavistic places where drag culture remained strong.

But between Reagan and AIDS, history seems to have taken a U-turn, and to have kept going in the wrong direction (marriage included, incidentally).

In this context, maybe my identity as a gay male boomer isn't quite as privileged as some might have it cracked up to be. We weren't just denied out utopia; we lost our very frame of reference. (As for my view of the LGBT Establishment, groups like HRC are certainly no help in assuaging my sense of having survived an aborted revolution.)

Ironically, I favor most of the specific political demands on the "T" agenda, but I don't believe in "transgender inclusion" in an "LGBT community," and I don't feel obliged to support what I consider the transsexual conflation of imagination with reality.

To each his/her own, I guess -- but the right to speak one's truth about human life as one observes and experiences it cuts both ways!

I disagree with the Lions analogy to the gay marriage fight. We are 0-31 and the Lions were 0-19. The Lions did not then announce that they would no longer play football or would not engage in certain aspects of football. Instead, they adjusted their strategy and I think that's what might need to happen right now with the LGBT movement.

To torture the analogy a bit further, if we understand the political goal of LGBT groups to be the removal of legal and political discrimination against LGBT people, then our strategies may change but our goal doesn't. Similar to football, the goal is to win the game.

Since the current strategy of engaging marriage and rights at the state level keeps messing up, then we need to change the strategy, not drop the goal. Maybe we need to be taking this to the federal level exclusively. I am inclined to think so as the previous models of civil rights have never succeeded at the local level consistently, not for African Americans, for women, for disability activists. There's no model for civil rights as a local issue.

Like a football team deciding to play a different offensive strategy or to convert a defensive play into an offensive one, our strategies to win employment antidiscrimination, military inclusion, family and marriage inclusion, for all LGBT people need revision, badly. But we can't just drop those parts of the body politic that we don't like.

The one part of the original part of the original post that disturbs me though is implied criticism that somehow seeking marriage rights is aimed against transgender people. It would seem to me that the goal of achieving access to marriage regardless of gender or gender identification would be a major trans goal, particularly for those trans people who do not undergo surgical gender reassignment or trans people who are not straight.

Stay nice, people. We don't like to TOS comments because of free speech concerns, but we do have some basic standards, which include not using slurs to refer to other people.

Using scare quotes around gendered language when referring to transgender people and the word "trannies" are considered slurs.

Argue substance all you want but keep it civil. As a parallel, feel free to argue that gay men should all marry women because sex is less important than Biblical morality, but don't say what "faggots" should do.

And usually we delete entire comments when they violate TOS, people are already engaging and it seems that everyone here is attempting to discuss the topic.

It feels weird not to see dyssonance under my posts, LOL