It's been a rough few weeks for the LGBT community. Things had been going well for us. We helped take back Congress. We continued to have a powerful voice in Sacramento. Assemblyman Mark Leno's (D-San Francisco) marriage bill sailed through the legislature. And, perhaps most significant, for the first time in American history, both houses of Congress passed an explicitly LGBT piece of legislation, the Matthew Shepard Act, a hate crimes bill that covers both sexual orientation and gender identity.
We were planning to score another big win with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, one of the holy grails of our community. For the past few years, ENDA, like the hate crimes bill, has covered the entire LGBT community, including transgender people.
Then, out of nowhere, we were informed that we didn't have the votes to pass an ENDA that included transgender people. We were told that we should remove gender identity from the bill, take half a loaf, and try to get the other half at some unspecified point in the future. We were told that this was political reality that we needed to accept. We were told that, as gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, we should move ahead even if we did so without our transgender brothers and sisters – without the people who have stood and fought with us every step of the way in building this LGBT movement.
Well, I say no way. We, as a community, should unambiguously reject this division. If this strategy proceeds, this will be the first time in U.S. history that a piece of civil rights legislation will cover some members of a community but not others. When we banned discrimination based on race, we didn't just cover the more "popular" races. We covered all of us. And, as we ban discrimination based on sexual identity, we must make sure that we cover all of us and that we don't cleave the community in a rush to get something passed.
As a gay man, it is tempting to take what I can get, when I can get it. Gay men have experienced enormous discrimination in hiring and promotion. We need federal legislation to address this problem.
But, I don't want that legislation at any cost. And, I certainly don't want it if it means excluding part of our community that, frankly, needs employment protection a heck of a lot more than many gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Here in San Francisco – the LGBT mecca – only 25 percent of transgender people have full-time jobs, and 59 percent earn $15,333 or less per year. These abysmal statistics are in San Francisco. Imagine what the numbers are like in other parts of the country.
Against this backdrop, our community is being pitted against itself. Transgender people are being told that their presence in ENDA will drag down the whole bill. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are being told that the only way for them to get ahead is to separate from transgender people – a temporary separation, of sorts.
The problem with temporary separations, however, is that they often become divorces. That would be a tragedy for the LGBT community. If we yield to the "transgender people are too unpopular" argument and take them out of the bill, we will only encourage legislators around the country, at all levels, to take the easy way out and downsize LGBT legislation so that it only covers the least controversial portions of our community. We need to insist that Congress take the hard vote up front. It may cause us some pain now, but it will be well worth it in the long run.
Solidarity is never easy. It means that some people with privilege voluntarily give up that privilege until other people can have the privilege as well. It means that some of us make temporary sacrifices to benefit the entire community. This isn't new in the LGBT community. Just ask the heroic lesbians who cared for gay men dying of HIV/AIDS during a time when, frankly, gay men were the unpopular ones because of the nationwide panic over HIV transmission. Or, just ask the transgender heroes who, instead of focusing exclusively on trans rights, have dedicated themselves to fighting for the right of gay men and lesbians to marry.
This is our chance to prove that we "L's," "G's", and "B's" don't leave people behind so that we can get ahead. We have always been one community, back to Stonewall and before. We continue to be one community. Let's keep our community intact by rejecting this ill-advised effort to pass a version of ENDA that excludes our transgender brothers and sisters.
Scott Wiener is chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and serves on the national board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign. He disagrees with HRC's position on the current version of ENDA but believes that it is important for all voices on this issue to be at the table within HRC, given that the ENDA legislative process is likely to last for several years or more and that the current debate is not even close to over.