It took a long time to add the ‘ T’ to LGB
At this point the consonants are so tightly fused it’s as if they were always and inevitably so: LGBT.
But just a decade ago, the T teetered. It wobbled.
It was eliminated from a federal bill to protect lesbians, gays and bisexuals from discrimination in employment. The 2007 legislation’s principal backers — including Barney Frank, an openly gay congressman — decided that pressing fellow lawmakers to cover transgender people as well was a bridge too far.
That bill failed anyway. But the tinkering reflected broader apprehensions. If not publicly then privately, many gays and lesbians wondered not only about the political costs of an alliance with transgender people but also whether the alliance made any real sense.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told me that at a recent banquet for an LGBT health organization, a wealthy gay donor said to her: “Can you walk me through why we’re all one big community? I just don’t get it.”
I do, though I admit that it took me time and that I sometimes worried that we gay men and lesbians were steepening our climb toward the fullest possible acceptance by making the ascent arm in arm with transgender people.
Last week the Trump administration rescinded the Obama administration’s guidelines that public schools allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
That move stood in contrast to a decision weeks earlier not to mess with Obama’s edict barring federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT people, and it suggested a greater reluctance to be seen as an enemy of gay and lesbian rights than to side against transgender ones.
Although Congress is still resisting anti-discrimination legislation for LGBT people, I no longer hear advocates discuss whether the T is an obstacle or propose that it be left out.
Even Keisling’s banquet companion, she said, made clear that he wasn’t taking any particular exception to the big tent. He was just curious about how it assumed its shape.
The answer: fitfully. The road to a consonant cluster that’s now taken for granted — and that’s grown longer, with a Q or more added, depending on who’s doing the clustering — was a rocky one.
Go back to the 1960s and ’70s and the G was often so domineering that the L went its own, separate way. In fact much of a new ABC miniseries about the LGBT rights movement, “When We Rise,” which will be shown over four nights this week, focuses on that rift.
And for a while, the B was a matter of controversy. Many gay men and lesbians suspected that people who called themselves bisexual were taking a timid, untruthful half-step out of the closet or were adventurers who’d return in short order to the heterosexual fold. But that tension paled next to disagreements about the inclusion of transgender people, exemplified by yearly fights over whether to allow transgender women to attend the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
In a thoughtful, provocative essay in Salon in 2007, gay rights advocate John Aravosis defended the absence of any reference to transgender people in the federal anti-discrimination bill on the grounds that half a loaf was better than none.
He also wrote, with brave candor: “A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins.”
I knew where he was coming from. A transgender person’s experience of anatomical features unaligned with his or her psyche and soul was as mysterious to me as it was to any straight person.
Over the last decade, I’ve listened — imperfectly but earnestly — to the life stories that transgender people have courageously volunteered, and I’ve come to a better understanding of how much more lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people share.
We all have firsthand experience of how unnecessarily rigid and tyrannical a society’s conceptions of manhood and womanhood can be. We all know the pain of falling outside those conceptions. We all appreciate the importance — in some cases, it’s a life-ordeath matter — of freedom.