The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
LGBTQ organizers take issues back to the community
NEW HAVEN — Two days after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy put his signature on Senate Bill 13, legislation crafted to give pregnant or menstruating inmates more dignity and natal support and privacy, organizers with a coalition called CT Equality recently went back to the community level.
CT Equality, one of the several state groups that advocated for SB 13, was founded in 2010 as a coalition of groups and individuals to fight for Connecticut expanding its antidiscrimination statutes to protect gender identity and expression, although organizer Gretchen Raffa, director of public policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, said the work itself had been ongoing for years.
For a group like CT Equality, one of the most crucial elements of SB 13 is the protections for transgender inmates written into the bill, like being searched only by guards of the same gender identity and receiving commissary items consistent with their gender identity.
“There’s been so much national backlash against LGBT people that we have to be prepared for whatever happens,” Robin said. McHaelen, executive director of the Hartford-based True Colors. “We need to look more intersectionally.”
Intersectionality is a feminist theory that emphasizes how systems of oppression are linked to and compound one another. Issues of refugees, immigration and racism “are all queer issues,” McHaelen said.
Raffa said the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 ignited a sense of urgency in the coalition, which informed the group once again joining with groups such as the ACLU of Connecticut and LGBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders to successfully advocate for the banning of conversion therapy, a practice that purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
In the most recent legislative session, the group also advocated for the confirmation of Justice Andrew McDonald as Connecticut Chief Justice. McDonald, whose nomination was rejected by the state Senate, would have been the first openly gay chief justice in the nation.
“There’s more great work we need to be doing to protect the safety and dignity of our communities,” Raffa said. “We have power over legislators, so we want to do more great work in the policy arena.”
Although the group has given attention to legislation and policy recently, CT Equality organizer Pat Comerford led a discussion with about 75 people in the New Haven Pride Center on a recent evening to share their concerns.
“This is an opportunity to hear from folks and a chance to hear from each other,” Comerford said.
The ideas raised during the two-hour meeting represented a wide variety of concerns, from protecting the sexual health of young people by easing laws on the procurement of the antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis treatment or introducing more comprehensive sex education into schools, to laws that protect and recognize nontraditional family structures, combating mass incarceration and having gender-neutral markers on state-issued identification.
Not all of the ideas were about policy: some suggested that queer advocacy groups be mindful about why the spaces are overwhelmingly white or that youth voices be carefully considered and included in advocacy and discourse.
Patrick Dunn, director of the New Haven Pride Center, said grant writing is difficult for LGBT service providers because of how state agencies and major foundations disburse funds based solely on their relationship to serving a binary idea of gender.
“We’re doing meetings in other places around the state to continue this conversation,” Comerford said. “As we go do this, we will be making sense of patterns.”
One audience member said they could not remember a time ever seeing such a large queer community outside of a nightclub than in that moment. Moments where a group of queer people gathers to talk about queerness, they said, are rare but important opportunities that should be duplicated more often.