As some of you might know, I'd been very involved with Georgetown's LGBTQ group, GU Pride, for most of my freshman and sophomore years. This semester, I've also been interning at Immigration Equality (a group working for LGBT and HIV+ immigration and asylum), which shares floor space with a lot of important LGBT activist groups.
While for the first year or so, I was just so happy to have found a safe space in which to be out, and where there was an actual gay community (and not just a handful of assorted individuals that I knew at school), that I didn't much care for the politics of it all.
However, the more conscious I become of the politics, the less I like it.
I'll start with something very pertinent one of my residents pointed out to me: the more time and energy you spend fighting each other, the less you are able to devote to fighting for equality.
So true.
However, it's difficult to not fight with each other when Ronald Gold, one of the founders of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and driving forces behind removal of homosexuality from APA's list of disorders, blogs about, essentially, the non-existence of transsexuality.
It's difficult to not have infighting when the Human Rights Campaign was ready to support a non-inclusive ENDA.
It's difficult to not have fight one another when some members of the community start pointing fingers at others (within community, or at other minority groups) and start claiming "it's THEIR fault WE don't have our rights."
There is racism, sexism, ageism, fat-phobia, transphobia, cis-sexism, ableism, classism, Western-centric normativity etc. etc. in the LGBT "community", much as there is in the broader LGBT + non-LGBT community. It might even be more amplified, due to the pressures of already feeling like a discriminated group, and being desperate to hold on to some form of privilege. Is it going to disappear because we, to some extent or another, share identites as gender and sexual minorities? Not really. Do we have to continue working against those forms of discrimination though? Absolutely.
Part of the problem why these problems of exclusionary politics seem more acute in LGBT politics is that, frankly, to be able to devote your energies to LGBT politics over most other causes, you have to be in a position of relative privilege -- there's a REAL reason why the LGBT movement is characteristic of post-industrial society. Research has found that people of color tend to view their race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, as more defining factors of their identities than their sexual orientation. It's not unsurprising then, that when IE was looking to hire for a job opening, most of the job applicants WERE white and from relatively well-off backgrounds.
When we haven't yet created an environment where people who place other aspects of their identity above their sexual orientation are unable to commit themselves to the cause of the LGBT movement, attempting to enforce invisible quotas won't help. But then, when we're spending so much of our energies fighting each other, it's hard to expect people affected by LGBT discrimination at the same time as other forms of discrimination to spend a significant part of their time fighting for LGBT rights, when they would have fight people within the LGBT community for those same other types of discrimination as they are fighting on the outside, the same racism, classism, sexism etc. Additionally, for many people from racial minority backgrounds,
At the same time, the fact that for various reasons minorities are underrepresented in numbers in LGBT organizations does not mean it's ok for them to be underrepresented in terms of issues. It's not ok that trans issues get ignored in favor of cis-centric issues; that the murder of a white gay man get more coverage than the equally brutal murder of a trans black woman; that issues affecting LGBT people outside the US borders not gain a mention at all. It becomes the responsibility of those who feel they can devote their time to representing LGBT issues to devote their time to ALL LGBT issues and not claim that "hey, the minorities didn't run/apply for this job etc. and therefore, I can't represent their voice".
However, when do we get to a point when we realize that fighting each other, for fights that really are less against each and more against the broader discriminatory forces of society, prevent us from being united on what we do have in common? We do want equality and equal treatment as sexual and gender minorities, though we might have different priorities.
Another (HUGE) fallacy the LGBT movement, I think, seems to fall into is boxing people too much. Take a person and stick labels on them. That's why the LGBT had grown to LGBTQQIAP and heaven knows what other letters: the answer isn't to add to more letters to the acronym and thus exclude people who don't fit the letters you arbitrarily decided to pick in your attempt to be more inclusive. Why can we not settle on a term that identifies our similarities as sexual and gender minorities rather than our differences from one another? The boxing and labeling is also apparent in how we will break people down to the component parts of their identities rather than viewing them as individuals holisitically: you speak for minority issues because you're non-white, you speak for trans issues because you're gender non-conforming etc. etc.
So, where's the solution? Well, part of the solution is to realize that these different fights are not disconnected. Social justice causes are all inter-related, and while, yes, being gay doesn't mean you subscribed to "The Progressives United", it's important to realize that we will not be able to have a unified front as an LGBT community when we're fighting each other over racism, classism and all those other monsters. Which is why it becomes important to fight against them all at once.
It's, unfortunately, too much to ask of anyone though. Because people don't like giving up their positions of privilege, relative or absolute, and heck, when being a rich gay man gives you more privilege than being a poor trans woman, heck, you're going to stick to that privilege. But, you know what? By doing so, you're hurting your own cause. People on the outside will look at you, and see you reinforcing what they think of the society (some people are inherently better than others) and decide that "hey, we're still better than that guy because we're straight".
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