Monica's Universe

(Permission to repost this from Laura Calvo, Oregon’s Stonewall Democrats, one of the Transgender Delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Committe’s Convention.)

The year was 1993.  Clinton was President.  Gay, lesbian and bisexual people felt they finally had a friend in the White House.  And, even though transgender people officially started the gay movement at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, they only began finding their voices in the equal rights movement in the early 1990’s.  They had very little visibility and vertically no credibility.  We weren’t on anyone’s radar.

In that year, President Clinton wanted to fulfill a promise by making the US military safe for people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but it didn’t turn out the way people wanted.  The now infamous Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law came into affect and it did not protect people in the military based on their sexual orientation, if that orientation was something other than straight.  The law gave commanders a chance to hunt down gay, lesbian and bisexual service member in order to weed them out.  Transgender military people didn’t ask to be included, but included they were.

(more…)

I just received an “Action Alert” from the Servicesmembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) asking me and others to send a letter to our local newspapers and the national newspapers on stating the need to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA) supports this repeal and has since Day One of our existence.  We knew back then that transgender people were being kicked out under DADT, but did not have the proof until this year with the survey we did.

I included the Action Alert SLDN sent me after my comments.  When you click onto their link, it takes you to a place where you fill out various pieces of information and it then sends you to a pre-written letter to send off to those newspapers.  You can change the words in the letter.  If you read down in the letter, you will see near the end it says, “gay, lesbian and bisexual service members.” When I saw that, I added the word “transgender” in that list and sent it out with that minor change.  Afterwards, I sent a response to Aubrey Sarvis at SLDN telling him what I did.

(more…)

Guest posting by Angela Brightfeather

Angela has been an activist for the transgender community is some form or another for the last 42 years. Some of our community’s activists weren’t even born then. She has been on the board of NTAC, It’s Time, North Carolina and the several other organizations too numberous to mention. Currently, she serves as the Vice President of the Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA) and is one of its Co-Founders. Also, Angela is one of my closest friends.

And, the big question for Senator Obama is . . . . ?

You know something? I am so tired of arguing with people about HRC and about their loyal transgender members and workers at the bottom of the food chain we call the “GLB community.” I am also getting tired of the absolute position of transgender leaders whom I know, about their insistence that we don’t need HRC and that they compare them to our worst enemies..

I actually agree with both sides of all this argument, which makes me stop and think a minute about why we need to argue in the first place?

Deep in the pit of my stomach, I have always sought the most acute area of pain in our community and focused the things I have done in that direction. As a professed and unashamed healer in our community, I really have no choice but to be drawn to ease the pain and that is how it has been for most of my life.

(more…)

The Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara has released the findings of a survey, conducted by Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA), that shows that transgender veterans are being turned away and being mistreated in high numbers by Veterans Administration medical facilities.  The survey, with 827 transgender veteran participants, was conducted from December 13, 2007 to May 1, 2008.  This represents a strong sampling from what is estimated to be approximately 300,000 veterans in the US who identify as being transgender.

(more…)

Marisa Richmond is President of the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Equality Project & Board of advisers of NCTE. She is a former Board Member of AEGIS, IFGE, NTAC, & Nashville’s Rainbow Community Center. She served as Co-Chair of Southern Comfort in 2001, chaired the host committee of the 2002 IFGE Convention in Nashville, & served on the Planning Committee for Nashville Black Pride in 2004. She won the Trinity Award in 2002 & the HRC Equality Award in 2007. This year, Merisa will be one of eight transgender delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She is the first African American trans person to be elected as a delegate to any national political party’s convention.

Yesterday, the Platform Committee of the Democratic National Committee met in Pittsburgh to review and amend the draft platform. In July, community meetings were held all across the country to gather input from people of all walks of life. Those of us in the 2nd Transgender Caucus stepped up in our own way to ensure that the concerns of the Transgender community were heard and included. Amanda Simpson of Arizona met with her Governor, Janet Napolitano, who was the Chair of the Drafting Committee. Several others, including me, met directly with Platform Committee members from our respective states. Tennessee has three members on Platform and I met or talked with all three. In our meetings, we expressed the desire to have language calling for Democrats to support only a fully inclusive, employment non-discrimination act. We also urged passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, access to health care for all Americans, and expressed concern over various ID laws at the federal and state levels. For Transgender Tennesseans, this includes the right to change gender on Birth Certificates, and opposition to the Real ID Act and new voter ID’s.

(more…)

Recently, there has been a heated discussion on The Bilerico Project about the emotion of Anger.  I have written articles on love and being in love and finding love, but I have never tackled the very misunderstood emotion of anger.  I felt that this could be a challenge to spark my meager writing talents.  Here goes.

I will be the first to admit I can get angry at times.  (I can hear the audience now, “F-in’-A, Monica!”)  I have no delusion about this one bit.  I don’t deny it like others try to do.  It has been made apparent several times that I am one of the biggest mixer of feces on blogs, in articles and on Yahoo lists.  Yep, I even bought a huge wooden spoon at Target to make the mixing easier.  Sometime, it’s real anger, while others is more like faux anger, or even “anger lite.”  Less filling.

(more…)