Why the T in LGBT is here to stay

Transgender people are not beggars at the civil rights table set by gay and lesbian activists. They are integral to the struggle for gender freedom for all.

By Susan Stryker

Read more: Civil Rights, Gay Culture, Politics, Lesbians, Opinion

Oct. 11, 2007 | Pity poor John Aravosis, the gay rights crusader from AmericaBlog whose "How Did the T Get in LGBT?" essay, in reference to the controversy over gender identity protections in the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act, was published on Salon a few days ago.

To hear Aravosis tell it, he and multitudes of like-minded gay souls have been sitting at the civil rights table for more than 30 years, waiting to be served. Now, after many years of blood, sweat, toil and tears, a feast in the form of federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace has finally been prepared. Lips are being licked, chops smacked, saliva salivated, when -- WTF!?! -- a gaunt figure lurches through the door.

It is a transgender person, cupped hands extended, begging for food. Seems somebody on the guest list -- maybe a lot of somebodies -- let this stranger in off the streets without consulting everyone else beforehand, claiming he-she-it-or-whatever was a relative of some sort. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a fabulous dinner party starts surreally morphing into one of those OxFam fundraisers dramatizing third-world hunger whose sole function is to make the "haves" feel guilty for the plight of the "have-nots."

Maitre d' Barney Frank offers an elegant pretext for throwing the bum out. The establishment's new management, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is caught off-guard by the awkward turn of events, but deftly shuffles the hubbub into the wings and starts working the room, all smiles, to reassure the assembled guests that a somber and long-sought civil rights victory will be celebrated in short order.

Aravosis and those who share his me-first perspective are not so sure. Seeing half a loaf of civil rights protection on the table before them, and sensing that the soirée might come to a premature and unexpected denouement, they make a grab, elbows akimbo, for said truncated loaf. This is, after all, their party.

In my line of work -- teaching history and theory of sexuality and gender -- we've invented a polysyllabic technical term applicable to Aravosis & Co., which is homocentric, whose definition Aravosis supplies when he asserts, as he did in his recent essay, that gay is the term around which the GLBT universe revolves. By gay he means gay men like himself, to which is added (in descending order of importance), lesbian, bisexual and transgender, beyond which lies an even more obscure region of poorly understood and infrequently observed identities.

Aravosis isn't questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he's just concerned with properly marking the distinction between "enough like me" and "too different from me" to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies. His position is a bit like those kerfuffled astronomers not too long ago, scratching their noggins over how to define Pluto's place in the conceptual scheme of the solar system. Sure, we've been calling it a planet for a good number of years because it's round and orbits the sun just like our Earth, but now it appears that if we keep doing so we'll have to let a bunch of the bigger asteroids into the planet category, as well as some other weird faraway stuff we only recently learned about, which stretches the definition of "planet" into a name for things we don't really think of as being much like good ol' Earth, so let's just demote Pluto instead. In Aravosis' homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto.

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