Obama protects transgender rights in federal goverment. How queer.

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Maybe Obama is as queer as a three dollar bill?  Maybe that’s why he is not responding to many demands from gay and lesbian activists, but is working to support  diversity of gender expression among federal employees.

New Protections for Transgender Federal Workers – NYTimes.com.

Obama has not worked to rid the nation of the Defense of Marriage Act and in fact added even more money to the federal “Healthy (STRAIGHT) Marriage Initiatives”- a campaign started by Dubbya to solve poverty by teaching poor people to get married.  Further, he has not yet signed an executive order getting rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military.  But, Obama is working to protect transgender federal employees.

The fight for transgender rights is  a growing movement on many college campuses and other places where young people gather.  In the same way that the Civil Rights campaign helped to break down the color line, the transgender movement is breaking down the gender divide.  Some transgendered persons live as one sex or the other (not the one they were assigned at birth), but many also live as “trans” or “gender queer” or in other ways refuse to be a man or a woman or insist on being both. As transgender writer and performer Kate Bornstein famously said, “Fuck your gender.”

The trans movement has helped to liberate bathrooms (no more waiting in the women’s line when the bathroom next door is free), but it has also created a crisis among many in the gay and lesbian movement.  What to do with a movement that undermines the basis of gay and straight desire?  That is, if straight people are attracted to the opposite sex and gay people the same sex, what happens when you’re attracted to someone who is both or neither?  Perhaps it is this discomfort that led the Human Rights Campaign Fund to cut trans people out of its campaign for a national Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).  The mainstream gay and lesbian movement was interested in protecting employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual identity, not diversity of gender expression.

Of course, the relationship between mainstream gay/lesbian movements and trans activists has always been fraught. In the 1970s, when MtoF lesbian Sandy Stone was outed working at a women’s only company, female-born lesbian Janice Raymond responded with an entire polemic, The Transsexual Empire.  In her book, Raymond accused transwomen of bringing patriarchy into women-only space (or probably “wombyn only space” or maybe “wimmin-only space”).   Sandy Stone got the last word, however,  a decade and PhD from Santa Cruz later when she wrote “A Post-Trasexual Manifesto” and argued that trans people should stop being forced to be one gender or the other and embrace the complexity of gender expression that everyone, trans or not, feels.

It is this “diversity of gender expression” that disturbs homo and hetero identities and is now going to be protected among federal employees.  Good for Obama.  And how queer.