Voting While Trans

Today is Election Day in the US.  Many of us can't vote on what, for us, is the most basic issue of voting:  actually having access to the voting booth.

You see, some states have instituted voter ID laws, or made the ones they already had on the books even more restrictive.

Those laws keep trans people from voting because many of us live in a legal limbo in which we can get one kind of ID but not another in our names,  and the jurisdictions in which we live will only accept the kind of ID we can't get.

As an example, some states won't allow us to change the names on our drivers' licenses until/unless we've had gender reassignment surgery--even if we've changed our names in the local court.  Or we've changed our state IDs but the local boards of elections still list us under our old names. 

I was in a really peculiar situation:  After changing my name, I was able to get a new state (non-drivers' license) ID with my chosen name and a female gender marker.  I also got a passport as a woman named Justine, but was not allowed to renew it as such until I underwent my surgery.

Anyway, I will leave you with this "Voting While Trans" guide:



 

Valentina Verbal Runs For Chilean Congress

Last year, Argentina passed a law that said, in essence, any Argentinian aged 18 or over can be whichever gender he or she chooses.  No surgery is required, and for those who want it, the government will provide it free of charge.

Now neighboring Chile may go where neither the US nor any of the other countries seen as avatars of human rights has gone:  It may elect its first transgender member of Congress.

Valentina Verbal has just announced her candidacy for election to the position in November.  She realizes she has an uphill battle in a country where "If you're male, you have to be masculine. If you're female, you have to be feminine.  If you're not, it's weird."  

One of the things she wants to do, if she's elected, is to change the country's gender-identity laws.  "When a person has a card or national identity card that doesn't reflect their social sex, in practice it means they are undocumented", she says.  "We have to change the law so that it recognizes the identity of transgender people without the state obligating them to have an actual sex change."  Changing the law is necessary, she says, because when an identity card says one sex, but the person appears as another, "it can be difficult to find employers who don't see it as a problem".  This makes it difficult for such a person to find work, which she calls "a basic human right".

Her platform is not limited to identity cards or other issues of concern to transgender people.  She wants to help create "a more citizen-based democracy, not just a democracy run by political parties of so-called 'professionals'".

While she has received support within her party, she still has to defeat two multi-term incumbents in order to receive her party's nomination.  Then, of course, there is the general election.  She acknowledges she is "taking a risk" but vows to "try anyway."

You can read an inerview with her here.  

South Carolina Yesterday; Ecuador Tomorrow?

Media pundits have parsed Newt Gingrich's primary victory in South Carolina last night in a number of ways.  Some think it's an indication that the battle for the Republican nomination will be very close; after all, there has been one other primary and one caucus, each of which produced a different winner.  Others say South Carolina is a bellwether:  Every candidate who's won its primary since 1980 has gone on to win the nomination.  Then there are those pundits who think South Carolina is too different from other states that have had, and will have, primaries, to serve as a harbinger of what's to come.


But nearly all of the commentators seem to agree that Evangelical Christians played a large part in Gingrich's victory.  While a larger percentage of the population identifies itself as Evangelical in South Carolina than in any other state, it's hard to deny the influence they will have in upcoming primaries, and the general election.


That can have dire consequences for LGBT people.  Sure, Michele Bachmann may be out of the race, but her husband's "therapeutic" practice--which, among other things, purports to "cure" homosexuality--is still thriving.  He was her main campaign adviser; now that she's out of the race, I wouldn't be surprised if he were giving support to Gingrich or Rick Santorum, who has also denounced homosexuality in religious terms.


Some of my friends and colleagues--who work some of the "bluest" occupations  in one of the "bluest" states-- don't understand just how many people in other places hold similar beliefs and were sorry to see Bachmann leave the race but are willing to vote for people like Gingrich and Santorum.  Of course, I don't think they can elect a President all by themselves.  But they are vocal about what they believe, and they vote.


So what would happen if this country were run by people who operate or support "ex-gay" clinics or camps?  Well, this might seem extreme to some of you, but we could end up like Ecuador, where hundreds of such clinics exist. According to the testimony of people who've experienced them, the physical and psychological torture of women is endemic to those places.  According to Karen Barba, the Director of Fundation Causana, those who operating the centers are "not only getting away with obscene human rights abuses, they are profiting off them."


So those clinics come from an unholy alliance of bigotry married to greed, which is then covered with a veneer of religiosity.  Hmm...that sounds familiar.  I think we've seen it at work in this country's election cycle, and there's more to come.

More (!) About the Elections

Much ink has been spilt (and much digital space taken up) talking about the Republican "takeover" or the Tea Party "coup."  The so-called GOP indeed took, by a fairly wide margin, control of the House of Representative. Their candidates also were elected to governorships and other relatively high offices.


Now, I am with the Tea Party in its desire to limit government.  However, supporting them on that basis is a bit like supporting Pat Buchanan because he opposed the invasion of Iraq and opposes other imperialist interventions.   They are right on those issues, but if you go much further with them, you find yourself in a thicket of bigotry.


I'd like to believe that there are other people who feel the same way.  Or, at least, those who oppose what the TP purport to represent, and what the GOP has become, have become more assertive.  Either or both of those possibilities were on display in the results of some local elections which resulted in, among other things, the election of an openly transgendered judge in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Now, of course, most people would say, "Well, that's San Francisco."  Indeed it is.  But, at one time, lots of people thought that gays lived only in San Fran, the Village and a couple of other places.  Now characters on prime-time TV are gay.


Still, Victoria Kowlakowski's victory should no more be seen as a sign that we have "arrived" than Obama's election was a sign that racial equality had been achieved.


At least Kowlakowski seems well-qualified for the position.  That in itself would make her election a positive step, I hope.

The Elections: I Have No Expectations

Tomorrow's Election Day.


It seems that actual and would-be voters can be more or less divided into the following categories:

• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are but don't blame the incumbents
• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are and blame certain incumbents, e.g., Obama
• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are and blame the incumbents
• the ones who aren't happy, period.

Now, I can't blame anyone for not being happy about the state of the economy and international relations.  I feel the same way.  I also can't blame anyone who isn't happy with whoever's in power.  That's how I've felt almost continuously since I knew who was in power, or knew what it meant to be in power.

But, I'm also not disappointed.  How could I be, when I had such low expectations.  That's not hard to do when the Presidents under whose rule you lived during your adult life are Carter, Reagan, Bush pere, Clinton, Bush fil and Obama--and the other two Presidents of whom you have any clear memory are Nixon and Ford.  

Clinton was probably the last President--or elected official of any sort--for whom I had any real hope.  Of course, almost anybody looked good after Reagan and Bush I.  But at the time, it seemed that this country just might have a chance at a less invasive and interventionist foreign policy.  And civil liberties might just become part of the public discourse once again, I thought.  Then again, in those days I was still confusing civil rights with civil liberties.  In my own defense, I'll say that most people still confuse the two.

Some people say that Clinton wasn't as effective a President as he might've been because Republicans took over Congress midway through his first term.  If being effective means passing one's own agenda, I think the mid-term election was only so much of an excuse for Clinton's record.  Then again, I'm not sure that anyone knows what Clinton's agenda actually was.  After all, he did support "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act before the Republican takeover.

But apres lui, la deluge.  After him, we got Bush the Younger.  If you're reading this, you know how that went.  

The only candidates for whom I had any flicker of enthusiasm in the 2008 election were Hillary, Obama and--as much of a contradiction as this may seem--Ron Paul.  Of them, the latter was the only one who seemed to understand that we were headed for economic trouble that couldn't be headed off or ameliorated by government policy.  And, while he wasn't the most LGBT-friendly candidate, at least he opposed marriage--for everyone.  At least, he didn't think that marriage should be defined by the government.  What that would amount to, in practice, is that every couple, straight or gay, could have a civil union.  And those who wanted their unions sanctioned by whatever God they believed in could find a clergyperson and institution who would wed them.  Finally, he has always endorsed a "humble" foreign policy in which the US wouldn't have military bases all over the globe.

Some of his supporters could be pretty scary, though.

Once he was no longer on the ballot, there were nothing but establishment candidates left.  Hillary is very smart, but I still felt she cared more about her own personal ambitions than about the causes she  claimed to espouse.  And, while I ultimately voted for Obama, the change that I really expected was that he would be in the White House and Bush The Second wouldn't be.

Nearly two years into his administration, about all we ever knew about him was that he was, or was supposed,   to represent "change."  And change he has:  namely, his positions on gay marriage as well as other issues.

The thing is, I don't know what any non-incumbent candidate can offer besides the fact that they're not the incumbents.  Yet that will get more than a few of the so-called "Tea Party" candidates elected to Congress and to a few governorships.  While I'm glad that Carl Palladino has about the same chance of winning as a mango tree has of surviving a Buffalo winter, I have no enthusiasm for Cuomo, much less the minor candidates.