Not even a month after giving the finger to our community on ENDA, a Colorado trans organization is allowing themselves to be used by the HRC. While I fully support the idea of education on trans issues, couldn't the Gender Identity Center of Colorado find a better organization to partner with?
According to GIC "leadership", this event was organized well before HRC's most recent betrayal of gender variant people. They further claim that members of the local HRC steering committee (HRC Colorado) are fully supportive of trans inclusion in ENDA and had no say in what their parent organization did to us.
I don't doubt that there are plenty of well-intentioned people working for the HRC. Likewise, I don't really fault the GIC for organizing an event with them prior to everything that's happened recently. The HRC deceived many of us (including me) into believing that they had changed and that their anti-trans ways of the past were behind them. We know better now and it's time that the leaders of our community stood up and said "enough!".
The HRC desperately needs to regain the trust and support of the trans and greater LGBT communities. I have no idea how they plan on doing that at this point but it should certainly not be on the backs of trans organizations. This event is little more than a way for the HRC to say "look - trans organizations are still supporting us! It's only the radical fringe who isn't willing to even talk with us anymore."
Don't believe me? Go to the GIC's website (
http://www.gicofcolo.org) or HRC Colorado's homepage (
http://colorado.hrc.org) and find me a single mention of this event. Try searching the HRC's site for mention of the event. Hell, try a
google search on it...I only found a couple of mentions on sites that keep community calendars and had to dig
deep. An "education" event that no one even knows about is utterly worthless and serves no real purpose other than allowing the HRC to continue deceiving less aware members of our community.
It doesn't feel good to call out a trans organization like this. I had hopes that the GIC would actually start playing more of a leadership role in our community with some of the dedicated new people on their board. We're dealing with friends and allies in both of these organizations and that doesn't make what we need to do any easier. But if we're ever going to be taken seriously, we need to start standing up for ourselves instead of letting organizations like the HRC continue using us as doormats.
Labels: ENDA, GIC, HRC
Not even a month after giving the finger to our community on ENDA, a Colorado trans organization is allowing themselves to be used by the HRC. While I fully support the idea of education on trans issues, couldn't the Gender Identity Center of Colorado find a better organization to partner with?