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For Immediate Release: November 6, 2004
From: The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC)
Contacts: Media Director, Robyn Walters, Seattle, Washington
NTAC Chair, Vanessa Edwards Foster; Houston, Texas
Contact Email: ntacmedia@aol.com
media@ntac.org
Contact Phone: 832-483-9901
360-434-3042
Website: http://www.ntac.org
With Some Battles Lost, the Fight for Equality Continues
Despite a palpable sense of loss, transgender people and their gay, lesbian, intersex and straight allies cannot afford to give up the fight. The 2004 elections offered few bright spots, offering mostly a beating suffered by those striving for equality. The election results foretell a period of increasing neo-conservative and neo-fundamentalist power that urges government to enshrine discrimination and intolerance in the laws and policies of the land. Much will be written about the losses, humiliations and hatred heaped on those who do not fit the outmoded, unscientific and unchristian views of the powerbrokers in politics and religion. This brief article will spare the reader much of that rehash and focus instead on the way forward.
The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) Board of Directors has begun shaping an updated strategy for winning transgender human rights in a nation whose leadership does not believe in equal protection under the law. This plan will take shape over the coming weeks and will include a continuing call to action at the national, state, local and individual levels. It will call for cooperation and sharing of talents and intellectual resources among those organizations whose fundamental objectives are fairness, tolerance, and respect for all Americans, not solely for the rich, the arch-conservative, and the aggressively strident.
“This Congress will be the most challenging we’ve ever faced,” stated Vanessa Edwards Foster, Chair of NTAC. “We’ve been living with this environment in Texas for the past few years. From most of our friends in Congress, we will see a large measure of fear as well as some aversion. For the few brave souls who stand by us, they will need our support like never before – a protective circling of the wagons.”
“On the flipside, we will see unchecked hubris as never before at the national level,” Foster added. “With one party holding leadership of every branch of national and a majority of state governments, we must realize that they have an agenda and will ardently move on it. For individual citizens’ and social issues – including transgender issues – we can expect a notable pushback. The ‘compassion’ agenda -- or ‘tough love’ as it’s also known -- will be brutal and will be applied to inflict the most damage possible.”
NTAC will act with other human rights organizations in common cause, but transgender people must pick up the flag, the pen, and the sword in the interest of our individual and collective health, safety and prosperity. This is not the time to sulk or to slink back into the closet, waiting for the sound of jackboots at the door. If we do that, the forces of ignorance, bigotry and hatred win. It is time for transgender people to be out, proud, active and demanding.
“The hopes of the anti-social-progress agenda are [to] demoralize and kill their targeted opposition,” said Foster. “They only win if we as a community succumb. Our only option is to redouble our energy and push back even harder.”
It is time for us to act individually and together in our families, our workplace, our churches, communities and states. We must act bravely as if our lives and our futures depend on it. They do now, more so than ever.
Founded in 1999, NTAC - the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition - is a §501(c)(4) civil rights organization working to establish and maintain the right of all transgendered, intersexed, and gender-variant people to live and work without fear of violence or discrimination.
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