Boston Area Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" An Oral History Project Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for a Bachelor of Arts Degree at Goddard College by Gunner Scott August 2009 _____________________________ ______________________________ Neema Caughran Date Shaka McGlotten Date Advisor Second Reader Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" Table of Contents 1. Acknowledgements 1 2. Abstract 3 3. Introduction 5 4. Pulling Threads 20 5. Oral History as a Research Method 25 6. Reclaiming Our Past Transgender Movement Leaders: 39 Virginia Prince and Sylvia Rivera 7. Exacerbating the Split - The LGB from the T: 78 The History of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act 8. Mending the Cracks in the LGBT Movement: 86 Boston Area Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" An Oral History Project 9. Autoethnography: 259 Personal reflections and reactions to the oral history interviews and the historical research 10. Annotated Bibliography 280 11. References 289 Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" Acknowledgments I would like to first especially thank all of the participants in this project: Nancy Nangeroni, Grace Sterling Stowell, Ethan St. Pierre, Denise Leclair, and Diego Sanchez for agreeing to share so much of their time, their life stories with me, their ongoing friendship and all of their work for transgender equality. Thank you also to Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality for sharing background information and for all of your work for transgender rights. I would like to thank my thesis advisors Neema Caughran and Shaka McGlotten for your wisdom, support, nudging, and particularly your patience with my typos. I would like to also thank my past advisors Karen Werner, Muriel Shockley, and in particular, Karen Campbell for all of your encouragement. Thank you to program directors Lucinda Garthwaite for encouraging me to come to Goddard and Bobby Buchanan for supporting me in being fully present at Goddard as a transgender person. A special thank you to Scout Herzig for all of the editing, encouragement, and support. Thank you to my friends for supporting me through my Goddard adventure including Toni Amato for telling me about Goddard, Paige Kruza for all your editing skills, Alice Miele, Evan Hempel, D’hana Perry, Steph Simard, DJ O’Donoghue, S. Bear Bergman, Amy Epstein, Jessica Flaherty, Ariel Berman, Thomas Lewis, Ruben Hopwood, Kerith Conron, Tré Andre Valentine, and Cameron Gordon. Thank you to my colleagues and friends at the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC), Boston Alliance of GLBT Youth (BAGLY) and The Network/La Red. Thank you to Beth Leventhal and Susan Marine for writing letters of recommendation for me. Thank you to all of my colleagues and friends in the transgender activist community. Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" Thank you to all my Goddard friends for all of your wisdom, support, and encouragement including Lee Mason, Sue Landolina, Tracy Jamar, Gaetano Vaccaro, Gilad Shanan, Morgan Andrews, Sadie Ryanne Baker, Maggie Cleveland, Rija Newell, Chloe Winthers, Alex Karoff-Hunger, Jennifer Hodges, Leslie Freeman, Ralena Gordon, Jill Washburn, Luke Rackers, and Danni-toph Marilyn West. I want to thank my family of origin including my mother Kathryn-Lee Cahill, her husband Bill Cahill, my step-dad Robert Gurwitch, my siblings Jennifer Gurwitch, Marsha Gurwitch, and Jeff Gurwitch, and my grandfather Arthur Scott. Lastly, I want to thank especially my partner, Lee Thornhill, for your love, support, encouragement, and for pushing me even when I wanted to quit. Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" 3 Abstract This paper explores a collection of oral history interviews of five Boston, MA area transgender activists about their participation, assessment, and experiences of the transgender rights movement in the United States. The oral history interviews were conducted in accordance with the standards set forth by Charlton, Myers, & Sharpless (2006). Interviewees were specifically asked about their recollections and reactions to the proposed Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) bill and when gender identity language was added to and then later removed from the bill by Representative Barney Frank in the 2007 version. Representative Barney Frank’s reasoning for removing the language was that the bill would have had a better chance of passing the House if only included sexual orientation language was included. Frank also alluded that transgender people had not been as visible or had done as much education about gender identity as gay and lesbian people had on sexual orientation for the last thirty years, therefore Congress was less educated. In addition to the interviewees’ transgender activism I have included a focus on two pioneer transgender activists from the early gay rights and transgender movement, Virginia Prince and Sylvia Rivera. Each represented different ends of the spectrum, including geographic, race, class, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, but each significantly contributed to the building of the transgender movement and to the early gay rights movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. I argue that, contrary to Barney Frank’s statement that the transgender people had not been educating Congress or the larger public for as long as gay and lesbian people had, but that transgender people, including the transgender activists I had interviewed, Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" 4 had been collectively educating and doing activism for transgender rights for as long, if not longer. This included educating the general public, policy makers, and legislators about gender identity, gender expression, and the experiences of transgender people. Additionally, transgender people such as Virginia Prince and Sylvia Rivera had contributed to the early transgender rights movement and as well as the early gay rights movement, but had their contributions had been rendered invisible in recollection of gay history. Key Words: Transgender, Transsexual, Cross-Dressing, Employment Non- Discrimination Act, Representative Barney Frank, Oral History, Transgender History, Gay Rights, Transgender Rights, Virginia Prince, Sylvia Rivera Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis” 5 Boston Area Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis" An Oral History Project Through this oral history project, Boston Area Transgender Community Leaders and the “ENDA Crisis” I interviewed and recorded the experiences of five transgender activists about their assessment of, experience of, and contributions to the transgender rights movement. I wanted to understand how these leaders came into transgender activism, what they thought about legislative tactics as way to end discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, and how the experience of being excluded from federal legislative protections affected them. I asked questions about their knowledge of and participation with transgender inclusive civil rights legislation on state and federal levels; their assessment of the current gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights movement; and their feelings about being included then excluded from the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act bill of 2007. I wanted to specifically record their recollections and reactions to the events surrounding the Employment Non- Discrimination Act (ENDA) and to the time period in the Fall of 2007 of what some, including myself, labeled as the “ENDA Crisis.” It was through my own work in the transgender rights movement that I had met and worked with all of the participants in this oral history project. I am a white, queer, female-to-masculine (FTM) transgender activist who has been involved actively in the transgender rights movement for the last eleven years and also involved with the larger lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community for the last fifteen years. My transgender and queer activism has often centered on issues of violence including organizing demonstrations to bring visibility to the murder of transgender woman Rita Hester; the protesting of the both Iraq wars; and working for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, Transgender Community Leaders and the "ENDA Crisis” 6 transgender (LGBT) domestic violence survivors through the organization The Network/La Red. My queer and transgender activism has been about speaking up when injustice occurs both from those outside the LGBT community and those from within the LGBT community. My involvement in transgender activism began when I joined the Boston Lesbian Avengers, a queer women’s radical street activist group in 1998, prior to my coming out as transgender. Some of the women involved in the group were transgender and they would talk about their experiences with being harassed in public and with being discriminated against in employment or when trying to rent an apartment. Then in November of 1998 an African-American transgender woman named Rita Hester was murdered in her apartment in what appeared to be a hate motivated killing according to the Boston Police Department due to the level of “overkill” that was used. The media reports about her death she was disrespected, reporters used her former male name and male pronouns for her, including in the gay press. This prompted a protest by members of the transgender community and some allied gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, which I helped to organize along with the Lesbian Avengers