A week

I forgot how hectic the last week of a campaign is. That is the one real bummer with having a Halloween birthday is that it always runs right into the elections.

So the candidate I was helping, Gilbert Wong, won election to the Cupertino City Council. So I have been trying to have a birthday, work furiously on this election and discovered that it is not good to change hormones. After I changed my prescription I began to cry and cry and cry and cry and cry. Not just little teary eyed moments over a commercial but copious, knock-me-to-my-knees crying fits. Not so better living through chemistry. I finally realized what had happened and stopped taking them, called the doctor and said I want to go back to my old prescription NOW. Since then the birds are singing again and I am not such a big hormonal wuss.

Also in this time, ENDA was voted on. I cannot be joyful that my trans brothers and sisters were left behind. Even though the bill will now be dead moving to the Senate, it is still such anguish for me to think that gay and lesbian people decided to leave some of us behind.

Now I will go back to the New Mexico story. The ending is perfect, Governor Bill Richardson signs in to law a trans inclusive hate crime law, a non-discrimination law and then signs an executive order give domestic partnership benefits for state employees. What happened before all this is currently being rewritten in New Mexico to not include me who was on the floor of the House the night we got the ENDA bill passed nor my partner who was Executive Director of the statewide LGBT group.

What is critical to note are two things: 1. many lesbians and gays were more than willing to throw the trans community under the bus if it meant the L&G's would get something out of it. 2. what stopped that from happening is L&G people saying no, we all get there together. And that is what happened because many of us refused to be pushed around for expediency and showed a moral center. Compare this to secret deals, lies in public and a lack of a moral center for certain DC types.

There can be all the tut-tutting people want to say those of us who wanted to stay together are politically naive. To which I say I can live with that because I kept my word. However, I am not politically naive, I am experienced at many levels of lobbying and can walk the halls of Congress and Sacramento and talk to just about anybody. So when the multi-million dollar organizations throw their hands up in the air, it says a lot about our movement. WE have many people who lack a moral center. And don't care about transgender people. No wonder the LGBT people of color have been screaming for so long this again illustrates how this movement is about comfort with anyone not like us. How we are very quick to claim homophobia but are more than willing to throw those under the bus who aren't just like us.

It is a sad day indeed. I wonder what would have happened to all those gay men with AIDS whose lives were made better from all the lesbians who took care of them and loved them and changed their sheets and fed them and were left behind with broken hearts. So what if we had said, what do I have in common with these guys? Look they got infected, too bad, deal, you did this to yourselves. That isn't what happened though because somewhere deep inside of us, we saw our humanity in our dying brothers and could not look away or hide from the truth.

The grand compromise gave us nothing. WE are not better today than we were the day before this vote. But at least we see the people "in charge" for what they are: people without a moral center. Rosa Parks they are not.