I hate to say this, but maybe the trans community needs to organize itself, separate and apart from the gay (and here, I think I very specifically mean gay-as-in-gay male) community.

I’ve been debating the pragmatic vs. idealistic argument with regard to the ENDA with several people, and I’m slowly coming to the realization that relying on the gay community for anything at all is probably going to end only in frustration for transfolks. The ironic thing is that gay people themselves have been told the same thing for decades. This exact argument – precisely the same – has been used by supposedly progressive Democrats in the past with specific regard to nearly any gay positive state or federal legislation. For more than two decades – or, nearly the entire time the US has had a visible lesbian and gay civil rights movement – gay people were told by (supposedly) well meaning straight folks in positions of power that we’d just have to wait for our time to come, and that now just wasn’t the time to try and pass a hate crimes bill or add “sexual orientation” to a nondiscrimination law. We’d have to wait until society caught up. We swallowed this until we simply refused to keep swallowing it. A generation of people my age and younger, who grew up in a post-Stonewall world, radicalized by AIDS activism were simply unwilling to wait for society to catch up.

What painfully short memories we have.

Or maybe there are just more folks like John Avarosis out there in the world and I’ve been giving the gay community credit it doesn’t actually deserve. Maybe most gay people really only care about protecting against sexual orientation discrimination and nothing else. Folks have made this claim, publicly, before – Somewhat famously, Roseanne did, not long ago, and was excoriated for it in gay circles.

Maybe it’s true.

Maybe it’s time for the trans community to stop asking for acceptance from a GLB community that from appearances doesn’t understand T* folks, and actively resists trying to. I’m ashamed of us queers for even coming to this place, but I’ve been beating my head against a wall with gay people who (I’ve said) really ought to know better.

You know what? We ought to know better.

But we don’t.

We don’t want to. Or, at least, we sure as hell seem not to.

I wish this wasn’t where my head was at around these issues, but for better or worse this is where I’m at.

But I’ll tell you this: the first pissed-off trans person who gets radicalized around ENDA – or whatever the next signal event happens to be – and starts a separate movement will have a few queer supporters throwing dollars his or her way. Because, ultimately, if it really does take a separate trans* movement to pry open the brains of the queer community at large, the organized GLB money machine won’t be getting any more of mine.

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