Celebrating Victory, Pursuing Truth

Speeches in the Senate Reading Room

By the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
cross-posted at Walking with Integrity

On this bright January morning, as the hour of 11am neared, I emerged from Boston’s Park Street T stop, turned left and began walking up the hill toward the State House.  Today (or rather, at this late hour, yesterday) marked the ceremonial signing of the Transgender Equality bill here in Massachusetts.  This legislation, first filed in 2007, passed on November 15^th, and officially signed on November 23^rd, adds gender identity and expression to the state’s existing hate crimes law and the nondiscrimination statutes in the areas of housing, employment, education and credit. In a fitting twist, the week of its official passage was also Transgender Awareness Week, a time of educational and community events leading up to the eleventh annual observance of Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. 

The Senate Reading Room, where today’s signing took place, was packed with observers, a joyful crowd savoring the celebration.  Lawmakers were clearly also buoyed, as their inspiring comments demonstrated.  “You have no idea how beautiful you are as you stand here beaming,” said state Auditor Suzanne Bump.  “Remember that you are powerful,” offered Senator Brian Downing, followed by fellow Senator Sonia Chang Diaz: “it's days like this that remind us why we ran for office... Thank you for reminding us [legislators] of our own power, in addition to showing us your power.”  Representative Byron Rushing, who joined Representative Carl Sciortino in co-sponsoring the bill from its very first days, declared, “this hasn't just been a discussion of gender identity but of the identity of Massachusetts, and hopefully it will become a discussion of our national identity.” 

Representative Rushing, photo from masstpc.org

In his Episcopal Church context, as a longtime member of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ deputation to General Convention– Deputy Rushing inspires us to  pose that question of church identity.  Faith communities can ask, and indeed are asking, what do we stand for as people of our respective traditions?  In the Episcopal Church we might well ask—and have asked at the 2009 General Convention and various diocesan conventions before it– what does it mean to declare in our baptismal covenant that we strive for justice and respect the dignity of every human being? In 2009 the Convention passed resolutions putting The Episcopal Church on record in support of transgender equality in the civic sphere (D012 and C048), and pledging within our ecclesial life to make administrative forms accessible to gender identities beyond male and female and to protect transgender lay employees from discrimination (D090 and D032, respectively).   As our collective conversation continues, we might allow the varied lives of transgender as well as intersex people – communities and individuals whose lives are textured not simply by complex embodiments of gender but also by race, class, sexuality and ability-- to deepen our understanding of the human person.  How do we interpret and live out the mystery of being created in the image and likeness of God?

At the signing this morning, I was reminded of a startling moment in the November 15 debate that I watched on my laptop. Representative Sciortino was speaking movingly in support of the legislation when he began to describe the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) held at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul the year before.  He made a point of detailing the apology that my bishop, the Right Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, had offered on behalf of Christians who had condemned trans people and in the process had “misrepresented God to” us.  The apology had been stunning enough in its own right, but to hear it reported, in some sense repeated, on the floor of the House of Representatives, was positively astounding.  As I sat there dumbfounded—actually, calling out to my partner to come see this!--  receiving these words afresh in an unimagined context, I was reminded of a strangely parallel moment at General Convention three years earlier.  The Convention had managed to pass D012, the Trans Civil Rights Resolution, on the same day that the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee was holding a hearing on its own Trans Equality legislation—an earlier version of what has now finally passed.  As a team of trans people and allies worked toward the resolution’s passage in Anaheim, a fellow Episcopalian in Massachusetts learned about it (on his laptop, while waiting to testify in the stultifying heat) and shared it in the course of his testimony three thousand miles away.  The Episcopal Church supports this bill, he was proud to be able to say.  It all came full circle.

Also on my mind today were the words (viewable here as blurry video), offered by Bishop Shaw at this year’s TDOR.   Speaking at the end of the program, he welcomed us to the Cathedral and then offered a word of gratitude that felt almost like a meditation: “because of your honesty, because of your integrity, because of the way you so pursue the truth of your identity, you tell me about the nature of God, because that is how I think God is.  And so I thank all of you not only for the way that you enlighten my understanding of God but how much you preach to the rest of the world about courage, and about bravery, and about truth and about perseverance of identity.  We owe all of you a huge debt of gratitude.  Thank you.” 

I got the sense people were both honored and stunned by his words, working to digest and contemplate them— I know I was.   His comments about perseverance in pursuit of the truth of identity—language I had not heard him use before— reminded me of words from the Gospel of John that I first really took in at a middle school summer Bible camp: “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (Jn 8:32). 

From this chair, at the end of this day, looking out at the striking vista of falling snow, it strikes me how the process of knowing the truth and being freed by it is both lifelong and communal—by turns grueling and wondrous, and inextricably relational, even as it is distinctive to each person. 

Governor Deval Patrick signs the bill, photo from masstpc.org

An important truth about the MA trans equality law is that it is far from perfect: it does not include protections in public accommodations—access to public gender segregated spaces.  Everyone was resolved to come back and get that done.  And as I think about how far we have come, how much more free we are than we were just a few short months ago, I know that what we need more than anything else is the will, the support, the conviction to keep pursuing the truth.

CP

Winter Thaw for Trans Equality

Cross posted from Walking with Integrity

We are at the end of February, and this year’s very long season of Epiphany is almost at an end as well. Here in the Boston area, side streets are still littered with chairs and other detritus-- markers of the you-shovel-it-you-keep-it parking culture-- but snow banks are finally showing signs of letting go. Last week the state’s transgender community also received welcome news that perhaps the long-frozen nondiscrimination bill, too, might be starting to thaw.

As recently posted on Walking with Integrity, last week Governor Deval Patrick signed an executive order banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression for all who work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Boston Globe both reported on the move and published an editorial praising it, and yesterday the local LGBT paper Bay Windows published a comprehensive article on it as well.

As reported in all three pieces, this development both creates a sense of momentum for the statewide bill which would add "gender identity and expression" to the categories of age, race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, sex, and marital status, and prevent discrimination on those bases in employment as well as in housing, public accommodations, education, and credit.

The dire need for this protection was just underscored by the major new study released on February 4th by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality. They surveyed over 6,450 transgender-identified participants and learned the following, as summarized on NCTE's website:

"* Respondents were nearly four times more likely to live in extreme poverty, with household income of less than $10,000.

* Respondents were twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the population as a whole. Half of those surveyed reported experiencing harassment or other mistreatment in the workplace, and one in four were fired because of their gender identity or expression.

* While discrimination was pervasive for the entire sample, it was particularly pronounced for people of color. African-American transgender respondents fared far worse than all others in many areas studied.

* Housing discrimination was also common. 19% reported being refused a home or apartment and 11% reported being evicted because of their gender identity or expression. One in five respondents experienced homelessness because of their gender identity or expression.

* An astonishing 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide, compared to only 1.6% of the general population.

* Discrimination in health care and poor health outcomes were frequently experienced by respondents. 19% reported being refused care due to bias against transgender or gender-nonconforming people, with this figure even higher for respondents of color. Respondents also had over four times the national average of HIV infection.

* Harassment by law enforcement was reported by 22% of respondents and nearly half were uncomfortable seeking police assistance.

* Despite the hardships they often face, transgender and gender non-conforming persons persevere. Over 78% reported feeling more comfortable at work and their performance improving after transitioning, despite the same levels of harassment in the workplace."

An interview from the Bay Windows story shows both some of the unexpected ways that people's transgender status can come up in an employment application process and the reality that there are indeed workplaces where people are free to do their jobs and be themselves. Diane DeLap, who works for the Department of Workforce Development, explained how her application process inadvertently revealed her transgender status to her prospective employer: "'One of the interesting things was that the Massachusetts Employment Application requires the inclusion of discharge papers if you have a history in the military,' DeLap said. She had served in the Navy for four years, and included her discharge papers with her application. 'Of course, the military doesn’t change names for anything,' DeLap said, laughing, 'so it had my old name on there and all the other papers had the new name on there, so the fact that I was transgender became a topic of discussion very early in the hiring process. They determined that it shouldn’t make any difference.'"

DeLap clearly had a good experience in her interview process, and others I know also have had positive experiences coming out at work. Increasingly, there is good news of that sort to tell, and it is important to share it along with the alarming statistics and stories, as both are realities right now. The latter tells us how much work we have to do while the former encourages us that it has already begun and we can indeed do it.

As with marriage equality, which received a major boost from the Obama administration this week, I am hopeful that the ice is truly beginning to thaw for transgender equality, that momentum is finally building toward passage of key legal protections. It is up to us to keep that momentum going.

The executive summary of the NCTE/NGLTF survey can be found here, and the full report here.

CP

Hope for Trans Folk from Harvey Milk

I've just returned from a rally for transgender equality in front of the Massachusetts State House organized by Join the Impact Massachusetts. Today's event was part of a week-long celebration of the legacy of Harvey Milk, who would have turned eighty years old today, had he lived.

I was one of several people who spoke on a range of topics related to pending trans legislation, from an overview of the national and state movement for trans equality, to how we are all impacted by the gender binary, trans or not. After the speeches, we marched down from the State House, to Government Center, to Downtown Crossing and then back up the State House, providing Saturday shoppers with an unexpected interlude.

I pray and, in the tradition of Harvey, hope that our legislators will hear us and finally get ENDA and the Massachusetts Trans Civil Rights Bill out of committee and passed.

CP

JTIMA Harvey Milk Day Rally for Transgender Equality
State House Steps, Boston, MA
Saturday, May 22, 2010

Hope from Harvey Milk

In his book The Mayor of Castro Street: the Life and Times of Harvey Milk, openly gay journalist Randy Shilts (may he rest in peace) described a San Francisco Sunday morning scene in 1978 when, with Harvey Milk sitting in the back pew, the Reverend William Barcus, priest of St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, got up and denounced Proposition 6. This “Briggs Initiative” called for the removal of gay and lesbian people and possibly even their supporters from working in the California public schools. In an unusual move for a priest in that context, Barcus not only spoke of the God who stands with the marginalized, not only berated the fear-mongering, dehumanizing rhetoric of the Initiative and its backers, but he also witnessed to these truths with his own life, coming out as a gay man. He challenged people to, as he put it, “morally put yourself on the line, not after the fact, not after November 7th, but now” (pp. 241-242; for more on Rev. Barcus's sermon, see this LGBT chronology for the Episcopal Diocese of California by Rev. Kathleen McAdams).

On that morning I was across the Bay in Berkeley where I grew up, possibly in Sunday school, possibly sleeping in. I had no idea of the import of what was going on across the Bay and around my state. I was a shy new kindergartener, a little girl growing up to be a transman, a spouse, a dad, an academic and an Episcopal priest. What Harvey Milk inspired in William Barcus and countless others, I too came to appreciate as one who also knows something of what it feels like to be dehumanized.

What Harvey Milk goaded us into remembering with relentless wit and grit is the crucial importance of hope. Hope. “You gotta give ‘em hope,” he said again and again. He wasn’t the biggest fan of organized religion so-called, but by God he knew how to preach. Hope, he knew, is as essential to human life as the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink. Without hope we shrink into ourselves, our capacities squandered, our stature cut short. Our ability to hope, as human beings, is intimately tied to our dignity.

When others deny transgender people our dignity, they attack the heart of our humanity. This happens as much in quiet, behind the scenes ways as in the bold, openly violent ways we mark every year at Trans Day of Remembrance. I am thinking of the violence of intentionally identifying us with wrong names and pronouns; the violence of quietly tossing our resumes in the proverbial circular file; of falsely telling us the apartment is already rented; of telling us we must wait our turn to ensure being treated with dignity and respect; and particularly in this climate, of shamelessly labeling legislation that would safeguard our basic civil rights a “bathroom bill.”

I’m honestly not sure how much transgender people were on Harvey’s radar in the late seventies, but I have no doubt that our struggle today would inspire and galvanize him. He would tell us that no matter what indignities we have suffered, no matter who might have rejected us, we do not have the option of giving up hope. In his Hope Speech, he said, “if there is a message I have to give… it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope.” Harvey knew his election was a foot in the door for all who are marginalized. But he also knew that the hope he inspired was not automatic. It was something he called on each person in his audience to give. And I would submit, Harvey’s legacy renders that hope as something we must also claim.

The program for his memorial service at the San Francisco Opera House contained a line from Victor Hugo that he had recently hand-copied and posted on the wall of his office: “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come” (Shilts, 286). Trans people of Massachusetts, from around the nation and indeed the world, partners, allies, families and friends, lawmakers, people of all faiths: the time for full equality for transgender people has indeed come. The time is now for all of us — and particularly, I would say, for religious leaders of all traditions— to “morally put ourselves on the line,” as Reverend Barcus put it, for the dignity that is our birthright. The time is now for our legislators beneath this gleaming dome to finally take up the Massachusetts Transgender Civil Rights Bill, and for our legislators in Washington to take up ENDA, and pass them. Thank you.

CP

Bishops' Letter Contributes Momentum on Trans Civil Rights in MA

As the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee pushed back its deadline for reporting on the Transgender Civil Rights Bill to early June, Boston-based LGBT paper Bay Windows has reported on two new voices of support, Boston City Council and the letter sent last week by Bishops M. Thomas Shaw and Roy "Bud" Cederholm (Bishop Gayle Harris did not sign because she had not yet returned from a leave of absence). Read the whole article here. Excerpts are reposted below.

I would like to add that the article cites Virtue online as the place from which it got the text of the letter. Virtue Online reprinted without acknowledgment my exact post (which I posted with permission from the Communications Office of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts to three blogs: TransEpiscopal, Walking with Integrity, and the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality). This made it look as if Virtue Online actually had permission to post the letter, which it did not.

CP

Transgender Rights Bill receives more support, extended deadline
by Hannah Clay Wareham
Associate Editor
Tuesday May 11, 2010

Amid resolutions and commendations, hopes are high for bill to pass.

Support for "An Act Relative to Gender-based Discrimination and Hate Crimes" (S. 1687/H. 1728), known as the Transgender Civil Rights Bill, is growing in Boston. The City Council last week passed a unanimous resolution backing the bill and joined the Episcopal Diocese of Masscahusetts in publicly voicing their support. The Transgender Rights Bill will remain under consideration by the Judiciary Committee for at least another month.

Gunner Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC), said that the organization "is grateful for the continued support of the Boston City Council and hopes that our state leaders will follow this wise example and extend civil rights to our state’s transgender citizens."

The Transgender Civil Rights Bill offers crucial employment protections for transgender people and outlaw anti-transgender workplace discrimination. If the bill is passed, the category of "gender identity and expression" will be added to the Massachusetts hate crime, employment, housing, credit, public accommodations, and public education non-discrimination laws.

The legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary on May 6 extended the bill’s deadline, giving it at least another month to remain under consideration. The original deadline required that the bill be reported out of committee by May 7.

"As they say on ’Monty Python,’ we’re not dead yet," DeeDee Edmondson, political director of MassEquality, said. "The Judiciary Committee and our coalition [of organizations working together to pass the bill] now can get down to the business of producing a piece of legislation that can put transgender people back to work and bring stability and dignity to families throughout the Commonwealth."

snip

On April 30, Episcopal Bishops M. Thomas Shaw and Roy "Bud" Cederholm of the Diocese of Massachusetts sent letters to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo urging the lawmakers to pass the Transgender Rights Bill. Attached were resolutions stating the full support of both the Episcopal Diocese of Masschusetts and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

"As bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, our eyes are open to the realities of transgender people and their families," Shaw and Cederholm wrote in the letter, which was subsequently printed by VirtueOnline.org. "Many of them serve faithfully in the congregations and ministries of our diocese, as lay people, as deacons, and as priests. They are dedicated and loving parents, children, siblings, friends, and community leaders."

The letter encouraged lawmakers to act quickly in passing the bill. "Adding gender identity and expression to the state’s nondiscrimination and hate crimes laws is no isolated concern of a special interest group," the letter read. "The disproportionate suffering of transgender people should grieve the hearts of all who love justice and liberty."

The Transgender Rights Bill received an intensified focus from a wide variety of mainstream media outlets after Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker pledged on Saturday, April 17, that he would veto the bill if elected.

MA Bishops Send Letter to Legislators in Support of Transgender Nondiscrimination Bill

Bishops M. Thomas Shaw and Roy ("Bud") Cederholm of the Diocese of Massachusetts this week sent letters to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Robert DeLeo pressing them to pass the state's Transgender Civil Rights bill. "An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes" (House Bill #1728 and Senate Bill #1687) is slated to either make it out of the Judiciary Committee or die there for a third straight year this Friday, May 7th.


The bishops' letter follows unprecedented coverage of the bill by Boston area newspapers (including a supportive op ed by the Globe), after Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker announced that he would veto the legislation if it crossed his desk. His team handed out fliers referring to the legislation as "the bathroom bill," taking up the rhetoric of the virulently anti-LGBT group Mass Resistance (and groups battling similar legislation in other states) which tries to stoke fears that such legislation will make women and children vulnerable in bathrooms and locker rooms.

The bishops' letter (posted with permission) follows:

April 30, 2010


The Hon. Deval L. Patrick
Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
State House, Room 360
Boston, MA 02108

Dear Governor Patrick,

We write to express our strong support for an act to add gender expression and identity to our Commonwealth’s antidiscrimination and hate crimes laws, and to ask you to work to ensure its passage.

As bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, our eyes are open to the realities of transgender people and their families. Many of them serve faithfully in the congregations and ministries of our diocese, as lay people, as deacons and as priests. They are dedicated and loving parents, children, siblings, friends and community leaders. Again and again, we hear how they have struggled against incredible odds and pressures to be true to their identity as beloved children of God, made in the image of God.

It pains us that even as transgender people claim their identities and step into newness of life, they face discrimination and violence that undermines their human dignity. A November 2009 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 97 percent of respondents had been harassed or mistreated on the job, and 26 percent had been fired for being transgender. You will recall that in November 1998, an Allston transgender woman, Rita Hester, was murdered and her killer never found. This local tragedy led to an annual Nov. 20 international Transgender Day of Remembrance, for transgender people who have died, especially those who have been killed or taken their own lives. It is fitting that our state should model amendment of life and hope for a future that is better than this sad past.

Adding gender identity and expression to the state’s nondiscrimination and hate crimes laws is no isolated concern of a special interest group. The disproportionate suffering of transgender people should grieve the hearts of all who love justice and liberty. Both the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church are on record in support of full equality for transgender people (resolutions attached).

So many of the arguments against the full inclusion of transgender people in our society are driven by unfounded fear. Transgender people are simply seeking the removal of barriers that prevent them from flourishing as full members of and contributors to society. One need not fully comprehend what it is like to walk in their shoes to provide them with the protections every citizen—every person—is due. Please act to ensure their rights.

Faithfully,



The Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, SSJE
Bishop

The Rt. Rev. Bud Cederholm
Bishop Suffragan

Enc.

Resolution D012: Support of Transgender Civil Rights

Resolved, the House of Bishops concurring, That the 76th General Convention of The Episcopal Church supports the enactment of laws at the local, state and federal level that a) prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or the expression of one's gender identity, and b) treat physical violence inflicted on the basis of a victim's gender identity or expression as a hate crime; and be it further

Resolved, That the Secretary of Convention convey this resolution to appropriate congressional leadership to the Chair of the National Governors Association, the President of the National Conference of State Legislatures, and to the President of the U. S. Conference of Mayors.


Voted by the 223rd Annual Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, Nov. 7-8, 2008, Hyannis:
Resolution in support of transgender civil rights and inclusion in the ministries of all the baptized

Resolved, that the 223rd Convention of the Diocese of Massachusetts supports the enactment of laws at the local, state and federal level that a) prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or the expression of one’s gender identity, and b) treat physical violence inflicted on the basis of a victim’s gender identity or expression as a hate crime; and be it further

Resolved, that the Secretary of Convention convey this resolution to the Massachusetts State Legislature, and the Massachusetts representatives in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives; and be it further

Resolved, that this Convention submit to the General Convention the following resolution: Resolved that the words “gender identity and expression” be inserted into Title III, Canon 1, Sec. 2 directly following the words “sexual orientation” and before the words “disabilities or age.”

“Do That Which Scares Me”: Fear and Transgender Equality in Massachusetts

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Rom 8:38-39

A lobby day for transgender equality yesterday capped off what has been, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily intense week here in Massachusetts.

I attended the lobby day in support the H1728/S1687 “An Act Relative To Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes” bill with my partner and our three-month-old son, and delivered a brief invocation at the end of the speeches in my capacity as Co-Chair of the locally based Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality.

The mood in the historic Nurses Hall at the State House was tense, energetic, and laced with anger in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s Tuesday defeat of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Martha Coakley. Brown’s win removes Senate Democrats’ sixty-vote supermajority and imperils the passage of national health care reform legislation.

Coakley had been widely backed by the state’s transgender community, as Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition Executive Director Gunner Scott forcefully expressed in a Bay Windows opinion letter last September: “as State Attorney General, Martha Coakley came out early for transgender civil rights as the first statewide elected official to publicly support ‘An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes.’” Coakley also “sought civil rights injunctions in numerous cases involving hate crimes against LGBT victims” including one “against two men who attacked a transgender teenager in a Dorchester pizza shop.”

Meanwhile, as Chuck Colbert reported in Bay Windows yesterday, the Massachusetts LGBT community was angered this election by “anti gay-baiting robo calls” that began plaguing Massachusetts phone lines three days before voters hit the polls. Originating “in a 202 area code from the Washington, D.C. [area], a recorded male voice asks residents if they view marriage defined as ‘only between one man and one woman.’ If they indicated ‘Yes’ they were urged to vote for Brown, ‘the only candidate with a proven track record’ of supporting traditional marriage. The call also labeled Coakley as a ‘radical’ same-sex marriage supporter who opposed letting the people vote on the issue and who used taxpayer dollars to support a same-sex marriage ‘agenda.’”

With the Supreme Court just yesterday approving by a 5-4 margin that corporations and labor unions can spend unlimited amounts on federal elections, the floodgates of such robo-calls and other methods of bombardment would appear to be opening at the national level. The majority opinion, penned by Justice Anthony Kennedy, argued that to prevent such spending is to censure free speech. “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,’’ he wrote.

Add to this mix the continuing cloud of grief and anxiety hovering over the many intersecting communities devastated by last week’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Numerous people in New England had connections to the events in Haiti, including members of the large Boston Area Haitian community, the Sisters of Saint Margaret, and medical teams from Boston based Partners in Health.

And add to that list the trans community which learned last weekend of the death of Flo McGarell, a visual artist and transman from Newbury, Vermont, who lived in the city of Jacmal for the past six years, serving as director of the FOSAJ, a non-profit art center. The New England Cable News did what struck me as a very respectful interview with McGarrell’s grieving parents and, perhaps without meaning to, gestured toward the complexity of McGarrell’s gender identity and expression. In an in-depth interview with the art 21 blog about his wildly creative art, Flo described himself as “a total gender mash up” which was “a constant and humorous topic of discussion” in Jacmal. When asked about what guided his artistic vision, Flo answered:

“Don’t hide, don’t lie.
Do that which scares me.
Resist the urge to settle.
Be as many things as possible in this lifetime.”

His loved ones are organizing memorials and tributes at this site.

With such losses along with the sour economy on the minds of lobby day attendees yesterday, a fundamental question emerged: how can we help return a sense of confidence to lawmakers who may be afraid to fight for any legislation considered “controversial” right now? How can we break through this late-January crust of fear?

Fear may be eroding Massachusetts’s transgender nondiscrimination legislation, just as it is at work in the stalled Employment Nondiscrimination Act in Washington. D.C. How is it that over 105 state lawmakers (out of a total of 200) have signed on as co-sponsors of the MA bill, that a poll conducted last November by Lake Research Partners showed that 76% of Massachusetts residents and 80% of Massachusetts women support it, that Governor Deval Patrick has signaled his enthusiastic support, and still this bill has not gotten out of committee? We cannot let the events of this week, devastating as they are, deter us from this crucial task.

As I think and pray about all of these swirling currents, as I watch the dynamics of fear playing out all around me, I can’t help but think of McGarrell’s conscious ethic of fearlessness. And that sentiment, in this week’s context, draws my mind to the Apostle Paul writing to communities in Rome about the eager longing with which creation waits to be set free from its bondage. We may groan inwardly now, he says, and we may feel alone in our labor, but the Spirit indeed intercedes for us, and urges us onward, never, ever separate from the love of God, as we collaborate in building God’s glorious dream.

As the three of us emerged from the State House, we were dazzled by a brilliant, cold blue sky and streams of sunlight.


****************************************************************************

Here is the invocation, which uses language tailored for a group of numerous religious (and nonreligious) traditions:

Nurses’s Hall, State House
Boston, Massachusetts
January 21, 2010

An Invocation for Transgender Lobby Day

May the Holy One of all our traditions bless, protect and empower us, illumining us with insight, calm and unfathomable fortitude.

May we be reminded of the remarkable strength that lies within us, urging us onward even in face of the steepest odds.

May our hearts be filled with gratitude and awe for the sacred community gathered here today: trans people, partners, allies, families of all configurations, people of all races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, national origins, religious and spiritual traditions, professions and vocations.

May the Divine Spirit flowing among us stir up our prophetic anger at the evils of apathy and expediency as much as of bigotry and ignorance.

And may we go forth with boldness, empowered to bear witness to the truth of our lives and the birthright of our human dignity.

All this we ask in the name of the All-Holy One who urges us into life and love, and sets us free. Amen.

CP