I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
(Creative Commons photo by celesteh via Flickr)
Even though the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn’t bother to keep count of those who say they’ve been fired because they’re transgendered, Southfield attorney Denise Brogan-Kator knows the number is greater than zero.
“In my case, I’ve been fired more than once for my gender identity,” she said matter-of-factly in a recent interview. Recalling the final encounter at a Michigan law firm in the late 1990s, Brogan-Kator recites the exchange with her then-boss as if it were yesterday.
“I said I was transitioning,” she said, “and I was told I should do that somewhere else.”
While Kalamazoo’s proposed Ordinance 1856 would bar discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, it’s the second category that has generated the most controversy.
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines “transgender” in the following way:
of, relating to, or being a person… who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that differs from the one which corresponds to the person’s sex at birth.
Denise Brogan-Kator
“Transgender identity is still a fairly new concept in most people’s minds,” Brogan-Kator, the president and board chair of the Triangle Foundation, a Detroit-based LGBT organization, said. “The fact that we’ve been around since the dawn of time seems to be irrelevant. The whole transgender movement is only a few years old.”
Perhaps because the “T” in GLBT remains the acronym’s least understood category, efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations — as Kalamazoo’s proposed ordinance would do — have highlighted the confusion and in turn, have been met with stiff opposition.
If fact, equating transgendered women with bathroom perverts has become increasingly routine.
Last year, after the city council in Gainesville, Fla., enacted a nearly identical anti-discrimination charter amendment to the proposed ordinance in Kalamazoo, opponents successfully petitioned a public vote — and they kept their message to voters simple.
“Keep men out of women’s bathrooms” became the semi-official opposition mantra. A memorable TV ad featured a young girl stepping off a merry-go-round and walking into a women’s restroom. After the door closed, a bearded man in sunglasses and a baseball cap entered ominously behind her. Then a question is posed: “Is that what you want in Gainesville?”
Voters in Gainesville ultimately backed the anti-discrimination charter amendment this past March.
Over the last several weeks in Kalamazoo, campaign mailings and door hangers have revived the same molesters-will-prey-on-women-in-the-bathroom approach from Gainesville – even utilizing some of the identical graphics.
Mara Kiesling
Mara Kiesling, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Transgender Equality, is well aware of the tactic.
“I understand there are some people who are uncomfortable. But you know what? They’re just uncomfortable,” she told Michigan Messenger. “That’s what civil rights are about — minorities who are not allowed to have the same lives as the majority because of our cultural biases. Most of these people are still uncomfortable with straight men being in a restroom with gay men. And there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable about being in restroom with people of different races,” she said.
None of that, Keisling argued, is a good reason to indulge discrimination. “Trans people are at the vanguard of civil rights right now,” she added.
Keisling also noted that anti-discrimination protections for transgendered men and women have been on the books in Minneapolis since the 1970s — without a single bathroom incident.
“It’s not that it doesn’t happen much, it doesn’t happen,” she said. “Yet still, Americans are worried about what they see as their personal private space and they don’t want somebody they see as the other in there. And you know what? Right now, trans people are still a little bit of the other and so we need some education to overcome that.”
Beyond more education, Brogan-Kator, managing attorney for the Rainbow Law Center, cited legal protections as a baseline indicator of a community’s inclusiveness.
“It’s important from a perspective of feeling like you belong,” she said. Moreover, Brogan-Kator added, enacting basic anti-discrimination protections is key to proving bias even when perpetrators don’t fess up to discriminatory hiring practices. She sketches out an example:
It’s very rare that someone won’t hire you because you’re black, for instance. They may never say that. But what happens is that over time you learn what the various indicators are that suggest there’s a bias at play and you find evidence. That’s part of what lawyers do through the discovery process. You find evidence that the reason given for the hiring or firing decision was just made up.
Keisling said she recently hosted a “virtual house party” for One Kalamazoo, the campaign organization pushing for passage of Ordinance 1856, focusing on messaging. She acknowledged that transgender people are a small subset of the LGBT community, and that beyond a need for more exposure there’s an even more basic need.
“We still don’t have oodles of out, prominent trans people. President Obama still hasn’t appointed a transgender person to a high-level job,” she said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, we have a hell of a lot of transgender people who need to work.”
For good measure, Keisling ticks off a few more needs.
“People need a chance and trans people need a chance. And we also need to shop and we need to go to restaurants,” she said with a laugh. “All the Kalamazoo law does is give us the same chance.”
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