Targeted transgender community speaks out in advance of vote

(Creative Commons photo by fadogirl via Flickr)

The new TV ad funded by opponents of Kalamazoo’s proposed anti-discrimination ordinance isn’t all that new. But until next week’s vote, its ability to sway votes in this southwest Michigan city remains a mystery.

The ad, nearly identical to an ad used by opponents of a similar measure on the ballot in Gainesville, Fla., earlier this year, warns viewers that the anti-discrimination ordinance on the ballot in Kalamazoo — which includes protections for gay and transgender people — would allow men to prey on young girls in public bathrooms.

Calls to the main group opposing Ordinance 1856 to explain the ad were not returned this week.

The ad serves once again to highlight the starkly different way both sides in this fight characterize the proposed ordinance — supporters saying it promotes basic fairness and equality, opponents saying it opens the bathroom and locker-room door to “cross-dressing men.”

That divide shows no sign of receding. Nor does the relentless focus on gender identity from the opponents of the ordinance. Meanwhile, very few open transgender men or women have been quoted in traditional media outlets covering the campaign in Kalamazoo.

Michigan Messenger sought out a couple transgender voices from Michigan as the Kalamazoo campaign winds to a close. (Another local transgender voice was featured in this story from earlier in the week.)

“Transgender issues are the hot button issues in this campaign,” Amy Hunter, a transgender woman and Kalamazoo resident, confirmed in a recent interview.

No official number of transgender people in Kalamazoo exists, but Hunter said the number is “at least” in the dozens.

Hunter, 50, an accomplished lighting designer and theater director, says she’s been living as a woman since the morning of Oct. 5, 2006. “When I left to go to work that day, I left the house that day as Amy, and I never ever appeared again in public or private as a male.”

A mustache-less Hunter put on some new clothes and a little makeup, and prepared for an anxious beginning:

That day that I left the house I was fully aware that it could go very badly or it could go OK. I adopted an attitude of, I don’t need to apologize myself anymore. I want to be an effective person. And I know, I absolutely know in my soul, that the only way that’s going to happen is if I live authentically.

Since then, Hunter said she’s experienced no hassles living and working in Kalamazoo, a city she said “has always had a tendency to be a very progressive community.”

Last year, after the initial drafts of the ordinance were being written, Hunter was moved to get involved.

“It came to my attention that the ordinance had been drafted without a transgendered person on the committee,” she said. Hunter was determined to change that, and would later become director of operations for One Kalamazoo, the group supporting Ordinance 1856. She recently resigned, but she said that wasn’t due to any problem with the campaign.

“I’m not a spring chicken anymore,” she laughed. “Campaigning is a young woman’s job.”

Rachel Crandall, a native of Southfield, is the executive director of Transgender Michigan. She’s been publicly advocating for anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity for at least a decade, she said.

Asked for her reaction to the new TV ad by Kalamazoo Citizens Voting No on Special Rights Discrimination, the group opposing Ordinance 1856, Crandall doesn’t refer to its content.

“My reaction is I wish they could get to know me. Most people who are so anti, are people who really don’t know a trans person,” she said.

Crandall, 49, says she’s determined to educate people about transgendered people — transgendered women in particular.

“These are not just men who wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I’ll wear a dress today,” she said. “These are people, a lot of them who really have been transgendered at least inside for most of their lives, and that’s what we’re trying to educate people about the difference.”

Her personal story, she adds, is similar.

“I’ve always know what I was, and it just began pounding on me from the inside, that I really couldn’t lie about it anymore,” she said. “For so much of my life, I tried to run away from it.”

Both Hunter and Crandall say that the social gains that gays and lesbians have achieved as more and more have become open about their sexual orientation, are just around the corner for the transgender community.

“If you know me, you can’t demonize me,” Hunter said. “It’s impossible.”

Crandall, for her part, lamented what she thinks is the probability that many opponents to Ordinance 1856 have never met a transgendered man or woman. “I really wish that people would just try to go out of their way to actually meet someone,” she said. “But isn’t that what prejudice is all about? Most of the people that people are prejudiced about are people they really don’t know.”