audio by title 'tg law center interview'

On March 14^th — 16^th, 2008 the Gender Equity Resource Center of University of California, Berkeley hosted the 3^rd Annual Transgender Leadership Summit. One of our readers, Cheryl Morgan, was lucky enough to be able to attend. Her report of the event is below. She was also able to take the opportunity to interview Masen Davis, the Executive Director and Kristina Wertz, the Legal Director of the Transgender Law Center in downtown San Francisco.

California Transgender Leadership Summit

Being lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area (with my very wonderful boyfriend), I happened to be here at the same time as the 3rd Annual California Transgender Leadership Summit was taking place. It sounded interesting, and PFC said they’d welcome a report, so I went along.

Things got going on the Thursday night with a welcome party at Asia SF, a restaurant in San Francisco staffed by trans people. It was a little early for most of the out of town people, but it got me to see a place I’d heard a lot of good things about. I must go back and try the food sometime.

The conference proper began on Friday evening on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, a location that is synonymous with the civil rights movement. Huge thanks are due to Billy Curtis and his staff at the university’s Gender Equity Center for helping stage the event. (Go Bears!) Thanks also to the Transgender Law Center who did most of the work to make it happen.

The evening began with a selection of speeches from politicians. These varied from local councilors up through the State Assembly and Senate to the Federal Government in the shape of a representative from Berkeley’s Congresswoman, Barbara Lee. The theme of the conference was “trans grows up”, and this was cleverly showcased in the opening session by using two speakers, one of whom worked with trans youth and the other of whom admitted to being “60 and perhaps a few years more”.

Shannon Garcia of Trans Youth Family Allies (TYFA) is an amazing woman. She’s a mother of six, an achievement in itself, including a trans daughter, and she’s fighting for her little girl’s rights with a huge amount of motherly pride, affection and determination. Much of what she said can be found in an online article at The Bilerico Project, but perhaps the most moving part of her presentation was when she described the time she took her family away for a week’s holiday and allowed her daughter to present as a girl in public for the first time. Her husband, who had been somewhat reluctant about the project, was blown away by the transformation of his shy, sullen and depressed son into a happy, confident and outgoing girl. It was a magnificent affirmation of how easily allowing trans people to be themselves can make such a huge difference to their lives.

Miss Major, an African-American trans woman, didn’t say much about being old, aside from complaining about not being allowed to move into a retirement home along with her parents even though she was of an age to qualify for entry. I’m not sure that being old is part of her vocabulary. She’s much more at home being sassy and funny and entertaining. If you are looking for a good trans speaker, this woman is for you.

Saturday opened with more political speeches and an overview of work being done by trans activist groups and their allies in California. It is a mistake to view the USA as a single country. State laws can vary dramatically – sometimes even more so than they do in Europe. In California trans people have many of the same sorts of legal protections and rights as they do in the UK. In some areas they may even be ahead of us. Others states, however, are far less enlightened, and the Federal Government is also lagging sadly behind.

The next three sessions were devoted to workshops, of which there was a huge variety on offer. You could learn about fund raising, about political lobbying, about working with youth or deaf people, and about how to tackle an uncooperative health insurance company. I spent much of the day in the media stream, mainly because I’ve been involved in PR and journalism in other areas of my life so it was an area I could contribute to. We spent a lot of time talking about images of trans people in the media, how they are improving, and what we can do to make things even better. Given the number of smart, enthusiastic and talented people I met (several of whom were from Los Angeles and were involved in film and TV), I have no doubt that this will happen.

I did, however, take time out to listen to Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). Tackling America’s Federal Government on trans issues is very much a full time task. Americans may talk a lot about limiting the role of government, but like any other bureaucracy Washington generates regulations at an astounding rate, and many of them impact trans people in unexpected ways. A very simple example is that men who dodged the draft for Vietnam are not allowed to enter law school, but what happens if you were exempt from the draft because you were a woman at the time? Mara and her colleagues have not only fought that one, but have ensured that the certificate of exemption does not state the reason why you were exempt.

In many ways NCTE’s work mirrors what happens in the UK. America doesn’t have a national health service, but the creation of one is very much on the political agenda. (In California Governor Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the idea, and he’s a Republican.) Making sure that trans people are fairly treated by such a system, if it happens, will be a major challenge. The US government is also trying to introduce a national ID card, and all of the same issues of data protection apply. (In this case Mara finds herself allied to Libertarians from Montana – the same people who have threatened to secede from the US if their right to own guns is ever curtailed – politics surely does make for strange bedfellows.)

Federal issues were also to the fore in the final session of the day where we all got back together to discuss the future of the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA, which isn’t strictly an Act in the UK sense as it didn’t get passed). If you follow trans issues on the Internet you will doubtless know the story of how the Democrat leadership and gay lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, got cold feet over this bill and stripped out protection for trans people because they felt it wouldn’t get passed otherwise. The end result was an outpouring of support for the trans community from just about every other LGBT organization in the country, and the bill going nowhere as a result. It was, in retrospect, a rather foolish move to make over a bill that the White House had already promised to veto. With the prospect of a Democrat President in the near future, LGBT groups are planning for another push next year. In the meantime trans activists are being mobilized to get themselves in front of their congressmen to do a bit of consciousness raising. Mara noted that many Congressmen claim to have never met a trans person and to not have any trans people in their districts. This is going to change.

Saturday evening saw the focus move back to San Francisco for a party at the city’s LGBT center. I confess to having skipped that, and going home to cheer on Lewis Hamilton instead, but by all reports the younger attendees were dancing well into the night.

On Sunday morning I had a weirdly British-like experience. The local commuter rail service, BART, had decided to do some engineering work, with the result that my partner and I were almost an hour late getting to Berkeley. “Who do they think they are?” he muttered, “Network Rail?” (He’s a bit of a train buff, my boy, so he knows this stuff despite being American.)

The final session featured Donna Rose and Jamison Green. I missed Donna’s speech, but Jamison was as fabulous as ever, reprising a rousing speech/performance he had made to a San Francisco Pride parade a few years ago. They then went on to hold an open discussion on the future of the trans movement. The conference had attracted 432 registered members and maybe 20 or so walk-ins, and it had become clear over the weekend that we were a very diverse group. There were delegates who were African-American, Native American, Hispanic and from the Pacific Islands (and even one from Peru) as well as white. There were teenagers and retired people. There were people who ran support groups for sex workers and the homeless, and others who held high profile, well-paid jobs. There were people who were out, and people who were stealth (a portion of the main auditorium was marked off as being a photography-free zone). There were people who were Christians, and people who resented even being described as “spiritual”. There were people who were gender-queer and questioning, and people who were utterly certain of their gender identity. And of course there were trans men, trans women, and all shades of gender in between, not to mention friends, supporters, lovers and parents of trans people. The trans movement, we repeatedly told each other, is extremely diverse. No one group stands much chance of moving forward on its own, and no one group has any right to consider themselves “true” trans people. If we are to have a future, then we will have to earn it by working together. And maybe along the way we can teach the rest of humanity a few things about respecting difference.

Cheryl