Blueprint for change

When Massachusetts passed its gay rights bill in 1989 the issue of transgender rights was not on the radar screen of most gay and lesbian advocates. In the last few years a handful of states -- Maine, New Mexico, Illinois, Washington, Iowa, Oregon and Colorado -- have passed non-discrimination laws covering both sexual orientation and gender identity. But most of the states that passed gay rights bills in the 1980s and early 1990s, like Massachusetts, have not updated their laws to include protections for transgender people. In fact, only four states -- Rhode Island, California, New Jersey and Vermont -- have accomplished that goal. And many of the factors that made victory possible are not present in Massachusetts.

Activists in New Jersey, which passed a gay rights bill in 1992, landed a one-two punch in 2006 and 2008, passing first a non-discrimination bill and then a hate crimes bill covering gender identity and expression. Steven Goldstein, chair of Garden State Equality, the state's largest LGBT rights organization, said that it took little effort to win over lawmakers on the bills because many of them were already familiar with members of the transgender community and understood the discrimination they faced. He said transgender people have served in leadership positions in Garden State Equality and other organizations, and they lobbied lawmakers on a wide range of issues, including marriage.

"If you make sure that transgender people are in every facet of your organization, if you make sure they're in the leadership of your organization, you're providing constant exposure to politicians. ... Here transgender people are front and center in the fight for marriage equality," said Goldstein. "The politicians here see transgender people year round at the table."

One of those trans activists at the table was Barbra Casbar Siperstein, vice-chair of Garden State Equality and president of New Jersey Stonewall Democrats. Through her work with Stonewall she became one of the delegates to the Boston Democratic National Convention in 2004, and she used that event to network with many of the lawmakers who would later help pass the non-discrimination and hate crimes bill. Prior to the convention advocates had searched in vain for a Senate sponsor for the non-discrimination bill, but Siperstein said during the DNC she connected with the eventual sponsor and talked to her about transgender rights.

"We had spent a couple of hours talking -- she was in the front row one night at the convention -- so she was familiar with me," said Siperstein. "So when this individual [lobbying for Senate sponsors] went to speak with her, she said, 'Oh yeah,' she remembers me from the convention."

Garden State Equality also leveraged considerable resources on behalf of the campaign to pass the legislation. In 2006 the organization aired a television commercial featuring a transgender woman named Carol Barlow talking about being told during a job interview that she was unemployable because she is transsexual. The outreach to lawmakers and public education paid off: The non-discrimination bill passed by an overwhelming 102-8, and hate crimes passed 100-10.

In Vermont, which passed a non-discrimination bill covering transgender people last year, LGBT advocacy organizations had a history of including the transgender community among their members, said Kara DeLeonardis, executive director of the RU12? LGBT community center in Burlington. But she said that paled in comparison to the push for visibility by transgender advocates last year to lobby Governor Jim Douglas and lawmakers in favor of the bill. RU12? was one of the core coalition partners in the TransAction coalition that campaigned for the bill.

"It was absolutely critical to passing this legislation that legislators and the governor got to meet with transgender Vermonters, and that had not happened before, where that level of transgender people were visible and vocal and telling their stories about why this legislation was important," said DeLeonardis.

MTPC and its allies have greatly increased the visibility of the trans community on Beacon Hill this past year, holding a lobby day last May that brought out more than 100 participants, holding the Jan. 16 legislative briefing, and urging their supporters to contact their legislators and ask them to support H.B. 1722.

But prior to the defeat of the marriage amendment this past June the transgender community had very little visibility during the marriage debates that raged on Beacon Hill, in contrast to the visibility of the community in New Jersey. There were few if any images of transgender people in the public information campaigns in favor of same-sex marriage, and there were almost no transgender people in positions of leadership within the marriage movement.

That lack of visibility during the marriage movement was no coincidence. Scott said there was an agreement by some transgender activists and marriage activists that the transgender community would step out of the spotlight during the marriage struggle in exchange for help from the gay, lesbian and bisexual community to pass pro-trans legislation once the marriage battle was over. He said the decision was made in part to protect the transgender community. MTPC worried that a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman could be particularly disastrous for transgender people, creating more rigid legal definitions of male and female in the law.

"We were just worried about how this was all going to shake out. So in some ways we were stepping back too to protect ourselves to see how it was going to work. ... We just didn't know what was going to happen with the pushback," said Scott. "That was the same time we saw the Patriot Act, the Real ID Act, stuff around immigration. We just don't need other folks telling us how to define our gender."

Josh Friedes, a former board chair of the Massachusetts Freedom to Marry Coalition and the MassEquality Education Fund who currently serves as advocacy director of Equal Rights Washington, said that in the early days of MassEquality, prior to 2004, marriage equality advocates asked transgender people to stay out of the spotlight out of concern that they would not inspire sympathy among the lawmakers that advocates were trying to persuade to support marriage.

"If you go back and look at our materials [from MassEquality and Freedom to Marry] I think you'll see an attempt to show families that are racially and age diverse and using cut-lines to show geographic diversity, but what you weren't seeing were imagery of couples where one or both were transgender," said Friedes, who spoke with Bay Windows about the agreement during an interview last October. "And to that extent I think transgender individuals were made fairly invisible during the struggle for marriage equality."

He said transgender advocates agreed to step out of the spotlight with the understanding that marriage activists would use the strength built during the marriage battle to fight for transgender rights, and he said it was incumbent on the gay, lesbian and bisexual community to keep that promise.

Diego Sanchez, a longtime advocate and former steering committee member of MTPC, said the transgender community ultimately benefited from the agreement because in the wake of the marriage battle MassEquality, one of MTPC's key allies in its campaign to pass H.B. 1722, has unprecedented clout on Beacon Hill.

"It turned out to be to our best advantage that marriage led the way in Massachusetts so that the network of connections grew exponentially by the time we got to House Bill 1722," said Sanchez, who also spoke with Bay Windows about the agreement last October.

Yet Goldstein said his experience in New Jersey convinced him that lawmakers could sense when LGBT advocates were nervous about discussing transgender rights. He said by including transgender people in their advocacy on marriage equality and other issues they sent the message that there was a united LGBT community and that advocates considered transgender rights "a no-brainer."

"We don't give politicians here any reason for their antenna to go up because we're not nervous. ... If you present things as a no-brainer then that's how they're perceived," said Goldstein.

Equality California, which led the charge to pass that state's gender identity non-discrimination bill in 2003, also treated transgender equality as a no-brainer. Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, said his organization included questions about transgender rights on their endorsement questionnaire, and they only endorsed candidates who supported all of their initiatives, including trans rights legislation. As a result of turnover in the legislature caused by California's term-limits rules, Equality California saw an influx of new lawmakers committed from day one to support trans rights legislation.

"Our policy has always been if you see our name next to a candidate as endorsed, you know they support [our agenda] 100 percent," said Kors.

Unlike Equality California, MassEquality, which up until late last year was exclusively focused on marriage, has made candidates' opposition to the marriage amendment the only factor in offering their endorsement.

There was one notable exception to the lack of transgender activists among the leadership of the marriage movement in Massachusetts. In 2003 and 2004 the Rev. Maureen Reddington-Wilde, a Malden pastor of the pagan Church of the Sacred Earth, served as co-chair of the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry (RCFM), and she has continued to serve on the organization's board. Reddington-Wilde said she was not privy to any discussions about the role of the transgender community in the marriage movement, but she said she got involved with RCFM because of her church's commitment to equal marriage rights.

Reddington-Wilde said when she lobbied lawmakers against the marriage amendment she described how marriage equality impacted her as a transwoman.

"Because I'm transgendered my wife and I have been legally married in Massachusetts for 21 years now," said Reddington-Wilde. "When I got into personal discussions with legislators about how this affects people I said, my wife and I have been married all this time. ... I never had a problem. They were very comfortable with the discussion."

Scott said the marriage movement is not to blame for the long delay in passing trans-inclusive hate crimes and non-discrimination bills.

"I think what really makes it hard is that there was such a long time between sexual orientation and gender identity. I think frankly we should have done this 10 years ago, whether marriage was here or not," said Scott.

And despite the relatively recent shift of LGBT organizations in Massachusetts towards fighting for transgender equality, Scott said those organizations have demonstrated their commitment to the cause.

"I think that our coalition of folks has really come up to speed fast on trans issues," said Scott.

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About 40 people, a mix of lawmakers, aides and LGBT advocates, turned out at the State House Jan. 16 for a legislative briefing on House Bill 1722, which would update the state's non-discrimination and hate crimes laws to make them transgender-inclusive.

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Talk about hitting the ground running. Gunner Scott took the reigns of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) as the organization's first paid director this week just as a controversy over MTPC's association with the Human Rights Campaign was attracting national attention.