MTPC town hall meeting addresses status, strategy for passing trans rights bill

The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) held its annual town hall meeting Jan. 13 at the Community Church of Boston, and the centerpiece of the agenda was the transgender rights bill, formally known as "An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes."

Lawmakers filed the bill this week, and MTPC and its allies will be working through early next month to gather as many co-sponsors for the bill as possible. Rep. Carl Sciortino (D-Medford), who serves as lead sponsor of the bill in the House along with Rep. Byron Rushing (D-Boston), told the crowd of about 60 people that the bill already has more cosponsors than it did last session, when it had just over 20 co-sponsors. Last session was the first time the trans rights bill had been filed.

"We already have over 30 reps and senators signed on, and we have three more weeks to go to add cosponsors, so we are well ahead of where we were two years ago," said Sciortino. Beyond the increase in co-sponsors the bill was also filed for the first time in the Senate by Sen. Ben Downing (D-Pittsfield).

Sciortino urged attendees to lobby their representatives and senators to join as co-sponsors of the bill, which will add gender identity protections to the state's non-discrimination and hate crimes laws.

"It really matters. When we go and ask for people to support it in the Judiciary Committee, when we go to the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate and have a full debate on this issue, we want to go there with a lot of reps and senators, a lot of allies on our side," said Sciortino.

He said the factor most likely to win them over is the personal stories of constituents who are transgender or who are family members of allies of transgender people.

"It's really about your stories and arming legislators with the emotional gut reaction, why they know, like on marriage, that this bill is the right thing to do," he said.
Marc Solomon, executive director of MassEquality, said that the transgender rights bill is his organization's top priority, and he said MassEquality is using its connections with lawmakers built up during the marriage equality campaign to win over new supporters for the trans rights bill.

"This morning on my way to work the House Majority Leader John Rogers called me and said he'd happy to be an original cosponsor of the bill, so we're making some real headway in getting legislators onboard," said Solomon.

Jeff Mahoney, Rogers' chief of staff, confirmed that Rogers is co-sponsoring the bill. Advocates also won the support of House Ways and Means Chair Robert DeLeo, who according to his chief of staff, Jim Eisenberg, is also co-sponsoring the bill. Rogers and DeLeo are viewed as the two most likely contenders to assume the role of House Speaker should current Speaker Sal DiMasi step down.

But LGBT advocates are not the only ones mobilizing their supporters around the transgender rights bill. MTPC Steering Committee chair Nancy Nangeroni told the audience that MTPC has learned that someone anonymously e-mailed every member of the state legislature a copy of a video created by the Gainesville, Florida-based Citizens for Good Public Policy, which is waging a campaign to overturn a transgender non-discrimination ordinance in that city. The commercial shows a young blond girl walking from a playground into a public restroom. A few seconds after she closes the door, a menacing man wearing a baseball cap and dark sunglasses walks into the bathroom behind her. A message on the screen links the video to the city's gender identity ordinance, reading, "On January 28, 2008, your City Commission made this legal. Is that what you want in Gainesville?"

The Gainesville video echoes much of the rhetoric used by the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) and other opponents of the transgender rights bill last year. This week MFI and its grassroots offshoot, the Coalition for Marriage and Family, e-mailed their members and urged them to lobby their lawmakers and tell them to vote against the bill. As they did last year, MFI and the Coalition for Marriage and Family argued that the bill will allow male sexual predators to gain access to women's restrooms and locker rooms.

"If this bill were to become law, the consequences would be serious. Women and children would be put at risk since anyone, regardless of their biological sex, would be allowed access to sensitive areas such as single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms as well as college dormitories. Nothing would prevent a male sexual predator from pretending that he is confused about his sex to gain access to a woman's bathroom or to join a female-only fitness club. The law could also affect sex education classes in school, suggesting that sex change operations are mainstream and confusing children even more," wrote MFI and Coalition for Marriage and Family in their e-mails to supporters.

Nangeroni showed attendees a rough version of a video response that MTPC is developing to send to lawmakers to dispel the myths of the Gainesville video. The response showed footage from the Gainesville video and countered it with a message explaining that the transgender rights law does not encourage sexual predators. Nangeroni solicited comments from the audience on ways to make the video more effective.

Beyond the transgender rights bill MTPC also discussed its other work over the past year and its future plans. MTPC Executive Director Gunner Scott said last summer MTPC partnered with the Boston Alliance of GLBT Youth (BAGLY) to hold the state's first Transgender Youth Summit, bringing together 45 transgender youth from across the state, and the two organizations plan to hold another summit this June. MTPC has chapters in Boston, Worcester and the North Shore, and Scott said over the next year MTPC will be working to restart a dormant chapter in Western Massachusetts and launch a new chapter on the South Coast. Scott said MTPC is working to develop new career resources for the transgender community, and he hopes to be able to plan a transgender job fair.

Scott said MTPC has been working with state public health officials to get the state to address transgender health issues. He said he has met regularly over the past year with staff from the Department of Public Health and showed them studies outlining the increased health and safety risks facing transgender people.

"So my question [to them] is, what are you doing about this?" said Scott. He said public health officials have thus far taken no action on trans health issues, but he added, "We're at the table, which is more than we were a year ago."