Captain Reeves thinks GIEC can be saved.
And by the way Teresa, you're using the wrong type of ship for your analogy. You should be using a warship, not a cruise liner.
Take it from somebody who was on the founding board of NTAC back in 1999. It started with noble principles in the wake of discovering and being told by a US congressman we'd been backlobbied again by HRC and our own sellouts in GenderPac.
We had a messy and publicly contentious birth during that summer and fall of 1999, but NTAC also was an organization made up of veteran lobbyists and people who weren't going to take any crap from Gay, Inc. and HRC. We sent that message loud and clear as the new sheriffs in town at the National Transgender Policy meeting that was held at Task Force HQ in Washington DC in March 2000.
We had an educated, multicultural group of transpeople as our founders. One had a doctorate in biology and was handling our Science Committee.. We had two people with political science degrees. Our initial chair was an IFGE Trinity Award winner with a masters' degree in political science and had worked on Capitol Hill. We even had transmen involved who sat on major community boards. We had a well thought out, realistic multiyear multipronged plan to get us where we transpeople needed to go civil rights wise.. Too bad we never got a chance to execute it.
NTAC, unlike GIEC was unfairly and racistly painted with credibility problems by people and a large gay organization who stood to gain from this multicultural trans organization's marginalization and demise. .
The back channel smear campaign attacks on our leaders, raids on the NTAC BoD, spin whispered inside and outside the vanilla trans community that 'NTAC = attack', HRC's public declaration they wouldn't work with NTAC and claims by the predominately white assimilationist wing of the trans community that insider politics and kissing HRC's behind would lead us to the Promised Land of trans civil rights crippled our multicultural organization's ability to grow, coalesce and become the muscular independent lobbying voice for the trans community it was founded to become and the community desperately needed.
And you see the result ten years later. The assimilationist wing founded the white dominated NCTE in 2003 and we're no closer to trans civil rights equality and freedom than we were in 1999 or dealing with the issues that led to GIEC's founding..NTAC is still around, but it's a miniature sub instead of the power projecting aircraft carrier or Peter the Great class heavy missile cruiser it should have been and was trying to build itself up to be.
Yeah, hate crimes is the law of the land. But ENDA still isn't, and transpeople at the start of the second decade of the 21st century still don't have a muscular FUBU organization that represents them and their political interests.
Revisiting what happened with NTAC a decade ago makes me highly skeptical and pessimistic that Teresa can raise the USS GIEC to the ocean surface, tow it to dry dock, repair it, and send it back into battle refitted with new weapons and a new way of doing things when the same unresolved problems and negative taint is still attached to its name.The USS GIEC was sunk by its own homing torpedoes of incompetence, failed leadership, obfuscations, lies, and hyperbolic overpromising destroying its credibility.
The USS GIEC has sunk, you need to leave it at the bottom of the ocean where it belongs and start over building a new warship with a new name.
The question is will anybody in the trans community want to sign up to cruise on it?
