Once again I found myself commenting in another Facebook chat. This one was a discussion about a 21 year old South African lesbian named Ncumsia Mzamelo who was murdered and her burnt body was found stuffed inside a toilet last week. This discussion was taking place while our pissivity over the reigniting of our ongoing animus with the radiKKKal feminist Borg spouting their tired disco era hate speech.
One person asked the question on the Facebook thread in regards to the original conversation topic of Ms. Mzamelo's heinous murder why trans people and some lesbians don't work together instead of having the animus they do toward each other. She pointed out that in realty, we have some common interests in terms of preventing violence against female bodies.
Someone else humorously responded back in the thread, 'that's asking too much'.
I quickly said, "No, let's ask for too much. We've been hat in hand meekly asking for too little for too long."
And we have. Transpeople have been for far too long meekly asking for societal respect. We've been asking for hate crime legislation, ENDA, jobs, liberty on Capitol Hill, in our various state legislatures and city councils since the 90's . We got hate crimes passed in 2009. We were hoping for ENDA this year.
The jobs, societal respect and liberty are to be determined.
Unlike the conservafools and His Fraudulency George The Younger, I don't believe there ought to be limits to freedom. I'm in agreement with President John F. Kennedy when he said in a June 11,1963 speech on civil rights "when we grant rights to others which belong to them, we expand rights for ourselves.
I don't believe it's 'asking for too much' for law enforcement personnel to stop assaulting and disrespecting trans people, take the crimes that are perpetrated against us seriously and prosecute them as vigorously as you would crimes committed against cis folks.
I don't believe it's 'asking for too much' to have the GL organizations that claim to represent us not only respect transpeople and treat us as equal partners in this ongoing civil rights struggle, but hire us to work for them as well.
I don't believe it's 'asking for too much' to have the trans community do a better job of reflecting the diversity of this community in its leadership ranks, including geographic diversity..I don't believe is 'asking for too much' to have media spokespeople for the trans community that reflect its diversity in body, mind and spirit..
The powers that be always seem to think that a marginalized group asking for its constitutional rights that they'd be screaming bloody murder about if they were denied access to them is 'asking for too much'.
Let's not only 'ask for too much', but demand it be granted as well.. We should also be prepared to not only fight to ensure that it happens, but not be satisfied until it does.
