Laverne Cox is the activist we need

I recently saw an ad promoting Chelsea Clinton’s speaking gig for the Human Rights Campaign’s inaugural address, and immediately Googled her to see what connection she has to the LGBT community. She has none. She is a straight, white, cisgendered, privileged daughter of notorious politicians. She does not represent our community, and the concept of her speaking for us is insulting.

Of course, the Human Rights Campaign is pretty much a sellout; they promote sanitized advocacy for the most privileged members of the LGBT community. Just one example of this: at a 2013 rally for marriage equality in front of the White House, the HRC asked people not to wave trans flags because they don’t consider marriage equality a trans issue.

Not only is marriage equality very much a trans issue, that action alone showed their true colors of excluding trans* people from their “community.”

The Human Rights Campaign truly extends very little effort in even making it look like they care about trans people and queers of color; to tie back to what made me write this article, this is reflected in who they choose to be the face of their campaign. Straight white cis people like Chelsea Clinton, easy-to-deal-with and already famous gays or lesbians… please, yall. Please.

The activist that, in my opinion, could best benefit and reflect the LGBT community, is Laverne Cox. As a black trans woman, she could provide representation to a huge part of the LGBT community that so often gets thrown under the bus. Additionally, she doesn’t waste time and seems almost effortlessly articulate—for real, check out the Katie Couric interview.

She was completely right in redirecting the focus away from transition to the extreme adversity and violence that trans people face so often—“The preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans peoples’ lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community… if we focus on transition, we don’t actually get to talk about those things.”

HELL YEAH. We don’t have any time to waste, and she knows it.

To summarize, I’m a massive fangirl for Laverne. The rest of the community should be too. As for the Human Rights Campaign—rename yourself. You’re a single-issue group advocating for a specific group, not the LGBT community.

Articles with supporting evidence:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/31563/human-rights-campaign-fails-to-advocate-for-minorities

http://themoonbat.com/2013/04/02/the-problem-with-the-hrc-logo-on-your-profile/

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=7291

Ladies, speak up- society's distortion of "nice"

We teach girls shame: Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they’re already guilty of something. As so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who have to silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think….And they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. – Chimamanda Adichie

It feels like almost every move I make, there’s someone telling me I’m being too aggressive, too weird, crazy, asking for trouble, that I need to tone it down. Which is funny, because every time I’ve done something to be called “aggressive,” “weird” or “crazy,” it’s literally just been me being myself and thinking I deserve respect for being a person. All of my female friends who are similarly independent have dealt with similar adversity for similar reasons. And I don’t want to cause “trouble”—I just want to be understood and respected. But things aren’t that simple.

The truth is, most people do not want or like independent women. The same reasons for which people have called me “aggressive,” “weird” and “crazy,” guys my age would be called ambitious and assertive. They’re “going places.” I was about to re-affirm that people don’t like independent women, but let’s cut the bullshit: they don’t like women, period. So they tell us by standing up for ourselves we’re weird monsters, and they’ve fed us this gnarly idea about being “nice.”

“Nice” means, as most girls have probably realized by their early teens: don’t talk too loud, let guys cut across you, don’t disagree with guys, never tell them they’re wrong (it would make them feel bad!), don’t do anything to make guys uneasy, don’t say no when a guy asks you out, especially if he made a romantic gesture (that would be mean!), laugh it off and be flattered when you’re being objectified and degraded, and generally make yourself as easy to deal with as possible, especially for guys, and never stand up for yourself.

Spelled out like this, it’s easy to see how dehumanizing and sick this. When I think about it this way, I realize I have to intention of being “nice” in the way that many people think about it. Yes, I want to cause trouble for them: they cause a world of trouble for my sisters and I, and it needs to end.

My girlfriend pointed out to me recently that I speak so quietly a lot of the time that she can’t always hear what I’m saying. She’s right, and I started thinking about why I do that. I started thinking things like, Well, I don’t want to talk over people. I don’t want to be rude. But why the hell is me speaking at an audible volume being rude? It’s part of the internalized misogyny I’ve absorbed- that I should be sitting down and shutting up. But that’s wrong. Women’s place is in the revolution—we are not a product to be sanitized and commodified.  My role is not to be easy to deal with. My role is to call you out, sit you down, and rise up with my sisters to create a new way of thinking. Where women aren’t “bad girls” or made to feel ashamed for being humans with their own views and judgment calls. And it’s not just for next generation—as Kwame Ture said,

“I don’t think that we should follow what many people say, that we should fight to be leaders of tomorrow. Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. And God knows we need to be leaders today, ‘cause the men who run this country are sick, are sick.”

Black power has always resonated with me and is more relatable to feminism than many would have you think.

So, do I dress a certain way to bother people? No, and I’m tired of people being selfish enough to assume it’s about them. It’s not. Do I sit around thinking, damn, how can I piss off the most people? No. I gather information, do research and then form opinions. Ladies, we need to stop taking shit and letting them distract us. Speak up, stand up and define “nice” for yourself. I'm right here with you.