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.
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