HuffingtonPost.com – Gabriel Rotello
The decision by the Democratic leadership in Congress to eliminate transgendered people from ENDA, the bill to ban discrimination against gays in the workplace, has ignited a genuine firestorm in gay political circles.
It’s heartening to see that LGBT activists are coming out of the woodwork to insist that any meaningful bill that does not protect the transgendered isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
But criticism that the bill is a betrayal of the most vulnerable among us, while well-intentioned, doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.
A bill to protect gays from discrimination that excludes transgendered people isn’t merely a betrayal of the transgendered — it’s a betrayal of all gay people. Because (as I wrote in an Advocate column a few years back, which I will quote from liberally here), in a very real sense, all gay people are transgendered.
And I believe that an emerging understanding of how all gay people are transgendered is the wave of the future, both politically and socially.