EDGEBoston.com – by Kilian Melloy – EDGE Boston Contributor
Monica Roberts at transgriot.com has posted a blog containing an illuminating, timely, and comprehensive, history of the tensions between the GLB part of the GLBT community and the transgender people who feel that they’ve been shunted aside–most recently by the Human Rights Campaign.
Roberts, served as the Lobby Chair for the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) for several years, from 1999-2002, maintains her blog as a source of “News, opinion, commentary, history, and a little creative writing from an African-American.”
Roberts writes that the schism between transgender people and gays, lesbians, and bisexuals run as deeply as those of the GLBT equality movement itself, to the episode in which Jim Fouratt, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, excluded Sylvia Rivera, a fellow GLF founder and trans activist, from the GLF. Fouratt, whom Lynn Conway writes of as “A classic example of transphobia” in a 2006 essay posted as the University of Michigan website, continued to antagonize the transgender community as late as 2000, when he called M-to-F transsexuals “misguided gay men who’d undergone surgical mutilations” at a Stonewall observance.