I’m happy to report that the same judge who, one month earlier, ordered a stay on Oregon’s domestic partnership bill has reversed his own ruling! Now gays and lesbians here in Oregon can get legal benefits almost but not quite exactly like straight couples. It’s not called “marriage” though, because gay marriage was voted down a couple years ago. To be honest, I’m perfectly fine with that. Marriage is a religious institution anyway and has no business being muddled with by the government.

But when has the government taken the separation of church and state seriously lately? Oh well. Go and get yourselves happily domestically partnered all you lovely Oregon queers out there! Yayness all around!

elle jo

A while ago, I drew a little comic for Lambda Legal’s “Life Without Fair Courts” contest. The gist of the contest was to depict a world in which some Supreme Court civil rights case had been ruled against. I wracked my brain for days trying to come up with a civil rights case that might, in some small way, apply to me. Eventually I chose to depict the (practically unknown) case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989) in which Ann Hopkins, an employee for Price Waterhouse, was denied promotion because her bosses deemed her “too masculine” in her attire and demeanor. Well, she sued their asses off and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court where it was ultimately ruled in favor of Ms. Hopkins on the grounds that she was being discriminated against because of her sex.

Now I would argue that this wasn’t merely sex discrimination, but it was gender discrimination as well. The (presumably make) bosses denied Ms. Hopkins a promotion because they believed her to be “too masculine,” as if to say that women are only allowed to be “feminine” in the cutthroat world of … um … accounting. And this wasn’t a one-time deal at Price Waterhouse. This quote from the Opinion of the Court piece by Justice Brennan says:

In previous years, other female candidates for partnership also had been evaluated in sex-based terms. As a general matter, Judge Gesell concluded, “[c]andidates were viewed favorably if partners believed they maintained their femin[in]ity while becoming effective professional managers”; in this environment, “[t]o be identified as a ‘women’s lib[b]er’ was regarded as [a] negative comment.”

from the Supreme Court Collection at Cornell University

These were decisions based not solely on sex, but on gender as well. That is, the expected gender performance for a given sex: masculine for men and feminine for women. This kind of thing has been going on for ages, and it’s not limited to big corporations.

There is a bill siting in Congress as I blog called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which will extend protections on the basis of sexual orientation and (if all goes well) gender identity as well. Unfortunately democrats in Congress are feeling a little twitchy about including gender identity in ENDA. They feel there will not be enough votes to pass legislation with trans protections attached.

Transgender folk have been on the sidelines of LGB culture ever since Christine Jorgenson got off the boat in New York. We’ve been treated as novelties, curiosities of science, or sideshow freaks who don’t belong anywhere but the sideshow or Jerry Springer. I know I’ve never felt completely at home in the queer resource center here on the UO campus even though I identify as a lesbian. The whole ‘trans’ thing fucks everything up. Now the same kind of sidelining is going on with ENDA. Dems apparently are too uptight to extend protections to a class of people that most still consider to be sideshow freaks.

But let me tell you, offering protections on the basis of gender identity will include more than just transsexuals. When we have legislation in place that states there shall be no expectation by employers that their employees behave exclusively masculine for men or feminine for women, it will be a shining day for people of all sexes, genders, and orientations. The mousy straight guy in the pink sweater won’t lose his job because his homophobic boss thinks he’s gay. The dominatrix of the boardroom in the black pinstripe suit will know that that promotion is hers, without an additional review. The trans-dyke illustrator can submit portfolios to any potential employer knowing full well that she’ll get hired (or not) based on her merits and not what’s between her legs.

So Congress, do not drop gender identity protection from ENDA. It could extend protections to so many more folk than just transsexuals. It would ensure that anyone who deviates from the archaic 1950s view of men and women could get a job and keep a job.

ellejohara

What’s the good news?

Well, a couple more chunks of the Patriot Act were ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. That’s good. (By the way, it was a federal judge here in Oregon who made the call.)

But what’s the stupid news?

Congress decided that it was more important to vote against dissent (read: free speech) with their complaint against MoveOn.org than spend that time and exert their grey matter working to get our troops out of Iraq.

Tell me, what was that message voters sent to the President last November? You know, that message from the American public that we were tired of the yes-men bullshit? Somehow I get the feeling the message was either lost, or never heard.

elle jo

Gay marriage is legal in Iowa. In Iowa! The ban on gay marriage in the land of corn and straw polls was declared unconstitutional by Judge Robert Hanson. Unfortunately, the ruling barely lasted a day before the wingnuts pushed for a stay on the ruling until it was appealed.

Fucking freepers. Fortunately there were a lucky few who took advantage of the ruling and got themselves legally hitched. In Iowa!

I’m sure the nutters in Jesusland will be up in arms about this, calling it a ruling by a so-called “activist judge.” No, this was not a decision made by an activist judge. This was a decision made by a judge who recognizes injustice and inequality when he sees it.

It was a pink letter day in Iowa. In fucking Iowa! Damn!

el jo

I’m opposed to a national ID card. I had a passport for the purposes of travel, but it expired back in 2004. (Sadly, it hasn’t a single stamp.) While a passport is a type of Federal ID, its history and background is nowhere near as insidious as the Real ID. The Real ID Act was passed by a rubber-stamp Congress back in 2005. The ID itself is basically a federally issued drivers license that is theoretically supposed to assist with “The War On Terror™” by displaying all your legal statistics conveniently on one piece of plastic and locking you in to yet another federal database. (It’s ripe for identity theft.)

Well today I read that come 2008, the Real ID, or some other form of federally issued ID, is going to be required to gain access to Federally controlled locations such as airports, federal buildings, or national parks. ERRRCCHHHHH! Hold on just a second there! Did you say “national parks?” Yes I did. Just check out this little morsel from CNN.com:

The cards would be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don’t comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

I don’t often find myself in airports, federal buildings, or (Eris forbid) nuclear facilities, but as an outdoor enthusiast, I definitely find myself in national parks. I can understand needing an ID (even a simple state issued ID) to get into airports and such, but requiring a federal ID to travel to places like Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, or Denali is tantamount to requiring authorization papers to cross a state border. It stinks of totalitarianism.

Oregon is still up in the air as to whether or not it will adopt the Real ID. If it does decide to adopt it I would be so fucked. Why? Well, as of right this moment, my Oregon drivers license and my birth certificate do not have the same data on them. (The sex is different. But I guess that should be a no-brainer.) What that means is that I would be flagged (and possibly flogged) for having conflicting records. It’s very likely that my social security records are mismatched as well, which means I’m stuck in a rather inconvenient boondoggle.

Since I was born abroad, my birth certificate is handled through the Federal Government. And being the Federal Government, nothing short of an act of divine intervention (or a surgeon’s letter) is going to get my ‘M’ turned into an ‘F’ on my birth certificate. In short, that means I’m stuck living legally as a man even though I’m living socially as a weird kinda masculine woman-it-thing. (But they don’t have a letter for that category.)

I’m really not happy with the way this country has turned since that fateful September morning. Fortunately for me, neither are a lot of other folks. I only hope that the spineless, thick-headed, shit-for-brains Congress gets their act together before we’re all forced to hail Commandant-For-Life George Dubya Bush.

el jo