Out of the bars and into the streets
Taking on LGBTQ+ justice
Hello, friend. I was just listening to a podcast on the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas. The guest talked about the gay rights chant “Out of the bars and into the streets” that rallied the LGBTQ+ community to take their outrage at injustice (some of which was fostered in the bars that served as community gathering spaces) and channel it. This week we’re talking LGBTQ+ justice, which is very much at risk at the state and federal levels, in legislatures and in court. Attacks on civil rights generally correlate with attacks on equal access to the democratic process, so it felt important to talk about right now. As always, thanks for being in this work with me. Feel free to share with anyone who might find the content helpful.
LGBTQ+ justice at risk today
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has strongly hinted the Supreme Court is open to repealing gay marriage, and you already know about all the anti-trans and anti-drag legislation in the US. (Here’s a helpful map from the ACLU in case you want to see what’s happening in your state right now. I also strongly recommend following ’s substack for the best reporting on the issue.) Basic protections in the workplace and other anti-discrimination laws are already being repealed at the state level and are at risk at the federal level. This is despite overwhelming support among Americans for queer and trans civil rights.
I also wanted to note that this isn’t happening in a vacuum: according to Amnesty International, homosexual acts are criminalized in 64 countries and in some countries, the death penalty has been used as a form of punishment. If I haven’t already recommended it, take the time to watch the Netflix Docuseries The Family, which talks about a Christian Nationalist organization and how it has bolstered leaders with these attitudes in places like Uganda as well as the United States.
I talked with someone not long ago who said we had maybe swung as far to the left as we need to, and when I asked what he meant, he pointed to gay marriage. You can imagine the conversation we had. So I thought I’d bring it up here in a kinder and more constructive way. I hope it’s helpful to have this context.
LGBTQ+ rights fights in history
This week I wanted to share a HOPEFUL piece of history. If you’ve read my book Rebels, Despots, and Saints, you may already know that the 2014 movie Pride is one of my favorite movies, about the Welsh Miners and the LGBTQ+ activists from London who supported their 1984-1985 strike. It always makes me cry, although to be fair, any movie about miners makes me cry.
The movie’s based on a completely true story, and I promise you Wales in the early 80s was not the most queer-friendly community in the world. But as is sometimes the case, working-class people engaged in different struggles sometimes figure out how to show up for each other and even adopt each other. And that’s what happened both in the movie and in the real life story.
This is a spoiler—for a ten-year-old movie, and also for a historic event—but even when Margaret Thatcher shredded union protections and the strike failed, the miners continued to support gay rights in various forums, including opposing the controversial Section 28 law passed in 1988 by a Conservative government that stopped councils and schools ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ I love this story of people showing up for each other, and I love any story about people coming together to fight Margaret Thatcher, so it’s a win-win.
[image from an online exhibit from the National Museum of Wales]
Ancestors fought back against oppression!
In case you haven’t heard of this remarkable human, I wanted to make sure you know about a truly amazing ancestor, Pauli Murray. I came across a documentary about her during the pandemic. Pauli Murray was a brilliant legal scholar, a poet, a Black lesbian and an Episcopal priest. [I will use the pronoun she because that’s what she used particularly later in life, although she did attempt to access gender-affirming medical care at one point in her life and some Murray scholars use they/them for that reason]. When Harvard wouldn’t admit Murray even though she was top of her graduating class at Howard University in 1944, she accused them of practicing “Jane Crow” and did a master’s at UC Berkeley before becoming the first Black person to get a law degree from Yale.
Thurgood Marshall called her 1950 book “States’ Laws on Race and Color” the bible of civil rights law, and her work influenced Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s own work on women’s rights. Murray didn’t engage directly in LGBTQ+ legal battles but fought always for the full equality and equal protection of all people in the US her whole life. What an amazing forebear to connect with as we try to do the same.
There’s a great documentary about her if you don’t already know Pauli Murray’s story.
And another thing…
So this week I want to complain about all the anti-trans sports stuff. The extreme right kept testing which anti-trans thing the rest of us would go along with. [There’s a great episode of the Five-Four podcast with Erin Reed on the following arc of legal efforts, synthesized here.] They didn’t get enough traction with the bathroom bans. They didn’t get a lot of buy-in on the drag stuff. They even met fair resistance with pretending that denying trans youth access to medical and emotional support was pro-parent. But the idea of trans women having an unfair advantage made a lot of sense to people on its surface, because we’ve all been shaped by ideas about certain things being biologically true.
So here’s what I’ve learned during these debates:
1) On more than one occasion, when an Olympic event was introduced, it was open to all genders and women kicked butt. The Olympics pulled the event, and then 8 years later re-introduced it with women’s and men’s categories. So it’s not universally true that biology determines skill.
2) Trans people are underrepresented in sports, and while they’ve been allowed to compete in many categories for decades, they have not dominated any of those categories.
3) Sports are a great example of how many different skills go into making an amazing athlete. Long arms, height, flexibility, focus are all gifts that contribute in different ways in different sports.
In other words, this is mostly a made up “moral panic” that has no real impact on real athletes. In fact, it’s one of the better examples of “trans women are women, trans men are men” I can think of, because in the instances it’s safe for them to compete, they get as much out of the gift of community and competition as anyone else from sports, and they get no more or less advantage than anyone else. It’s wild stuff. And it makes me cranky.
If you’d like a list of actual facts on trans people in sports, check this out. Let’s keep resisting this made-up panic designed to distract us from the effort to take away all of our basic rights.