Easter: The World Comes Back to Life

Man, look at this Easter morning. This is definitely a good time to have a celebration. Everything is rising from the dead. There is not a cloud to be seen. There is more traffic than the usual Sunday morning on my street, I am guessing people are going to see family and going to church. I think Easter is more than a religious holiday, though I do think of it as being the biggest Christian holiday, bigger symbolically than Christmas. The eggs, the bunnies, the hats, I love all of that as well as the profound symbolism of the resurrection.

This week there was a County Council meeting that I didn't go to, a town hall meeting upcounty that the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever had sent out a newsletter about. They wanted all the shower-nuts to show up and tell the council they don't like the new gender identity nondiscrimination law.

I have some friends who are transgender, the ones I am thinking of used to be men and now they are women. I'm a social psychologist and the interesting thing to me is the social aspect of it. The "problem" is that somebody feels like something inside but people who talk to them don't see it, they don't realize how the person sees themselves, they think they are talking to a guy and they talk like they talk to a guy. It appears to me that the interpersonal connection is the showstopper, you might feel like a woman but really there is no problem with that, you can feel like whatever you want, the problem occurs when you talk to other people. So there's a lot to do with clothes and physical features, appearances, which just really means how you appear in the eyes of other people. Gender identity is a complex subject and requires a leap of empathy to understand, but it is understandable, these aren't Martians or something, they're like somebody who is fat but didn't used to be, and is always surprised when people address them as a fat person. I'll probably hear from them about that, yikes, back off, ladies! The fact is, of course it's impossible for me to know how it feels to be them, but the people I'm thinking of are smart, funny, brave people and I trust that their accounts of their experience are credible and real. There's certainly nothing threatening about it, no risk to anybody at all, the worst thing is that it's a little hard to understand.

So several people went to the town hall meeting and sent me email about it, and they were all in a way different, because each report gave a first-person account featuring the narrator. Well, one was pretty objective. I am going to try to piece together what happened at the meeting, and then I do hope people will fill in details in the comments.

The meeting was held Wednesday night in Clarksburg, which is a little north of Germantown. There are some things going on up there, there is an issue about development and they should be concerned about getting their share of the county budget, which, as you might have read, has some issues. But the main topics at the meeting were school redistricting, which the County Council doesn't have anything to do with, and ... yes, the shower-nuts.

There is an issue with a carousel in Wheaton Regional Park that the people in Clarksburg want moved up there, I think. Perfect topic for a town hall meeting. Development districting, same thing, good to get community feedback on that. There was discussion of the behavior of the cop assigned to patrol the high school in Damascus. Sounds like he gets out of line occasionally, well, cops and teenagers, that can be a bad combination. And is this right, that if you complain they won't look at it unless you have the complaint notarized?

There were several people in the front with “Stop Bill 23-07” signs, where 23-07 is the nondiscrimination bill. Also another guy in the back with a sign like “Protect my personal privacy. Stop 23-07.” I wonder how the law affects his personal privacy, well I guess I missed the chance to ask him. Maybe he's worried about naked women coming into the men's showers. I'll admit, that's a problem that doesn't worry me a bit.

Somebody spoke up about the nondiscrimination bill, saying that the Council had ignored the emails and letters it received. If I may remind you, some of those emails and letters were pretty weird, hoping council members' daughters would be raped, there was a Republican Party leader shouting "heil Hitler" in the Council meeting, actually it's good for them if the emails and letters are ignored.

Something was mentioned which I do know something about. Someone at the meeting talked about "five transgender people" surrounding a person gathering petition signatures and harassing them. We've heard this talk before. This is going to be a little hard for them to convince the public, especially since I have photographs and everything HERE. This has to be what they were talking about, you won't find five transgender people in the same place very often but one day Christine and I were having coffee at Starbucks with three transgender women, when we came across a guy getting signatures. They stood and talked with him, I walked around taking pictures, Christine sometimes joined the conversation, and it was all very friendly. The guy might have felt bad afterwards, because he basically deserted his station, he said he needed to go home and pray and think about the topic, and he left. I'm sure the shower-nuts were not happy to see those pictures on the Internet, but the fact is, when you meet these people you realize they are the farthest thing from the predators and pedophiles that the CRW wants you to think of. Anyway, there was no surrounding, no harassment, no five transgender people, it's just a normal example of the kind of things the CRW folks say to make it appear there is a problem when there isn't.

Somebody complained to the council about the fact that there is no exemption for religious institutions in the bill. Let me get this right. These people are saying there should be special wording that says it's okay for a church or religious school or whatever to discriminate against people? Do racist churches have special wording regarding racial discrimination? Do they realize how often this is going to come up? How many transgender people do you think are going to be applying for jobs at fundamentalist churches in Montgomery County? Is there actually a religion with a doctrine about gender identity? Why does somebody stand up in public and talk about the "problem" that there is no religious exemption in the nondiscrimination law? Maybe it's me, but I end up with the feeling there must be some other reason they feel the law should allow discrimination against transgender people.

It sounds like Duchy Trachtenberg spoke forcefully on the topic. First of all, somebody had said that her staff member had harassed people with petitions. The CRW had put a few-second-long video on YouTube, showing Dana Beyer -- who works for Trachtenberg -- telling some people that they didn't have permission from Giant and would be asked to leave. Let me mention something that we haven't said before. Some of the people who carried the petitions were just ordinary people, maybe they heard about this in church or something and thought there was an actual problem with men in the ladies room. But the people at the table that Dana went up to were not that, not gullible locals, those were people we have known for a long time, olde thyme anti-gay radicals. One of them was the central person, the letter-signer, when the rightwing minority tried to rebel against the citizens advisory committee over the sex-ed curriculum back in 2004. Google [retta site:teachthefacts.org] and you will find a lot of mentions here, and she also used to comment here as "Bianca," Google for that, too, and see what you find. While you're at it, Google for "Steina," who appears to be the other person in the video. These are hard-core rightwingers, not somebody you walk up to and harass and it intimidates them.

Trachtenberg also told the audience that she had received death threats at home, real threats, not somebody saying somebody didn't have permission to be somewhere. I'm sorry it comes down to that, one side claiming harassment just because somebody says something to them, and then actually threatening someone's life for sponsoring a bill to prevent discrimination. From the reports I got, it sounds like Duchy made the point loud and clear, too, that this bill is about discrimination, and it is devious to pretend it is about locker-rooms and modesty. She told the crowd that no other jurisdictions have had a problem with bathrooms, which is of course true.

Someone describing the meeting to me said that when Trachtenberg told about death threats, "the room went stone cold quiet." CRW type people don't want to hear about that sort of thing.

A couple of other people spoke about the nondiscrimination bill, it sounds like. It also sounds like the upcounty audience was mostly not friendly to the idea of banning discrimination against transgender people. That's fine, we live in a county that is part city and part country, it has its Blue and its Red areas, and this meeting was up in the Red part. The bulk of the population lives down in the denser areas, of course, and the more liberal, more urban opinions tend to get their way here. I imagine it is sometimes frustrating to live out there in the country and feel that nobody cares about what you think. First of all it was black people, then gay people, and now this, the government is intruding in your life etcetera. There are plenty of places in America where everybody's like that, and the elected officials enact their wishes. I'm glad not to live in one of those places, but there's nothing personal there.

I am told that at the end of the meeting, Duchy Trachtenberg was cornered by a group of people, and the police had to break up the confrontation.

I am sitting here on a beautiful Easter, with a lovely song on the radio about Jesus helping me lay my burden down. Outside my kitchen window all the world is coming back to life. I admit sometimes I don't get it, I don't understand why some people think the most important thing in the world, the thing that drives them to organize and set up web sites and write letters, phone people, would be a law that prevents discrimination against the smallest, most vulnerable, least threatening minority you can think of. Aren't there real problems out there that they could speak out about?