August 11 Multicultural Festival Sheldon Community Center 4:30- 8:30
August 12 Eugene PRIDE 12-8pm, the theme is PRIDE not Prejudice http://www.eugenepride.org/
August 27 Monthly PFLAG Meeting: Picnic at Joy’s Farm 4-7 PM 27146 Louden Lane Junction City, Oregon
September 8-10 Eugene Celebration Booth Parade Sept. 9 9:30
October 9 Diversity Day at Oregon Community Credit Union.
To get to the farm, take Highway 99 to Clear Lake Rd. Turn left on Clear Lake Rd. and go ~5 miles to Alvadore Rd. Turn right on Alvadore Rd. and go ~0.5 miles to Louden Lane. Turn left on Louden and go ~ 0.5 miles to Spring Willow Farm. Turn left into driveway.
Portland, OR.-- Equity Foundation is pleased to offer “Gay Finances in a Straight World,” a financial and estate planning workshop in Eugene, Oregon on Friday, August 11th, 2006. This free event will take place from 11:45 am – 1 pm at the Eugene Public Library, Singer Room, 100 W. 10th, with lunch provided. Doors open at 11:30 am. Learn about safeguarding your finances, ensuring that your relationships and wishes are respected, and making your money work in a way that reflects your concern for other progressive people and our world.
The workshop presenters are Ellen Adler and Laurie McClain, AIF®. Ellen Adler is an attorney with the law firm of Speer Hoyt, P.C. in Eugene, whose practices emphasizes estate planning and trust and estate administration. Laurie McClain is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary®, specializing in financial planning and investments since 1988. She is the founder of Socially Responsive Financial Advisors.
Equity Foundation, a statewide non-profit, community foundation, builds communities that embrace the dignity and worth of all people. Equity Foundation works to promote philanthropy and positive interaction through grants and outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied communities.
Please register by contacting Amy Williams at Equity Foundation by phone, 503-231-5759, or email at amywilliams@equityfoundation.org. Please visit our website at: www.equityfoundation.org.
Beyond the boundaries of the trans population, things are not really any better. The politically active LGB community tends to take the same view as, or to pander to the prejudices of, hetero society, fearful of advocating for the rights of gender-variant people.
Even when they know better than society at large, there is a distancing, if not from all trans people, certainly from those among us that might be seen as ‘embarrassing’. (see last issue).When the first Pride parade marking the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion was inaugurated, queens and transpeople were denied participation. The organizers did not relent until twenty years of parades had marched by.
Witnesses say it was the late Sylvia Rivera, for whom the Sylvia Rivera Law Project has been named, who threw the first bottle. And was followed up by the other queens, many of whom were pre-op transsexuals with little chance of becoming post-op, along with some of their fans and patrons.
The Stonewall Inn was a drag scene, and it was largely the queens that hit the ‘enough’ button and changed gay history. This was conveniently ignored for decades, because it is convenient to ignore disempowered people whose presence may make one’s work of becoming respectable (in the eyes of oppressors) more difficult.
The reaction among the gay and lesbian communities to transgender people in general and to queens and she-males has ranged as widely as that of the hetero community; from acceptance and empathy to discrimination and outright bigotry, sometimes more, sometimes less, and, I feel, the cycle is tied to that of hetero society’s attitude toward all LGBT people.
When the witch-hunting against gays and lesbians heats up, some gays and lesbians seem to be inclined to ditch those who may appear to be a liability. The argument that is offered, usually, is that ‘the bad guys will punish us for having these people with us.’ But sometimes there is more than just this fear at work.
At the time of the first serious backlash against the Gay Liberation Movement, in the Seventies, Janice Raymond, a separatist lesbian theorist, wrote The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. (1979). It’s still in print, and taught in women’s studies programs.
Raymond’s theory, to which she brooks no rebuttals, is that the vast imperialistic patriarchy, not satisfied with the hitherto available forms of rape such as domination, and exploitation, came up with transsexualism (no discussion of female-to-males) as a new way to invade and colonize women’s space. This theory represents MTFs as a kind of penis-of-the-patriarchy in the form of a man whose penis has been cut off, as camouflage.
While Raymond’s view perhaps represents the extreme, even those who may accept MTF transsexuals sometimes try to make distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable born-male gender-variant people on the basis of the presence or absence, or scheduled absence, of a penis. ‘Make the sacrifice or I’m not with you’ is the unspoken message.
Yet many of those thus shut out will never come up with the many thousands of dollars required for transition. And if they would rather not go through the huge stress and expense of gender reassignment surgery, why disqualify them from the LGBT umbrella, under which 3 out of the four initials happily fall because of sexual preference, including gay men and bisexual males?
To be continued next issue.
PFLAG Eugene/Springfield is part of Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbian & Gays (PFLAG), a national non-profit organization with over 200.000 members and supporters and over 500 affiliates in the U.S. This vast grassroots network is cultivated, resourced and serviced by the PFLAG national office, located in Washington, D.C., the national Board of Directors and 14 Regional Directors.
PFLAG promotes the health and well-being of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons, their families and friends through: support, to cope with an adverse society; education, to enlighten an ill-informed public; and advocacy, to end discrimination and to secure equal civil rights. Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays provides opportunity for dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, and acts to create a society that is healthy and respectful of human diversity.