I’m just askin’…
I’m still askin’…
That’s how they marginalize us. They don’t go into the local department store, the shoe store, or the coffee shop and show regular folk doing regular jobs. EQMD drags their plantation mentality selves in front of the lemmings and say “Lookie, our little trannies provide excellent customer service.”
EQMD mentions Sugar as a “novelty shop” and the owner calls it a “retail store,” but their website clearly identifies it as a “sex toy shop.” I guess “out and proud” doesn’t apply when you’re asking clergy in Annapolis to celebrate how loving and committed you are.
They paint us into a caricature of what many churchgoers might consider a “sleazy” job with obvious sexual overtones. It’s bad enough that Jerry Springer does that. But this is coming from a so called “civil rights organization.”
As I recall it was the same sex toy shop where Equality Maryland held a fund raising event last week. I have a problem with that. What a lovely way to tell the Christian community whom they want to vote for marriage equality that they are just normal “loving and committed couples.” It’s just dumb EQMD.
Don’t drag us down to your level.
And I won’t stop tellin’….
Theresa Sparks was a co-owner of Good Vibrations in SF, and she has gone on to have a notable career in politics.
Being a “professional” and being knowledgeable enough to be a responsible decision maker are all but unrelated. The most naive are often the most well-to-do.
The biggest problem is that the people allowed to represent our community are nearly always newly minted, with no understanding of our history or our oppressors.
ENDA won’t solve the problem. ENDA ids a band-aid on a major amputation.
Thinking other wise is liberal blindness to working class reality, a minor reform here or there doesn’t mean much of anything when the erosion of workers rights started way back in the 1940s with passage of the Taft Hartley Act.
It hasn’t been helped by 40 years of corporate shills running the government by and for the interests of the corporations.
Obama is a total waste of energy, a more articulate Bush II.
There are only a handful of politicians who might make a difference and we lost one, Alan Grayson in the last election.
As long as they have a hundred candidates for a single opening anti-discrimination laws won’t mean a thing.
Or do you think they actually ended discrimination against people based on race, religion and national origin?
Over half the states have employment at will laws, which mean they can fire or hire anyone they want. They have laws that effectively prevent unionization.
The only way of changing any of this will be ending the corprotocracy that rules this nation.
Any accountant (CPA), or, a doctor (MD), or, a lawyer (JD), who is trans and works in a business that sells “sex toys” is still a professional. It could be said that a prostitute that works in the same store is also a professional. The real problem is that Equality Maryland doesn’t know better, and the followers of such leadership would drink sand if their leaders so directed. This is more about the professionalism of the leadership that uses such arguments as persuasive of their cause on those that do not know better of it, and less about what they are actually trying to accomplish with such slight of hand. For a fact, Equality Maryland does not know how to represent the transsexual community in obtaining civil and human rights… and they will never get there. The only means of accomplishing that will be for a critical mass of transsexuals to through off the verbal shackles of decades of control by Equality Maryland and lead themselves to their future of equality. Until that time… they are doomed to repeat the losses of the past.
Welcome to the reality of post-globalization corporate America. Where people with advanced degrees work as baristas, and engineers with management experience are on the sales floor of Frys.
I worked in a big box store with concrete floors with co-workers with degrees shilling products that were complete crap.
Part time, no benefits, irregular hours that made it impossible to hold a second job and substandard pay that was below a minimal living wage.
The real rate of unemployment is around 20%, for recent college graduates according to Paul Krugman yesterday the rate is 24%.
Among black men it is around 50%, older workers over 30%.
Factor in underemployment and the unemployment/underemployment rate is around 30%.
What is happen to TS/TG people will not be fixed by some minimal sort of reform because the problem is universal and systemic.
Instead of wanking with reform and thinking that it is only the problem of TS/TG people not being included in some sort of protected law, which really only protects the very privileged who can afford a legal team to defend those rights against a corporate legal team it might be better to look at this as a workers issue.
Socialist Workers Party or the AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Anti-Globalization movement, anarchism, The IWW and revolution might offer actual change.
In the mean time, yeah working in a sex shop is a professional job in the world where Obama and Bush are pretty much interchangeable tools of the corporate power elite.