Remaining obstacles for transgender people
Brightfeather discusses her interactions with Equality North Carolina when she first moved to the state in 1999. Brightfeather explains how Equality NC did not have any transgender people on its board, despite the fact that it had recently adopted transgender inclusive policy for the organization. Brightfeather offers this recollection as further evidence of tensions within the GLBT community. From there, Brightfeather expands her discussion to focus on the many obstacles transgender people continue to face in their struggle for equality.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Angela Brightfeather, January 24, 2002. Interview K-0841. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
The second [group of people] that I met was Equality North Carolina.
Having so much experience with the gays and the lesbians in
Syracuse—
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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You knew where to go—
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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I knew exactly where to go. I went right to ENC where the other supposed
activists are in the Gay and Lesbian Community and, I said,
"What are you doing? Can I help? Anything
I can do?" Of course, my reputation had proceeded me as an in
your face type of activist if it need be and it was pretty scary for
them and—
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Yeah, because a lot of the folks there are not very in your face.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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Nope, no and I understand that—
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Oh, yeah—
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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There is a need for everybody.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Well, I have had the same problem as a gay activist by being
"in your face".
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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There is a need for everybody to do whatever they can. The fight is on
all fronts; it is not just in one on one relationships, and meeting
people and convincing them. So, I am one of those people who right from
the beginning of time in my community, I was a shaker and a mover. And,
I still am, and I told them, I said, "Well, how many board
members do you have?" The said, "Sixteen"
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Wow, that's a big board!
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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I said, "Wow, that's great, how many transgender people do you
got on it?" Well, first of all, I asked them, "Do you
have a transgender inclusive policy or mission statement?" And
they said, "Yes, we just passed it four months ago. And I said,
"Great!"
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Was this Ian Palmquist that you were speaking to?
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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It was Ian and the person before Jo Wyrick, and I forgot here name now.
But, I said, "How many board members?" They said,
"Sixteen" and I said, "How many TG
[transgender] people are board members?" And they said,
"Well, nobody, we do not know anybody and we have not found
anybody." And I said, "Well, now you have."
Just like that, I said, "Well, now you have. You've got no excuse now. I'm here, I came from New York. I'm
here, I'm queer and I am not getting out of your face, you've got to
have a board member. If you've got the 'T' in the mission statement then
you've got to have a board member that is 'T'. You have got to tell
these people and allow them to learn and understand. As a matter of
fact," I said, "You should have 4 'T' people on the
board. Because if it is a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender
community, and I would give up one of the seats on the board for the
transgender people for an intersex person. And gladly do so."
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Okay, I as going to ask you that, I was on the net today and I was like,
what in the world is intersex? That is a new group.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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It is not a new group. It is people that. It's evidence that sexually
there is something, something equal to gender. There is a third sex.
There is a sex that is ambiguous at times, that nobody knows what it is
because it has XXX or XXY chromosomes instead of XX or XY. It has an
extra chromosome in there on one side or the other. And there are
millions of people in America like that.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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That is a true hermaphrodite?
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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Yeah, well, there's true hermaphrodites and then there's non-true
hermaphrodites indisputably cases born where—
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Of both genders—
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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No, of both sexes. Indisputable cases of where males are born with
totally, totally hardly any—almost inverted penises and
mistaken for as females at first sight until they
look closer and then they find the penis. And then there are women,
girls that are born with enlarged clitorises that look actually 2-3
inches long and can grow that long that look like they would be male,
but may not have a scrotum. Or their testicles are so high that they are
up inside the body and they grew in a deformed place. So these things
happen naturally, these things occur and the solution for that after
Christine Jorgenson was that the parents made up their mind about what
they were going to do. They said, "Does it look more like a boy
or more like a girl?" Do they have more of one than they have
of the other? Let's try that. Which lead to people like Dr. Money and
the John Hopkins study that gave 27 children sex re-assignment surgeries
within the first couple months of their birth, that had ambiguous
genitalia, and in all of those cases, all of those cases, they were male
to female. They were males with ambiguous genitalia that were
transitioned into females and guaranteed by the psychiatrists by their
parents, "Don't worry about it, it's the environment and the
way you bring up your child that determines the gender." And
yet all 27 cases, every single one of them turned back into living as a
male before they got to their thirtieth birthday. Two of them committed
suicide. None of them could conceive children. They were all literally
castrated. Which we call, in the transgender community a perfect example
that happens in one out of 20 births of ambiguous genitalia. One out of
every twenty. I am sorry, one out of every 2,000 children.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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I was like, whoa!
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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No, I am sorry, one out of every 2,000 are born with ambiguous genitalia
and we call that infant mutilation. Happening today.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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So, the solution with the transgender community would be just to let it
go, let that individual develop as they will. Don' reassign—
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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Let them make up their own mind, there is plenty of time.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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Which makes plenty of sense.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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But they don't do that.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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A young, twenty year old parent would think, "Oh, we have to
make this decision?"
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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Well, they are forced into it by the doctors—the doctors want
to give more care, they have to go in deeper this and that, it's too
much trouble.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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That is truly insane.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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Yeah, but this is what is happening every single day in America, see.
So, when you hear about things like that, it's not over. When you hear
about about the Peter Oiler case it is far fro over. When you hear about
my friend getting killed in Jacksonville, shot in the back of the head
when she gets out of her car, it's not over. There is still so much to
do than just educate gays and lesbians, to accept transgender people.
The gays and lesbians have got to do a little bit of the work
themselves, and it is really disheartening to see groups like the Human
Rights Campaign keeping us out of legislation like ENDA. It is critical
for us to be about us to be able to come out. It is critical for us to
be able to live our lives and be able to keep our
jobs, but they feel as though, the presence of transgender people at the
national level in legislation is going to hinder gay and lesbian
legislation and their freedom. And any amount of promises that they make
to come back and get the transgender people in the past have never been
lived up to. When legislation has been passed for gays and lesbians and
their freedoms, they haven't taken the time to come back, they have
always turned around and said, "Get it yourself." You
know, which is okay, but hey, you could have said the same thing to the
blacks during the civil war, "Hey don't let them treat you like
slaves, do something about it." Well, there is a few that tried
to do something about it, and look what happened to them.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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They were killed.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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They were murdered. They were slaughtered by the thousands. Well, that
is exactly what would happen to transgender people too. If they tried
that, they would be losing their jobs by the thousands. Families would
be starving by the thousands, you know. There are all kinds of
ramifications.
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
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It is easy to say, but much harder to put into practice.
- ANGELA BRIGHTFEATHER:
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They need help, they need help to come out. It can't be just one on one
and people like Angela Brightfeather starting groups. It has to be gays
and lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, intersex people, people of
color, people of other national origins and naturalized citizens and
citizens by earning it and by immigration. They have to join together,
and they have to understand that the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA] is an important thing to all of those
groups, not just one of them, and solving the problem for those groups
isn't really solving the problem at all because anybody, anybody that
has two common smarts that there is enough gay men out there that have a
feminine image of themselves and act femininely and transgress gender
norms and there is enough butch lesbians out there that transgress the
gender norms for women that after the ENDA legislation passes, nobody
may be able to fire anybody that is gay or lesbian, but they sure of
heck can fire the gays, the gay males that act feminine and the lesbian
women that act masculine. And they can use that as an excuse, and how
many of them exist in the gay and lesbian community? Certainly,
certainly maybe even a majority of the lesbian community.