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Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

  • 83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
  • 40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
  • 26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
  • Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
  • Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
  • The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

sophiaserpentia: (Default)

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I just came back from the Dyke March. My clothes had to be peeled off (it was a warm and rather muggy evening) and so i am sitting here naked trying to cool off. Whoo, naked tranny-girl flesh!

Ahem. Anyways. The Dyke March is a living embodiment of the affinity politics i wrote about a while ago. “Dyke,” at least as it manifests here in Boston, is a term of affinity and not of identity. Tonight, a “dyke” was anyone reasonably woman-centered who showed up and participated in this vibrant community. (Except for one guy who was there to pass out Jesus tracts.)

My girlfriend Cowgrrl was with me, and she explained that she had been in Dyke Marches over 20 years ago. Things were, of course, much different back then: then, there was big controversy over whether to invite bisexual women along. She wasn’t even sure when the Dyke March had become trans-friendly; it was after the last time she’d been.

How had things changed so much? We had only to look around to see the answer. These kids! These kids today. Let me tell you. They’re freakin’ awesome, and they have worked out all this stuff that we oldsters are still tripping over. So i am preparing myself for the switch to being one of the “community elders,” which basically means standing back and watching while these amazing young people do things we never dreamed of doing when we were that young.

These kids have a friend who is an Asian-American lesbian who does boy-drag and reads erotic poetry for GenderCrash; they have another friend who’s a lanky gay boy with bleached-blonde hair, who’s dating someone who just came out as a transman; they have another friend who’s dating a boy and a girl at the same time and who wears size 20 but dresses in a bellydance costume to dance on stage with Big Moves; and they have another friend who is a Latina transgirl who had to change schools when she transitioned.

And you know what? When they go to an event, they want all of their friends to be welcome there. They don’t want to see any lousy racism, they don’t want to see any lousy sexism, they don’t want to see any lousy sizeism, they don’t want to see any lousy homophobia, and they don’t want to see any lousy transphobia. It’s even better if things are handicapped-accessible, environmentally friendly, not too corporate, and generally pro-peace.

Before the March started i spoke with Gunner Scott of MassTPC to, you know, say hi, and find out what he knew about the decision to pull Bitch from the artistic programming.

For those who don’t know, Bitch was controversial because of statements like this about the policy of galla-exclusion at MWMF:

[I]t’s not trans people being marginalized. It’s people who were born as men. The festival is for people who suffered a girlhood. That’s all it is. They’re not trying to redefine what women are. … I’m so over it. I think it’s totally the patriarchy and it’s complete ageism. … If my elders want to say for these six days only these kinds of women can come, then I need to respect that. It is so against our nature to respect women for having boundaries. I think that’s exactly what’s happening.

Gunner told me the decision was made at the last minute because of considerable agitation in the community — but none of it had been started or directed by transactivists. MassTPC, he said, specifically stayed out of it. Transfolk had been involved of course; but Gunner didn’t know who started it. The person he’d first heard about it from was a woman-born-woman. At first it was just a call of attention to the incongruence between the Dyke March’s policies and Bitch’s politics. The movement to ask the committee to disinvite Bitch appears to have been basically spontaneous.

Once it started, though, it picked up momentum; MassTPC was going to pull out of the event; so was The Network La Red; probably others as well; it sounds like things became very intense in just a few hours. Finally the committee pulled the invitation to Bitch.

But iiiiiiii know who it was. Not specifically, i mean, but figuratively.

At the Dyke March i saw something i’d never seen before: most of the people there doing volunteer work to support trans rights (we have a bill before the Massachusetts legislature right now) were non-trans.

That’s big, folks. Big. These were kids who were tired of seeing their transgender friends being messed with and having their options limited for no good reason.

And they were the ones behind the withdrawal of the committee’s invitation to Bitch. Not Teh Evul Transfolk.

(Gunner was also pretty sure that my vision of Bitch “leav[ing] here talking about having had a great experience in a community that welcomes and includes gallae” was a pipe dream. I maintain that it would be better if things could go that way. I know. I’m a freakin’ hippie. It’s my nature.)

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