It may be autumn, but it's getting hot in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
That's where a non-discrimination ordinance intended to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people is up for a public vote this coming Tuesday. In the final week, campaigns for and against the proposal are giving it everything they've got ... and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is protection against gender identity bias that is generating the most controversy.
Perhaps because the “T” in GLBT remains the acronym’s least understood category, efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations — as Kalamazoo’s proposed ordinance would do — have highlighted the confusion and in turn, have been met with stiff opposition.
If fact, equating transgendered women with bathroom perverts has become increasingly routine.
Last year, after the city council in Gainesville, Fla., enacted a nearly identical anti-discrimination charter amendment to the proposed ordinance in Kalamazoo, opponents successfully petitioned a public vote — and they kept their message to voters simple.
“Keep men out of women’s bathrooms” became the semi-official opposition mantra. A memorable TV ad featured a young girl stepping off a merry-go-round and walking into a women’s restroom. After the door closed, a bearded man in sunglasses and a baseball cap entered ominously behind her. Then a question is posed: “Is that what you want in Gainesville?”
Voters in Gainesville ultimately backed the anti-discrimination charter amendment this past March.
Over the last several weeks in Kalamazoo, campaign mailings and door hangers have revived the same molesters-will-prey-on-women-in-the-bathroom approach from Gainesville – even utilizing some of the identical graphics.
Mara Kiesling, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Transgender Equality, is well aware of the tactic.
“I understand there are some people who are uncomfortable. But you know what? They’re just uncomfortable,” she told Michigan Messenger. “That’s what civil rights are about — minorities who are not allowed to have the same lives as the majority because of our cultural biases. Most of these people are still uncomfortable with straight men being in a restroom with gay men. And there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable about being in restroom with people of different races,” she said.
... Keisling also noted that anti-discrimination protections for transgendered men and women have been on the books in Minneapolis since the 1970s — without a single bathroom incident.
“It’s not that it doesn’t happen much, it doesn’t happen,” she said.
One Kalamazoo is leading the equality campaign for the 77,000 city residents through a series of TV ads, last Sunday's march, and old-fashioned canvassing and phone-banking. If it succeeds, Kalamazoo will join more than twenty other cities across Michigan that have enacted a comprehensive non-discrimination ordinance, including Detroit, Ann Arbor, Lansing, East Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Ferndale. Look here to find more details on the Kalamazoo proposal.
Please consider donating to One Kalamazoo in this crucial final week, or volunteering, or spreading the word. And my god, if you are a Kalamazoo voter, vote yes on Ordinance 1856!
Anna:
We were considering posting a longer comment but what We would post would likely become "unpublished". The general concept was that lesbian were conned into associating themselves with those other.
/Nathan
Posted by: Nathan | November 02, 2009 at 11:59 AM