The Silly Season :: Twin Peaks Gazette Message Board

Transgender ordinance backlash

By MEGAN ROLLAND
Sun staff writer

A heated and vocal response to a new Gainesville ordinance that extends rights to transgender individuals has garnered national attention.

Frequently asked questions

Does this ordinance allow a man to enter a women's restroom?

"An employer cannot require an individual whose gender identity is inconsistent with their sex use a unisex bathroom," says Charles L. Hauck, senior assistant city attorney. "That individual would be allowed under the ordinance to use the sex-designated bathroom consistent with their gender identity, regardless of their (biological) sex. A refusal of the employer to allow such individual to utilize their gender-identity-consistent bathroom, by forcing the individual to use a unisex bathroom, would appear to be a violation of the ordinance."

Does this ordinance allow a man to enter a women's dressing room?

"Where the employer (or business such as a fitness center) provides shared facilities for its employees (or customers), which are distinctly private in nature where being seen fully unclothed is unavoidable, such as shower rooms and dressing rooms . . . Denial of access to and use of such facilities on the basis of gender identity would be permitted if the employer provides reasonable access to and use of adequate facilities that are not inconsistent with the employee's gender identity," reads the city's transgender ordinance. Commissioner Craig Lowe, who helped draft the ordinance, says providing alternate accommodations for a transgender customer would be required only if such additions were "readily available" - in other words, not cost-prohibitive.

Discussion of Monday night's City Commission vote appeared on the much-read Drudge Report Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

These days, municipalities voting to include "gender identity" as a group of people protected from discrimination is part of a growing trend, not only in Florida but across the nation.

Last summer, both West Palm Beach and Lake Worth passed protections for transgender people, and according to their city governments, there was no protest during the implementation or problems afterward.

"It wasn't even a blip on the screen here," said Lake Worth Mayor Jeff Clemens, adding that there have been no issues since the law was implemented either. "I think the entire community took it in stride. We believe it's important to treat every person the same no matter what their gender identity."

Minneapolis became the first city to protect its transgender population in 1975, and the civil rights department for the city hasn't documented any problems. Since 1975, 93 cities and counties, 13 states and the District of Columbia have enacted similar laws.

Yet in Gainesville on Monday, public comment on the issue lasted more than two hours, and e-mails are still being sent to those who voted to approve the ordinance: Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan and Commissioners Craig Lowe, Jeanna Mastrodicasa and Jack Donovan.

The ordinance defines gender identity as "an inner sense of being a specific gender, or the expression of a gender identity by verbal statement, appearance, or mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual with or without regard to the individual's designated sex at birth."

That definition broadens the range of application to not only people who have undergone sex-change operations, but also the people in a community who are transitioning from one gender to another or those who simply project themselves as a gender other than what they were born, said Jennifer Sager a private practice psychologist who does specialty work in transgender issues in Gainesville.

"The heart of the definition is not on any type of objective or measurable criteria," said Commissioner Ed Braddy, who was one of three on the commission to oppose the ordinance. "It simply goes on how someone feels, so that is sort of ripe for abuse."

Braddy said that when domestic partnership benefits became available, one of the first people to apply were brothers in a fraternity house as a practical joke. He said that illustrates the need for these ordinances to be as narrowly defined as possible.

Headlines

Clarice Feldman

Some years ago a motocycle cop in a Bush motorcade was unfortunately killed. Time ran this headline:"Bush Motorcade Kills Cop". Yesterday, the same unfortunate thing happened to policewoman in Hillary's motorcade.

Wonder how Time headlined it?

"Officer Killed Escorting Clinton"

Verum Serum caught the bias. Nice work.

This could be fun! After nearly 8 years of Maureen Dowd's Bush-bashing columns and books, she takes on Hillary Clinton in Sunday's NYTimes. I can't remember the last time MD made me laugh but her recounting of the latest Clinton political ad was truly funny. I put the article here because of the commercial itself which exemplifies the political advisors' view of their potential voters' intellect.

NYTimes
March 2, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

A Wake-Up Call for Hillary

By MAUREEN DOWD

SAN ANTONIO

Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.

Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m. Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.

It’s hard to discern the message of the ad. The scariest thing is not the persistently ringing phone but an Andrea Yates-looking mother who’s creeping up on the sleeping babes in the dark. The point can’t be that Hillary is superior to Obama in international crisis management, because she’s done no more of it than he has. She’s only done domestic crisis management, cleaning up after Frisky Bill.

Is the message that Hillary is Ready on Night One? That she won’t have to waste any time if she’s rousted out of bed in the wee hours, because she’s wearing a pantsuit under her pantsuit? (Or is it just, as Wesley Clark said during an appearance with her in Waco on Friday, that Hillary’s “been in the White House when the tough decisions were made. I guess you’ve been at the bedside when that phone rang at 3 a.m.”)

It’s rather Mommie Dearest for the first serious female contender to try to give the kiddies nightmares. How maternal is that? But since her nightmare is losing, she doesn’t mind scaring the pj’s off of little Jimmy and Johnny.

Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue. “Senator Clinton may not be aware, but we already had a red phone moment,” he said at an outdoor rally here, with the crowd of 8,000 booing at the mention of Hillary’s ad. “It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And John McCain picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And George Bush picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer.”

(In fact, there is no red phone in the Oval Office, but maybe Obama will redecorate. He wants to put in a hoops court.)

On “Nightline” last week, Hillary once more wallowed in gender inequities, asserting that it’s harder for her to run than her opponent — a black man with an exotic name that most Americans hadn’t even heard a year ago.

“Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field,” she said, “but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there.”

Is that how she would deal with dictators, by playing the refs and going before the U.N. to demand: “How come you’re not asking Ahmadinejad these questions first?”

Tangled in her own victimhood, she snipped to Cynthia McFadden that Obama had written in his book that “he’s a blank screen and people of widely different views project what they want to believe onto him.” She said voters were projecting their hopes onto that blank screen even though “he just hasn’t been around long enough.”

In the next breath, asked about the women who feel sorry for her, she said: “I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It’s hard. It’s hard being a woman out there.”

So projection is bad with Obama but good with her?

On a conference call Friday with Hillary’s ever-more-hysterical male strategists, Slate’s John Dickerson asked exactly when she had been tested in a foreign policy crisis. After a silence long enough to knit a sweater in, as the Web site The Hotline put it, Mark Penn cited “her work on the Armed Services Committee.”

Hillary’s boys pout that the press should find some dirt on Obama before time runs out. Their once fearsome campaign is now reduced to whining that Obama did not hold any substantive hearings of his Subcommittee on European Affairs. What’s next? Bitterly complaining that he missed a quorum call?

Hillary keeps trying to dismiss Obama’s appeal as emotional, something that can be overcome with enough mental discipline. But behind that ethereal presence he’s a wonky lawyer, just like Hillary. He reads The Times and Philip Roth and talks about the fine points of Medicare Part B in a way W. never could have when he first ran for president. (Or now.)

Hillary’s visceral attacks will not work. And the Republicans’ visceral attacks on the Obamas’ patriotism, and their usual attempt to make the Democrat seem foreign (Hussein, Hussein, Hussein!), may not have the same traction.

The president took the country to war on his gut, exploited our fears and played the patriotism card to advance his political agenda.

This time, Americans may prefer cerebral arguments to visceral ones. What a refreshing change reality would be.