Bridging the LG–BTQIA Divide: Gender, Sexuality, Intersectionality, and the Politics of the Movement

- Okay, and we're live. Hello and welcome to the Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Talk Policy. I'm David Grosso, MPP 2009 and a leader in an emerging shared interest group for HKS LGBT alumni. I'll be your moderator for today's topic. Let's get right into it. We have our panelists, you can see them right here. We have Dana, Andrea and Mayor. How are you all doing?

- [Dana] Great.

- So one of the things that we try to do with these talks is we try to talk about what's happening in the world. And then unless you've been hiding under a rock, you probably notice there's a lot of LGBT issues in the news. Let's talk about them, whether it's the Don't Say Gay Law in Florida, whether it's Lia Thomas, the famous trans swimmer who swims for UPenn, or, you know, Transgender Youth Healthcare in Texas. So Dana, we're getting a kickoff with you. What do you think about the current state of the culture war and to your insights since you know, you've been around the block and you can tell us all about what's going on right now.

- Okay, thank you, David. I think I'm the only one here who was at Stonewall in 1969. So that gives me a bit of a longer term perspective. It was at that night where I recognized that my people were out there amongst the crowd. Not many of them, but were some of them. And that was the beginning of the National Movement. The National Trans Movement didn't really begin in force until the mid 90s, after the Aids crisis started to be corrected with the availability of drugs for that. In 2015, I think 2015 is the sort of dividing line here with the passage, with marriage equality becoming the law of the land with the Obergefell decision, the attention of the Christian fundamentalists, the right-wing reactionary right. Started to turn to trans people because they always go for the low hanging fruit, whatever the weak group is considered to be at the time. The problem for us has been that they've gotten much better at this over the past few years, they've been more targeted. You mentioned Lia Thomas, so this is a big national story. It's hard to avoid it. We've had trans athletes before, we've had systems in place protocols in order to deal with this, it was never an issue now it's become an issue because they've been able to make it one. Trans kids, well, you know, there used to be back in the 70s, I remember the Briggs Act in California, they were going after gay kids and gay teachers who might be "recruiting gay kids." Today, we get accused of grooming kids, right? So some things have changed, but some things haven't changed at all. The fact that the trans community is now so visible, something we worked very hard for over the past 20 years makes us more of a target. And people are more aware. Trans people, mostly transsexual people, which is for whom the movement was developed. People who need medical care, who want medical care, who need legal access to change their ID in order to fit into society. Transsexual people make up only 0.6% of the population. But now with the impact of queer theory on, on America's youth and young adults, we have in the latest poll that I saw, 21% of Gen Z, identifying as trans queer and non-binary genderqueer, whatever that is. So you suddenly, you have more visibility and that makes it easier for the right-wing people who are sitting around their desks the way we sit around our desk, planning out, our agenda to figure out their targeting. And they've been very effective. They've been very effective because they're touching on issues that get down to our basic humanity, which we generally ignore. Again, if you're talking about three to 4% people are gay, you know, the facts, the biology, that stuff doesn't really matter. You can deal with those numbers. You're talking about less than 1% trans, you can also deal with that. But when you're dealing at 21%, suddenly people are going, what's going on here? My kids in a class, and one third of her classmates identify as queer, this is something with which I have to deal. My main concern and I know this was some of the materials that went out for this is that we can't talk across the divide, across the chasm between right and left very well anymore, but we don't talk amongst ourselves either about what's going on, how best to understand who we are, what the community is. We used to, we created back in the OTTs the trans umbrella, to bring what we call transgender or cross dressing people in, and then Drag Queens and Drag Kings and all the rest, because these are people who wanted to be a part of it. We needed numbers for political power. That umbrella has now expanded so much, it's in complete taters because the terms, the language has been complete morphed into something else. And people who thought they understood before now don't understand people who were on the periphery and really didn't care much or suddenly being alerted to this because they hear it from their kids or their kids friends, and we need to do a better job of convening and talking about these issues. Since the--

- So can I bring Andrea into the conversation 'cause Andrea, when we had our pre-con conversation, you really talked about, you know, the problem with the divide in our community and I just lost you on camera there. Do you think that, you know, the role of the younger generation and as we all know as Dana alluded to, they're more likely to identify themselves as part of a community. And in fact, it's somewhat trendy to identify as queer, especially among Gen Z women, is this good or bad for the movement, Andrea?

- Well, I think it depends on how you define what movement is and what it's about. I don't know that it's good or bad for the movement for Gen Z folk to want to identify as queer. I actually think that it is a really positive outcome of movement. We're really talking about the liberation of one's sexual identity, one's gender identity and whether or not we as a society as a species, even beyond just the parameters of society are accepting of our evolution. And so societally, I mean, we can continue to strive for acceptance, inclusion and ultimately equality. And I think that part of that as Dana was saying, I mean, our movement is vast. And it has all sorts of contours to it. It is never linear. It is never we started on this date and we're gonna end on this date. There are a whole series like any other civil and human rights movement, a whole series of chapters and episodes and incidents that will mark in milestones, that will mark movement along the way. I have worked for several LGBT organizations and have been involved in our liberation movement for over, for a long time. Perhaps not since 1969, I was around in 1969, but I was a little kid, but nonetheless, I consider myself someone a silence equals death kid. I came out in the 80s. I came out in college and for me, that clarion call in the face of the HIV/AIDS crises, you know, silence equals death. It was to me, a clarion call, if we're not visible, if we're not being who we are and claiming our space, then there is no chance for equality or any of these other higher values that we would want to achieve. So my coming out was part of movement and that it was a clarion call as I say to be who we are, to be present, and to be visible, not necessarily just for my immediate benefit, but for the benefit of other young people that would come 10, 20 now, 30, 40 years later. So in my estimate, I don't think that one can say whether it's good or bad for movement, it is movement in and of itself. So I celebrate that there are more young people that feel like, okay, I wanna be who I am. I want to experience my authentic self that I want other people to receive that with respect and dignity, and you don't have to love me. You don't have to fall out about it, but that is a basic tenement of a civil society is just dignity and respect, and that's all that I think that many of these young people, as the elders have experienced, are working to experience have worked for. So to me, it's a reward of movement. It is the point of movement, good, bad, and different doesn't matter, to me that is the point of movement to support people's ability to be their true, authentic, and full selves.

- Thank you for that, Andrea. And we'd like to mention Andrea, of course, as a commissioner was for a very long time in San Francisco or San Francisco City politics, and we'll be returning with many more political questions for you, Andrea. I'd like to move on to Mayor who's a classmate of mine actually, was at the Kennedy School at the same time I was. So Mayor, as you know, the pronoun project, you probably saw the article in the "New York Times," but the Kennedy School on the map and gender fluidity is now mainstream. Can you briefly touch on your journey and weigh in on whether pronouns and gender labeling are productive for the movement?

- Sure, yeah. So I'm gonna largely defer to Dana and Andrea in this conversation who have a lot more knowledge and experience in these policy issues than I do, but I can definitely talk about my own personal experience. So I think in terms of is it good for the movement? I think Andrea said it really well, which is that respect and dignity are the outcomes of movement. And if for respect and dignity for true self. And if someone's true self is a different pronoun then they were assigned at birth, then yes, that is positive for movement, it is positive for dignity and respect. I did change my first name since I was in the Kennedy School to a more androgynous name, which is my current one. And you can find my old one if you Google it. And living in the city I do in Seattle and also having intersectional privileges of being a white person and class privileges, it was fairly mundane for me to change my name. I wasn't afraid that anyone would think differently or it would have a negative effect on my life, I just had some reflection, it was conversations with friends and then made the announcement if and when appropriate. And yeah, so I guess I feel like I have benefited from a lot of the movement work and also that my experience is an expression of inequity within the movement that I had an easier experience because of the privileges that were result of ongoing inequities in society, that it should be this easy for anyone who wants to change their gender expression or identity. So, yeah, thanks.

- Well, I think you picked a really easy name to remember Mer. The second I found out, I never forgot it. So it's very close to your original name. So let's go back to Dana. So Dana, we have an audience question that's a little spicy. So we wanna know is the queering of gender, a threat to the political achievements of gay men and women? So there's a big, hot button issue. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about, you know, how these hit at the issues at the core of our own identity.

- Well, that touches on many things. And some of the other questions that I saw that are out there are really very profound and they just convinced me that all the more reason we need to get together and talk about these things. I do wanna start by saying that I have friends who are above younger millennials, some geriatric millennials who tell me, Dana, you don't wanna be the grandma shouting to the kids, get off my lawn. And those of you are old enough to remember "Dennis the Menace." They remember that, you know, that was one of the key lines there. On the other hand, I think everybody on this panel has some wisdom from experience and can offer something there. Now I worked for gay rights for the last 25 years as well. I think most trans people have probably spent more time working on gay rights issues than on trans rights issues, because for a long time, they were the focus of the movement. And even though many of us got upset about that, emotionally, we understood that there are far more gay people than there are trans people. The money is mostly gay money. It's a reality that we didn't wanna really embrace, but it's the reality. So what are you gonna do about it? You can just throw a tantrum, but you'll go nowhere. And I have many gay and lesbian friends from those days who are telling me now they feel erased by the queering of gender or the queering of sexuality. One of the interesting things is that historically, as I mentioned earlier, we were transsexual people back going to Christine Jorgensen in 1952, but it even in Europe, in the 1920s and stuff, we were called transsexual. People didn't have a problem with the transsexual, but just the way the gay community changed homosexual to gay getting rid of the sex, we did the same thing too 'cause whenever we talked about this, people were imagining sexual relationships. So we had to change that. Now with queer theory, everything's focused on gender. Everybody has a gender, there are 70 plus genders, everyone is equally valid and that not only erases transsexual people because we get lost in this flood of gender, but it also erases gay people, 'cause if sex doesn't exist, then there's some pretty prominent trans activists who believe sex itself does not exist biologically, then you can't be homosexual. Because if you can't define yourself as a man or as a woman, you can't have a relationship with another man or a woman or male female more to the point with biology. So I have some friends, mostly in their 50s or 60s who are really getting nervous about this and they feel number one that as they age and this happens normally, you know, you're moving out of positions of power. The kids are coming in. So you're being marginalized, but their achievements are not being recognized. I mean we have gay rights today in this country because of the work of the last 60 years, going back to Frank Kameny and Daughters of Bilitis and such. Now Andrea's been doing this for 40 years. I mean, without her work, we wouldn't be where we are, but we got the boss stock decision, which basically puts gay and trans people into the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of the hard work of all these folks who now feel these kids are out there and making so much noise that they're distracting from their existence and their efforts and their achievements. And they don't like it. Now some of that as has been said here, this is the movement. There's good, there's bad, there's indifferent. We have to tolerate it. We have to understand our positions in it. But you know, they've got a point also. And that's the problem with many of these things. It's not just us versus them. It's not just good versus evil. There are issues that really do have some substance beneath them with which we must engage if we're going to win in the most that we can. Now this is a Kennedy School thing. And as I said, when we were discussing last week, my best educational experience was at the Kennedy School. My favorite professors were Linda Kaboolian and Marty Linsky. One thing I wanna mention here, professor Linsky made a very strong point, the leadership. His definition of leadership was disappointing your friends at a pace they can absorb. That implies several things, that implies disappointing your friends. And then you have to make sure you do it at a pace they can absorb, so they don't just basically cut the limb off and you go flying off into space. It's not an easy thing to manage. That goes back to what Marni Frank taught me a long time ago. He said, you know, "Progressivism is great, "but if you're not pragmatic about it, "you're not gonna get it." This is a big country. It's not just about us. You know, progressives make up 8% of the population. We can't just say we want this, we want respect and we want dignity, therefore give it to us. We have to persuade people to do that because they have positions too. However, apparent some of them may beat to us. We can't function in a society if we don't deal with it and engage with it. So yeah, at a pace one can absorb and thank you professor. That was one of the most important things I've ever learned.

- So Andrea, this is very familiar to you. I was about to go to you because you've had some issues with other progressives in politics, right? And we're talking about infighting with the, you know, within the movement. So how do you deal with that? There's a lot of nuance in these types of conversations. So how do we approach this in a way that is inclusive and doesn't review you such horrific divides and whatnot.

- I'm glad that Dana had mentioned Marty and Linda, they're dear hearts to us. And there, I wanted to, in the answer to that, go back to something Dana said that you Marty had expressed, but Marty was also talking about as part of that, you know, that very wise adage was it's also about, leadership is also about really working to manage people's loss, their sense of loss. There are really win-win situations. And in fact, I recall him having said once, "If someone says, "this is gonna be a win-win situation, "head for the hills." Run for the hills because it's not likely to turn out that way. I don't see our movement so much as about winning as just really claiming, we all have a right to respect and dignity and safety, just simply because we exist, right? So that sounds so base, but simply because we exist, however, is enough of a threat to someone and understanding why is it threatening? What is so threatening about the idea of two people of the same sex or gender married, we went through that you know, with marriage equality. You know, that is the law of the land. I don't think that in 1969, anyone could have projected or have seen that far ahead that we would have marriage equality, same sex marriage, civil marriage equality as a law of the land but here we are. But it's also about those issues are often really about loss. It's the threat of losing something. And I think that the right has perfected the manipulation of grievance or a sense of grievance, if not manipulating, it's manufacturing and fomenting grievance, a fear of loss. If my child is in a classroom with a youngster who identifies as a transgender kid at age 10, it's not so much about what that's all about, about what that kid is experiencing, it's about what threat does that pose to my kids' development or my kids' safety or my kids' ideas or my ideas that I am working to engender within my child or my young person. So this issue of threat and managing, or at least understanding what the ideas of loss are in any kind of movement, even internally, right. Coming back most directly to your question, David is really where I think is very important. I think again, stepping back, being on that balcony and really looking in what are the real issues here in terms of what people feel threatened by, and why are they feeling threatened? Is that threat real? You know, is it real? Is the threat real? If as Dana said earlier, what's 0.6% of the population identifies as transgender, is that really a threat? And what's the threat? What's the actual material threat? So I think that the threat is really more of an existential one than material. So even before talking about the issues that may have historically, you know, been at issue or at odds within movement, within progressive movement, I think it's not so much about... I think it's how we are learning to work through those issues, and we have to always understand our history, everything has context. This is not the first time, and it will not likely be the last time that we will be facing a torrent of legislative activity and movement to again, restrict and criminalize. We're really working against the criminalization of what being LGBTQ or even as women, which I think is, is related around our reproductive rights and just our status in society. So there to me is a real link between our movements, always has been and always will be. But at this particular time, I think that that's how I respond to your question. It may not be direct, but I think that to me, that's an important point. We're really talking about fomenting fear, but the fear is based on some idea of loss, right? And understanding what is that? Doesn't mean that it's my job to rectify or manage your loss, but I think in as a leader, at least trying to understand and work through that and confront that in the most practical and best way possible.

- Thank you, Andrea. That was wonderful. So Mer, you've worked a lot in the digital sphere. One of the things that I find a little peculiar, right, is we talk a lot about what happens in the classroom, right? But in the end, everyone's on these all day and especially young people are on TikTok and whatnot. So you've done a lot of work in that space. So how is the digital universe moving the ball forward, especially when it comes to queer issues?

- Yeah, so again, I'd love to hear also from Dana and Andrea is if they've had experiences in this area, but I think there's multiple, there's most positive and negative effects of the digital space. I would say positively there's space to gather either anonymously or with one's true identity, with others of similar or supportive identities, regardless of which one can do that in physical space. And that could mean connecting with someone that one will brome in physical space, or it could just mean seeing someone posting something that's has a positive reflection of one's identity. Tumblr was a big space for that earlier on now it's less popular. And then also I can see. Yeah, I feel like, and also, I feel like when the internet first came up, there was a lot, it was about a hookup. So that was you were gonna meet someone online and then be offline. So there's that, which is great. On the negative side, there's cyber bullying. So there's threats which may be a child to themselves has some inaccurate views, might not feel like they could say it to someone's face, but they could, and again, unfortunately, could even be anonymously say something really cruel or threatening to someone who has come out, who has been outed, who has been identified. So yeah, so both positive meaning nurturing and negative meaning harmful effects of digital space. And that, that has gone back since the internet has been coming broadly accessible.

- [Dana] Yeah, if I may--

- So let's hop back. Yeah, I'm coming back to you, Dana. So how is it different than your world? Tell us about the difference?

- So you want some personal stories here. I realized I had a name for who I was in 1966 when I was 14 and Hopkins started performing surgeries. It was on the "Cover of Time Newsweek." Everybody was just talking about this. So I finally had a name. So being a smart little obnoxious kid as I was, I would go to my local university libraries and look up this stuff. And I would go into the archives of psychiatry and psychology and human sexuality. And very time I went into those and I was looking for something that had the word transsexual in it, which was the term of choice back in those days, I found the papers were usually ripped out. Somebody got there before me, ripped it out to keep it but more importantly, I learned this from I'm talking to people over the decades. They did that because they were so much ashamed of who they were, they didn't want somebody who wasn't trans to come and see those articles. And then think about that. And somehow that would be a threat because this is what I mean, Andrea said it beautifully about the sense of loss. You go back to Larry Craig with his wide stance in the union station bathrooms. This is a U.S Senator, terribly homophobic. Why was he homophobic? Because he was gay and he didn't want people to know about it because it would ruin his stature in his community. That's a real thing. I mean, if that's your community and you know, everybody's gonna hate you. We've met many people who would come to us and say, you know, I'm really with you, but I can't say anything because my church will kick me out, my spouse will kick me out, what have you, even the guy who ran the Prop 8 debate for the Prop 8 court hearings for the other side, flipped in public, and we realized, okay, yeah, there you go. We know many people like that. So in my day it was a real effort to find literature on this to understand, then the internet comes along and suddenly it's at your fingertips and all these, kids 20 years now, or even the really smart ones who were on the internet back before it was really a retail phenomenon would go online and find stuff. I think in the early days, most of it was pretty accurate because it was people just desperate to find whatever science was out there as time has gone on there's been more nonsense. And Mer makes very well, there's good stuff and there's bad stuff. I think on balance, it's good because you should be able to understand your parents probably don't have a clue, so you can't ask them. Well, where do we all learn about sex? We learn about sex from our classmates. What did they know? You would hope that the classmate would know something that would be accurate, but you can't count on that. Now you can go online and you can pull stuff from everywhere and you can like sort of crowdsource your knowledge. You might come to a pretty reasonable conclusion, but as we discovered during COVID, you know, the problem is that sometimes there are fads. There are people influencing others. There's been an epidemic of Tourette Syndrome coming out of the internet and stuff and in young women, this is not a good thing, but it became sort of cool from YouTubers who were trying to push this. The other thing that, and Andrea mentioned, which is also a critical term was existential. All right, this really is existential for many people, it's an existential crisis because they don't really understand themselves or they're afraid of themselves, they're afraid their communities are gonna disappear. This is what powers the right-wing of the Republican party now, it's why they're all in love with Putin and the Russian empire. It's all part of that, we need to get back to the traditional system, and every one of us on this panel threatens that traditional system. That's the existential crisis, but you can't just go, well, that makes you a bigot and I'm not gonna talk to you anymore. You can't cancel that out, you have to find a way to engage with it. And I think somebody like Andrea is really good at that. I know from hearing about her work as the Commissioner for 40 years. Yeah, that's 20 years as a Commissioner, but 40 years in the movement that she's really good at that. And this is what they teach you at HKS is that, you know, you gotta go on the balcony and look down and get the temperature, gauge that, maybe lower it a little bit. There's a time to raise it. You know, all of these things, but it's not easy. Being a leader is really, really difficult. And my sense is, and I think the reason we're doing this today is that the leadership of the LGBT Community at large, not even talking about the queer community has become so diffused, so grassroots that you really don't know where to look. You don't know where you're going. That has its advantages. BLM was a very non-hierarchical movement that seems to have worked for it. I don't think it's really working for our community at this point, 'cause it's alienating as the other question meant, questioner asked it's alienating, gay and lesbian achievement. It's now alienating trans people who are biologically trans from trans people who are not, who are in it for social political reasons. It's complicated and if we don't talk about it, we're not gonna work it out. And we're just gonna be ending up from working from a much weaker stance against our real enemies over on the other side.

- So Andrea you're in San Francisco politics. So San Francisco was historically the refuge to people who faced as existential threats in places they were from. Is it still alive today? Is San Francisco still a refuge? Do we still need that? Is there a role for that city to play in our culture?

- Absolutely, always, but it's not just about San Francisco. San Francisco certainly, yeah, has historically in the latter part of the 20th century, been a developed as a focal point and of queerness of gay empowerment of gay liberation. So we have the East Coast and then the burgeoning West Coast with San Francisco and certainly West Hollywood or just really Los Angeles, right. Because the entertainment industry primarily. But it beacons me though to go to Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk, a wise proverb of Harvey's was this, "It's not about what's just happening here in the Castro, "it's more important about what's happening, "our movement and how it is reaching "that young person in Altoona, Pennsylvania." While certainly I think San Francisco remains a very vital, important, and certainly a very politically empowered part of movement or a community, right. I am more fascinated about where the movement really is. Not everybody can live in San Francisco, honey, okay.

- I know.

- There's less than a million people. Yeah, there are less than a million people that actually reside in San Francisco, in fact there's less than 890,000 people that reside in San Francisco and maybe a little less than that. It happens that I was also the co-chair of our census in the last two cycles. So I know a little something about the demographic of San Francisco, but it's powerful for a number of reasons, historical it's the way that the community has organized for political empowerment and certainly, you know, in Harvey Milk's time. And even before Harvey Milk's time, in fact, the first person to run for office was transgender person way before or Harvey ever arrived. But I'm more interested about what's happening in the burbs outside of our urban centers. I think that that has a little bit of something to do Dana with the sort of diffusion, or a sense of a diffusion of movement or what should be a more unified community of LGBTQ people. I think that it's the reality that more of us or in outside of these urban centers, raising families, living in suburban areas, rural areas, and my concern for our movement is definitely making sure that we are reaching out and really following the lead of folks that live outside of these celebrated urban gay enclaves as in the San Francisco or the Castro most specifically, or Los Angeles, maybe West Hollywood, most specifically, or in New York village or what have you, or in Houston, these are important centers, but our lives are mostly taking place outside of those centers. We're like everyone else. We're trying to raise families, making sure our kids are safe and healthy. We're working nine to five or wherever, we're working blue collar jobs. Many of us are under the poverty mind. These are real issues that certainly in our urban centers or those kinds of enclaves, I think work to address. But often we can be very limited. We are very much in a bubble. And I, you know, that's my concern. So San Francisco vital, hell yeah, we'll always be vital. You know us, we have to be the center of the universe. We will always work to be the center of the universe, but we are not the center of the universe. And I think that even in these digital period where we are, I just wanna make one other comment in terms of movement, information moves so much differently, right? I was Dana as well. I would go to the library, right. I go to the university or the public library and you go back in the stacks and look, and you're pretend you're looking for something else. And I always found my way to where I wanted to be. But think about that. Just how sort of cautious and underground one... And just, you know, it's like, you're a spy, you know, having to do this sort of work just to connect to find out about yourself. And it's not that that's not necessarily where we are, but there are still people that are isolated, that do face code discrimination and anxiety around them. That may not be part of San Francisco or Los Angeles, but are out in Bakersfield, are out in the Central valley that are not necessarily, you know, enjoy cocktails after work in the Castro. I'm more interested in what their experiences are and how to uplift and champion what their needs are.

- Well, that's great. Mer, I'll give you 30 seconds to respond to that right before we go into questions. What do you have to say to your elders here, Mer?

- Learning. I'm learning like all the rest of you and I'm looking forward to hearing the Q and A.

- Well, now we're gonna go to questions. So if you'd like to ask a question, you can address any of our panelists. As a reminder, their names are Mer, Dana and Andrea. You can use your raise your hand function in Zoom, and we're gonna follow the same format that the IOP does. If you all remember, what does the IOP say? Any of our panelists? Do you remember? All questions must end in a question mark. We wanna make 'em brief and we wanna make sure that it is a question. So on that note, I'll let our organizers take control and give us some audience questions. Let's see, we got something to chat over here. Okay, so our first question, Mer, we haven't talked a lot about international stuff. So we had another panelist recommended and unfortunately he was not able to make it today. Tar Zaydon, he does a lot of work in the Middle East. He's Lebanese. Someone who actually went to Fletcher at the same time we were at the Kennedy School and later came back to the Kennedy school, does a lot of work around as existential stuff like Andrea was referring to. So how can digital strategy really help with reaching people who like Andrea was saying, they're like spies that's underground. They don't have access to a lot of information. How can the digital outreach really help improve and reach those people and give them at least a minimally a sense of community?

- I think people are actually quite, people who have access to digital technology and have literacy to use tools, which isn't if, those individuals are actually really capable of reaching out and finding community, I think there is more of a problem with disinformation now because it's kind of a flood the zone with "strategy" to countering the transformative effects of the internet and the disruptive effects of the internet. But I think I feel like internationally. Yeah, I think in the past I had more of the youth, you know, we can go out and help people. And now I feel like, you know, let's get out of the way. Let's remove obstacles such as we can and listen to people who are saying, hey, I need this rather than proactively getting into a savior mode, something like that.

- Cool, well, we'll move on to our next audience question. This comes from David Barella from 2019, does encouraging the broad use of pronouns force people who are questioning, feeling pressured to make a decision? I hear this concern when I'm trying to encourage the use of pronouns at my own organization. So we'll give that to Dana and Andrea, of course you can respond to that as well.

- Well, it's interesting, is for most things there are multiple sides to this. Going back to what Andrea said earlier on about the suburbs and rural areas, I don't think it was an explicit part of our mission in the gay rights movement to reach out to people like that or to expecting that urbanites would then move out to the suburbs. But man, they have, you know, I think the last time I saw it, there were maybe 15 lesbian bars left in American cities or something like it. Well, if the number's not correct, it's there far fewer why? Most of my gay women friends have gone out to the suburbs with their kids and they're just living the lives. They're living the gay agenda, right? As Andrea explained. Getting up, tying your shoes, taking out the garbage and all of that. We didn't really plan for this, but 90% of gay Americans just wanna be part of society, right? They're not trying to queer society and to smash marriage or anything like that, they just wanna be part of it. They want the options to be like their straight brothers and sisters. So, and there's a downside too to that. We look, we're smiling about being back in the stacks and hiding and looking for this literature and stuff. It was exciting, it was like being a spy. And now we go, gee, isn't life pretty boring compared to how exciting it was back in the day when we had to do those things. It's sort of where you listen to artists who are living in Garretts in Paris, in the 1920s. Yeah, they had no money, they had no heat, but they were able to create. And when they looked back at it, they went, those conditions may be a necessity for creativity. With pronouns, yeah, it helps some people, but it also detracts from others who feel they're under pressured. Now when somebody's expected to do this, everybody's looking, what is it, right? And since you're gonna forget it in the next two minutes anyway, as you go around the 20 people around the table, it's like, what is the point of that? I can also say to give you a personal, slightly off take on this is that I work really hard. I knew I was a girl when I was seven, I work really hard to become myself, and it took me till age 50 to complete that journey. And I develop a whole bunch of friends here in the DC area. Everybody know who I was. They knew what my pronouns were. It was obvious. And then at around 2013 and 2014, some of my friends started asking me, "Which pronouns do you prefer?" And I went, "What, what are you talking about? "Can't you? You know, who I am? "Why are you asking that?" And they would go, "Well, you have more choices now." That's annoying. Personally that's annoying. After fighting for 50 years for people not to look at me and understand what my pronouns are, that is annoying. And I think a lot of people feel that way. I know a lot of other trans women in my generation are annoyed by that. And that's something we need to take into account. That's like older gay men and women being annoyed that nobody's paying any attention to them. Now they're just being written off, that you don't care, we don't men matter anymore. And I think that leads to the movement fracturing a little bit. It impacts donor flows because most of the donors are not trans people and they're not queer people. They're still white gay men. And if you treat them badly, you're gonna find that the money dries up. I think Andrea knows one of the major donors in the San Francisco Bay area has decided it's not gonna be funding LGBT Community very much anymore. This has become a cost celeb. Why is that? Well, you know, you're doing pretty well. There are other things that are more important, who knows? I don't know what it is, but there are downsides to all of this stuff. And yeah, and I know, and I've heard from some young kids that they don't like being put in that position. And then when they choose a pronoun, then they change it, then they feel if they wanna change it, they're embarrassed 'cause they went to so much trouble to change it in the first place. All this stuff gets really confusing.

- Well, Andrew, we have another audience question and it kind of parlays with what Dana was just talking about. It comes from Leo Gosu MPP 2014, do we need a united agenda? It has always appeared that white gay men have always gotten what they wanted and everyone else has gotten the leftovers.

- Yes, I think that it is important to have some unification are around but our goals, our objectives and how we're gonna get it, right. If our goals and objectives are again, just to simplify, to move policy, practice legislation, workplace, you know, community towards the recognition, but really the respect, the acceptance, again, you don't have to love me, but you will accept. And you will with respect and dignity who I am. No matter how I identify, right, as lesbian, as a gay person, trans person, queer, bisexual, non-bi, you know, whatever. And to me, that's the higher value. And so in order to achieve that higher value unification doesn't mean that we agree all the time with method, strategy and maybe even the goals and the objectives, but that is movement itself, right. It's always trying to build coalition. I think the real issue is that of coalition. And it doesn't necessarily mean it just has to be us, right. LGBTQ identified people. It's also about how does our movement and our need for basic human needs of respect, dignity. And I would even, you know, equality access pair with other like movements. It doesn't mean that it diffuses our movement if we are engaged in the movement, the fight for women's, for protecting in women's right to choose as an example, how do we relate? As a movement we are a multicultural community so to speak. Community itself sort of indicates or implies unity, right. But I'm African American lesbian with dreadlocks, and I'm nearsighted, okay. I have a whole host of things that, you know, to fight for. But it is, yeah. You know, having unity, I don't identify all day is just a lesbian. I identify and I experience life and hopefully is multifaceted, multidimensional as possible. You know, also like to play a couple little instruments. So we are all multifaceted multidimensional beings. But in order, I think to continue moving towards and evolving, evolving as movement unification is necessary or is essential and necessary, but that's the hard part. That's the hard part of the work. It is never easy. It is never easy to really build and maintain and sustain coalition and unification for an indefinite period of time. And understanding that principle about any kind of political, social political, social economic, social political movement, I'll just say for this purpose is that is the labor of it is, you know, being able to hopefully evolve and get closer or get more or claim more of what I think is rightfully ours just as people who exist in the world, equality claiming more of dignity, respect, and just our right to be here. And so I would hope that, you know, we could have a greater sense of unity, but what I consider to be unified in a moment may not feel like unity to someone else. So there's a push and pull about it. Are we always gonna be on the same page at the same time for the same thing? I don't know about that. I haven't experienced that yet, but I think what I have experienced is really more of critical mass, right? Again, going back to marriage equality, not that it's the end all be all. I went into the marriage that the fight for marriage equality, kind of kicking and screaming. I was like, I don't know that this is a big issue for me, I'm a feminist. I'm not interested in propagating some institution that I'm not really so sure about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really about gay white men. It's really about this. So I was one of those people, but at the end of the day, what it turned out for me to be I said, wait a minute, this is really about a movement, or this is really about people. Again, trying to manage some sense of loss or fear that are interjecting or trying to inject a theocratic, right, using biblical or using some sort of religiosity to they're trying to inject their theocracy into my democracy. And that's where I had to say, wait a minute, I can argue about all this other stuff a little later. And you know, you know, I'm a lesbian, feminist, but ultimately at the end of the day, that's how I saw that as a threat to me, because if you can use some version of doctrine or your interpretation of doctrine of religious doctrine to try to shape what should be again, that wall, that wall between church and state, we are all threatened because someone will come up behind and say, well, you know, hey, we kept them from getting married and having equal rights for civil marriage. That is a civil right. What you do in your church or what you do in your place of worship, honey, that's between you and God and Oprah. That has nothing to do with with me as long as no one to me is getting harmed or hurt. I can't really, if I really believe in that tenant of the separation of church and state, I've gotta then fight for democracy because someone else would come up and say, hey, wait a minute. You know, we used to have slaves. That seemed like pretty good idea. And it's justified right here at this doctrine, in this Bible or wherever. So we're gonna try to institute that again, you know, it used to be that women couldn't vote. And I don't know if that's turned out to be such a good idea, let's justify that. And so to me, I mean that I'm being somewhat, you know, obviously extreme and cartoonish about it, but think about that. So for me, it was really more of an intellectual exercise, but certainly feeling, wait a minute, as someone if you really do believe in our democratic society is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but isn't that really what civil rights movement is about? It's about the aspiration, maybe not towards perfection, but it is towards the aspiration of the basic principles and tenants and the integrity of the idea of what democracy is about. And so the choice is that, am I gonna be a part of that, or I gonna be over here still arguing with some other folks about, you know, whether marriage is good or bad or indifferent. So in a material world, in my decision, I just wanna make sure that at the end of the day, I have the same civil right to marriage as anyone else. That's all, it's really not that complicated. And so to me, that is, huh, that's how I kind of see, it's how I see things and just because we can get married, doesn't mean it's the law. It didn't mean that now, in other words, the law isn't that if you're, you know, that we have to get married. It is whether or not I have the same civil right. To me, it's profoundly simple and simply profound.

- To support that David, a little bit there. I think Andrea pointed out that we really never did get along. We used to fight amongst ourselves all the time. Most of us, certainly the trans community wanted employment protections first and foremost, and other gay people did too. And then the movement, the HRCs, the task force and stuff, and the Democratic Party grabbed a hold and we got hate crimes first, and then we got, Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal, it's not a big deal in the trans community at the time. And then we got marriage. It's not the way we wanted it, we only got our protections from Neil Gorsuch for God's sake. We can't even agree on the Equality Act now, but we argued about this. We fought about it and we educated one another while we were debating these issues. My main point about this entire panel here is we don't talk about it, we need to do more of this. We don't talk amongst ourselves enough about what's really important. What's existential, what isn't, there's too much identitarianism now, Andrea referenced that too. She has all these multiple identities so do I, but they're not primary in my life, they're just a part of me. I want the human part, the relative interaction part to be much more important than, oh, look at me, this is my identity, which is what a lot of kids seem to be doing today, and seems to prevent us from talking, because if you say anything that hurts somebody's feelings, somehow you're then a bigot or whatever where it is. And I get this kind of backlash too, from people who are so fragile, they can't even argue their position. I think that's a problem. I think we need to be able to do it and to take a punch the way Chris Rock did the other night, right. And then to continue to act professionally.

- Oh boy, well, we are out of time and I wanna thank, no, it's just coincidental, I swear. I wanna thank the three of you really for this very lively conversation about Public Policy. I think we're all cerebral people, but we always have things we could learn and, you know, to paraphrase Andrea here, when they start injecting their theocracy into our democracy, I think that's a very important litmus test that we really should to think about people. I think that would be the quote I take with me from this panel, as well as the wisdom of these three lovely panelists. If you'd like to join our Emerging SIG, which is our group, you could subscribe to our newsletter at hkspride.org, and of course you can follow HKS Alumni Relations and all of the important work they do on behalf of all of our panelists, we'd like to give our warmest things to the HKS Alumni Team. They've worked really hard to make this event a reality. So round of applause for them. We're just the faces, we didn't do the hard work we swear. And on that note, thank you again and have a great rest of your day, wherever you are today. And we'll see you soon.