HRC and the Fight for Gender Justice.

Over on Wonkette, Whale Chowder asked what is, in fact, a good question about the Human Rights Campaign:

So not all that long ago, HRC had a rep as being anti-trans (which, boggle), anyone willing to weigh in on their current position?

They were in fact anti-trans. I have the scars from the 1990s and 2000s to prove it. They were also anti-leather community and basically anti-anything that didn't make us all look like good suburban moms & dads who were definitely not having sex, but did cook good, healthy food for our cute adopted kids before heading out to coach soccer. Their primary agenda points were rooting out discriminatory anti-HIV provisions in health insurance programs (private and government), supporting government dollars for HIV research, access to IVF, employment non-discrimination for the L and the G, and of course, (above all else, really) equal marriage laws.

The problem for HRC is that they've gotten pretty much all of that in the vast majority of states. Yes, there are fights along the margins, and yes, SCOTUS is pushing back against non-discrimination laws applied to private parties (Heart of Atlanta be damned, apparently) but our glorious Alphabet Mafia has essentially won on every HRC priority except a bit of non-discrimination stuff, and even that was far less important to them than marriage equality and HIV research & treatment. Don’t believe me? Look back to their promotional materials of the time. Even when ENDA was coming up for another vote, their materials consistently featured a conventionally beautiful couple in a home setting, often with kids, often with food, and the rest of the time very likely to feature a chaste hug.

They cared, as an organization, about non-discrimination laws, but there was a split even then: the wealthy queers who funded HRC didn’t need non-discrimination laws. Though I’m sure they were in favour of them philosophically, if they were well off enough to give large amounts to HRC, then by definition they didn’t need help getting a job. On the other hand, the canvassers and phone bankers and other volunteers, they cared very much about non-discrimination law. Job protections were important to them not because of a vague philosophy but because of their actual, immediate impact. I spoke with volunteers of HRC at the time and did, in fact, get told by many people that the priorities of the volunteers were not the same as the priorities of the organization.

So let’s think about the institution and its highest levels as actual human beings, subject to actual human psychology. HRC created a lot of friends in high places as the movement for equality became more and more respectable. I think that board members and HRC management-level employees like rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful. I think power and influence are addictive. And so, with their original goals accomplished, rather than giving all that up they chose to pivot to new goals to keep the money and influence parties going.

Does that mean that the people doing the work don't believe in it? Actually, I don't think that's the case. Remember that the people doing the work are not the people funding the work. I think that as HRC’s board and management realized that they needed a mission that would keep them relevant they started looking for people who cared about that mission and wanted to accomplish that mission. So new hires would be hired in part for their commitment to that new mission. Still, there is such a thing as institutional culture and another called institutional memory.

You didn’t see the board resign en masse after Obergefell or even after Bostock v. Clayton County. Different members and different employees would leave at different times, with those staying slowly being asked to prioritize different things than they had in the past. The enthusiasm of new hires would affect employees hired before the slow process of institutional change began. Those employees would either leave seeing the work continue in a direction that didn’t interest them or gain some of the enthusiasm brought in by newer folks. Still, turnover and change take time.

Assuming all this is reasonably accurate, can HRC be an instrument of progressive justice? Can it ever truly embrace the causes of trans folks and gender radicals and drag queens? I am an outsider, so my perspective here is limited. A couple decades ago I had reliable info about HRC’s inner workings, but not today. So I will only guess: Yes.

I think that there is still and will always be a split in priorities between the donor class and the volunteers, much less between the donors and the people whose lives are too strained even to consistently volunteer. And the organization will always answer first and foremost to its donors, not its volunteers. Yet because the donors and HRC as an institution do desire to be relevant, they can be used. Their connections to power can be accessed by smart, progressive activists. Knowing someone who works at HRC can become a way to meet bigwigs at HRC and then politicians, which can become a way to get good, progressive ideas implemented.

Of course, all that seems very instrumental and not very voluntary. But that is how I see HRC. They’re not actually invested in radical gender justice. They have a conservative and limited vision of change. Their marriage equality message, after all, was consistently that HRC doesn’t see anything wrong with marriage:

We’re not trying to destroy marriage. The Ls and the Gs love marriage! That’s why we, too, want to have a June wedding on Sauvie Island or up in the Hamptons or in Santa Barbara or Whistler or wherever. We want our picturesque day and our picket fence just like you, conservative fence sitter on whether others should be treated like human beings!

My conversational tactics at the time were much more confrontational. I would say something like this:

Even assuming that queer folks are going to use their marriage licenses to gain easy access to home mortgages and invade suburbs where they will use their 1500 square foot split-level ranches as dens of the most outrageous sexual iniquity, why does that justify the government making marriage available on the basis of sex? Why is it the government’s role to decide that Amy can marry Adam, but Alan can’t? How many bureaucrats do you actually want in this Department Of Who Can Get Married anyway?

There is, of course, some logic and effectiveness to the HRC strategy. There are a lot of people on the fence about whether to treat different groups like actual human beings even when they’re clearly disabled or Black or heathens or sex perverts. If you target your message at a large demographic, you can convince a lot of people even if your message only resonates with a relatively small percentage.

But whatever the advantages of the strategy, it’s clearly not a progressive one. It has none of the clear, ringing virtues of the silver bell tolling when another trans person is attacked or killed.

One if by gun, two if by blade.

For some, like at Pervert Justice, there’s also something morally repugnant about messages that lie about ourselves as a political strategy. We are a messy, loose coalition. We don’t all want a picket fence. Most of us can’t afford a wedding in Whistler. Some of us are too busy enjoying our own lives to adopt kids. Some of us have DUIs. Some of us got arrested for punching a bigot that one time. Some of us learned some bad habits when our parents kicked us onto the streets in our teens, and others of us really did do the reverse and disown our parents, refusing to speak to their bigoted asses. Some of us are disabled or Black or heathen.

The HRC style is a scrubbed-face activism that seeks to reassure people that aren’t Hitler that their bigoted doubts are okay, that their bigoted doubts aren’t even bigoted! It’s fine to wonder if Western Civilization will collapse if two women hold hands in the parking lot of Kroger’s. HRC isn’t here to tell you that those thoughts are bullshit. HRC isn’t here to tell you to get your ass together and stop believing conspiratorial nonsense. HRC is here to tell you that all the men are strong and all the women are good looking and all the children are above average and we’ll get through this together because even the gaywads and bulldykes love America and the flag and the US dollar.

The HRC is left of the US public on queer issues, true, but it’s an organization with a history of embracing a conservative vision of society, so long as the white gate to the backyard pool party is open to the lesbian lawyer and the gay marketing executive.

The question of whether HRC can embrace a radical view of gender justice or even a radical view of inclusivity is rather beside the point as long as HRC is an organization that does not want to embrace those views. But cynic though I am, I don’t mean to imply that HRC is useless or should be defunded. This past week Dick Cheney of all people endorsed Kamala Harris for POTUS. I loathe Cheney as much as the next vertebrate, but with Trump threatening to take control over the US government again, I’m not complaining that he (finally) showed up to oppose Trump.

As I have said many times and will say many times more, no one fully agrees with me or they would be me. HRC doesn’t agree with me about many things, but while I think their strategy is revolting to me, patting bigots on the head and saying that they’re really good people doesn’t have exclusively negative results. It has mixed results, and the positive results HRC achieved contributed to society making the progress that it has.

I was never against marriage equality or research funds for HIV or ENDA or reforming health insurance. (Okay, I was actually against reforming health insurance, but only because I wanted to abolish it and create Medicare for All, which doesn’t exactly qualify as “reform”.) HRC did work on these issues that I care about, and they were part of our successes. And even if the most cynical view possible — that they’re only interested in fame, power & influence — happened to be true (and I don’t think that’s true unless you remove the “only”), they’ve still chosen to seek those things through being publicly seen doing good things for queers. And as long as they want to be seen in public doing good things for queers, then they are useful to the people who actually have as their very highest priority doing good things for queers.

Let HRC be HRC, I say. They’re not for me, but they clearly, as an organization, manage to appeal to a lot of folks. If you’re a progressive that dislikes them, then use them in the most Machiavellian sense. If you’re a progressive that likes them, then support them. HRC will never be the source of our best and most liberatory ideas. But they’re useful. They help some people. And right now they’ve decided that they want to help trans people a bit. Will they be targeting help to the Black gender rebel heathens? Probably not. But I’ll take what help I can get these days, and whatever you say about HRC, they’re certainly not as bad as Dick Cheney.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!