D.C.'s Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA) has released its questionnaire for the D.C. mayoral race, quizzing candidates on their thoughts on everything from the D.C. police department's Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit to  "water-based lubricant."

The document surveys the candidates on 26 questions in six categories: marriage, public health, public safety, human rights, education, and business. Some of the queries are pretty pointed: Just try giving the incorrect answer to "Will you support legislation to curb abuses by NIMBYs who are now allowed to file an endless series of baseless complaints to harass or extort bars and restaurants?" or "Will you rein in police officials who respond to legitimate crime concerns with unsustainable, media-centric quick fixes that infringe constitutionally protected civil liberties?" Come on. That's practically a cheat sheet!

Another question of note: Question 26 follows up on the GLAA's push to legalize prostitution earlier this year: "What are your thoughts regarding GLAA’s proposal . . . to mitigate the problems associated with prostitution by legalizing and regulating it? What will you do to provide alternatives to survival sex for at-risk populations like homeless youth and transgenders?"

Participating candidates must file answers to the GLAA by Aug. 17.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The final item on the GLAA's agenda is "Prostitution: Legalize It, Regulate It, Zone It, Tax It." And their plan to do so is pretty awesome:

"Public officials seldom ask a most practical question," the agenda reads. "[W]ho benefits from the criminalization of prostitution?" The agenda goes on to cite notable scholars on the question, from Samuel Johnson to Jesse Ventura:

Samuel Johnson described the ills associated with prostitution—crowding, intemperance, famine, filth, and disease—and assured his friend John Boswell that “severe laws, steadily enforced, would be sufficient against those evils, and would promote marriage.” Jesse Ventura came closer to the truth when he told Playboy in 1999, “Prostitution is criminal, and bad things happen because it’s run illegally by dirt-bags who are criminals. If it’s legal, then the girls could have health checks, unions, benefits, anything any other worker gets, and it would be far better.” Not just girls, Jesse.

The GLAA then lists the reasons that D.C.'s LGBT community should get behind legalization: A lot of sex workers don't choose prostitution freely. People treat them poorly. Our criminal justice system in particular treats them poorly. And criminalization only makes matters worse:

As advocates of the legalization of prostitution, we think it needs neither sanitizing nor glorifying. It is not a profession filled exclusively with people who freely chose it from a host of other options. No doubt there are some in that category, like the college student turning tricks for extra cash. But too many turn to it by necessity. These include gay teenagers who have been thrown out of the house by their parents, and transgender people whom discrimination has left with few options.

People in these situations are practicing survival sex. They face greater risk of substance abuse, mental and physical abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. The District has seen numerous murders of sex workers in recent years—murders that were made harder to prevent and harder to solve by the fact that the victims worked the streets and were without legal sanction or protection.

Harassing, arresting and prosecuting people for survival sex solve none of their problems, but only pile more on. Whose idea of responsible public policy is this? To be justified, any public law ought to serve some identifiable common good. Saying to people as Sister Mary Ignatius did, “You do the thing that makes Jesus puke,” is no basis for criminalizing whatever it is. Having been the targets of moralistic lawmaking, we as gay people are especially on guard against it.

The best-case scenario for sex workers? The District should fund "the creation of drop-in centers, transitional housing, job training, counseling, addiction recovery programs and other services for at-risk populations." But first, it's going to have to get over its hang-ups in talking openly about sex:

Our society’s penchant for legislating morality is the chief obstacle to eliminating the harm caused by prostitution and solicitation laws. Otherwise compassionate and practical people often lose their bearings when the subject turns to the “naughty bits.” Overcoming this will take time, especially in D.C. with its constitutional vulnerability to congressional grandstanding; but we will never get there if we do not start. We can begin with a humble recognition of the normal variation in sexual expression, the proper limits of government coercion, and the fact that other people’s personal choices are none of our business unless they harm us. In the case of sex behind closed doors, whether in homes or hotel rooms, the fact that someone is paying for it is no more a legitimate basis for police involvement than if the transaction is a more informal one involving dinner and a show.

Recently, D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier decided to restructure the department's Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit (GLLU)—a unit of officers specially-trained in LGBT issues—in order to disperse trained officers across the force. The move has been criticized by LGBT activist groups, who are concerned with the force's ability to adequately address LGBT-specific crime without a visible, coordinated, and well-staffed unit.

Today, the D.C. Trans Coalition (DCTC), the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV), and the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club released a statement enumerating their beefs with the decision. "MPD Chief Cathy Lanier is poised to call this initiative a success, but we are unfortunately quite skeptical," they write. "An award-winning unit has been effectively dismantled without meaningful input from the very community that unit serves."

Full release after the jump.

December 9, 2009

Contact:

Sadie Ryanne Baker, DC Trans Coalition, 202.557.1951
Rick Rosendall, GLAA, 202.328.6278
Chris Farris, GLOV, 202.368.5321

Broad Coalition of LGBT Community Organizations Oppose Metropolitan Police Department Plan to Restructure Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit: Groups object to flaws and inadequacies found throughout new GLLU training program for affiliate officers.

Washington, DC – Today a broad coalition of DC’s LGBT community groups stand together to express our severe disappointment with the Metropolitan Police Department’s ill-conceived plan to restructure the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit (GLLU). MPD Chief Cathy Lanier is poised to call this initiative a success, but we are unfortunately quite skeptical. An award-winning unit has been effectively dismantled without meaningful input from the very community that unit serves. Lanier is quick to point out that she and her staff have held meetings with community members to discuss their plans, but she fails to mention that not one critique of her plan was accepted.

In spite of repeated requests, MPD has not been able to say how many officers will serve GLLU full-time (there is currently only one, with three on full-time leave), whether GLLU will again have a full-time sergeant, or how new affiliated officers will be effectively coordinated to both respond to LGBT issues and learn and share best practices. Many members of our communities have had exceptionally negative experiences with police, while others have enjoyed quite positive interactions – these latter advances have often been credited to GLLU’s outreach work both within and outside the MPD. Thus to upend this unit without seeking real community input calls into question MPD’s self-stated claim to serve our communities. We look forward to MPD demonstrating its willingness to act in good faith to work with us in both cleaning up the fallout from this hasty restructuring program and in making additional progress in other areas.

Moreover, community members have been largely shut out of the process to develop the training course for GLLU’s new affiliate officers, which concluded last Friday. Lanier has boasted that 32 hours of classroom training have been provided to these officers. However, only 2 of those hours featured any discussion whatsoever of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. The MPD promised to share its training curriculum with community representatives at a meeting on October 22, yet failed to do so. At that same meeting, organizations were promised an invitation to suggest reading materials, case studies and specific modules for the training program. Finally, the Chief stated under oath at a City Council Hearing on November 20 that she would share the curriculum for the training with the LGBT community and incorporate their feedback. There was absolutely no follow-up to this invitation, despite repeated requests by LGBT community organizations. Last week, some LGBT community leaders were invited to speak at the training session (for 10-15 minutes each). They were given less than two days and asked to prepare outlines of their presentations before attending. This left no time for any real preparation, and only allowed for a few minutes of time for community members – almost entirely volunteers – to present anything at all.

In addition, individuals who were able to sit in on the training are deeply concerned about numerous errors of omission and commission that will seriously endanger DC’s LGBT communities. Specific concerns include:

• Failure to consult with the LGBT community to foster confidence and gather community input to inform the training,
• Failure to follow through on the commitment to have stand-alone GLLU training for at least half a day – instead, training was limited to less than two hours, and with combined attendees from both the GLLU and the Latino Liaison Unit;
• Failure to provide culturally competent training for officers on how to sensitively approach and manage specific needs for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming individuals;
• Failure to include in the curriculum any discussion of the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity;
• Failure to discuss the need to actively curtail profiling trans individuals as criminals;
• Failure to address domestic violence situations, which make up 82 percent of GLLU’s caseload, until after training was well underway, which converted what limited LGBT Domestic Violence training there was into a mopping-up exercise;
• Failure to provide guidance and training on how to appropriately track and record hate crimes related to an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression;
• Failure to address strategies on how to ensure a supportive workplace for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender affiliate officers and those performing LGBT liaison duties;
• Failure to develop a public education plan aimed at encouraging community members to report homophobic and transphobic violence and crimes;
• Failure to encourage affiliate officers to attend significant LGBT events to promote visibility and develop strong and meaningful relationships between police and LGBT community members.

There is a critical need for a more comprehensive LGBT training program to be provided before new affiliate officers are certified as GLLU members – a training program that is developed in partnership with the LGBT community. This includes intensive field training with existing GLLU officers, and in-depth classroom training that covers the range of safety, discrimination, and access to justice issues that LGBT individuals face across this city. We also feel strongly that we need answers to the key questions on the size, structure, and responsibilities of the GLLU moving forward. We hope that MPD acts quickly to demonstrate a genuine commitment to community safety, and cooperates with concerned individuals and organizations to address its flawed GLLU restructuring program.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about two shoplifting suspects who were shot over the weekend by a Prince George's County police officer. The suspects were shot after they attempted to drive away with the officer's arm lodged in the door of their getaway car. But the Post story was not concerned with the facts of this botched escape—the newspaper had already covered the particulars of the incident a day earlier. The follow-up amounted to a lengthy correction of one fact: the gender of the wounded suspects.

In its first story on the suspects, the Post wrote that "an off-duty county officer shot and wounded two women." In the second story, the Post corrected the record: the suspects "turned out to be men rather than women," Staff Writer Martin Weil wrote. Weil explains:

It was believed at first that the two who were shot were women. But they "turned out to be males dressed in female clothing," Officer Henry Tippett, a county police spokesman, said early Sunday.

That finding was apparently made when medical personnel began treating the two for gunshot wounds, Tippett said.

The headline of the story reads "Two Men Shot by Pr. George's Officer Were Dressed as Women." A link to the story goes further to label the pair: "Cross-Dressing Men Shot By Police."

There are two possibilities here:

(a) The suspects were cross-dressing men who had disguised themselves in dresses, wigs, and make-up in order to lift merchandise from a store. Any man can be a cross-dresser—all you gotta do is put on a dress. Or:

(b) The suspects were transgender women who were born with male sex characteristics, but live their lives as women. Transgender women are not guys in dresses—-they're women whose gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. They should be identified as women, not men.

For the Post, the distinction between "cross-dressing men" and "transgender women" is an important one. According to the Associated Press Stylebook, transgender subjects are to be identified by their gender identity, not their sex at birth. Media outlets are to employ "the pronoun preferred by the individuals who . . . present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth," the guide reads. "If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly."

Additionally, the GLAA media guide cautions against using the term "cross-dresser" to describe a transgender person. Cross-dressers, the guide notes, are people who "occasionally wear clothes traditionally associated with people of the other sex." The term should be employed to describe someone who is "comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth and do not wish to change it," not "someone who has transitioned to live full-time as the other sex, or who intends to do so in the future."

It's not possible, at this point, for the Post to definitively identify the subjects as either "cross-dressers" or "transgender women." One sure-fire way to confirm a person's gender identity is simply to ask them, but the names of the suspects, both 23, have not yet been released by police.

Still, a couple of facts in the story suggest that the suspects in question presented consistently as female, and didn't just dress up "in female clothing" for their little crime spree. Initially, everyone—from the police officer who chased and shot them to the police spokespeople who announced the incident—had no doubt that the suspects were women. The suspects were only identified as biologically male following a medical examination. In short, the Post modified the gender of the suspects solely on the basis of a genital check.

If you're under the impression that a person's genitals should determine the gender used to describe them in print, consider this: Under what other circumstances would the Washington Post force its subjects to drop their pants in order to prove their gender? Let's run that test on some other stories which appeared in yesterday's Metro section. Was Noah Robbins, a 19-year-old local actor headed for Broadway, forced to display his genitals in order to be referred to throughout the piece as "he" and "him"? How about Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell—did the Post ensure that the candidates have penises before calling them "men"? Was Debra Rowe, former HIV/AIDS housing chief, only granted a "she" following a medical examination?

In every other instance, a Post subject is considered a woman if she presents as a woman and says she's a woman. A couple of shoplifting suspects, however, appear to have been denied that courtesy. There are several reasons for the Post not to write this story. The suspects' identities are still unknown. The gender identification in the story is contrary to style guidelines. The Post has reason to believe that the gender terminology employed by the police requires fact-checking. Further information in the case could require yet another gender correction here.

There's one reason why the Post would go ahead with this story: "cross-dressing" shoplifters make for more sensational crime suspects than do a couple of women. The story has already generated such helpful online comments as "Was dey pretty? Does dey gets to wear the dresses in prison? Big dummies," and "One can only hope that their shoes matched their dresses." Perhaps the Post received positive feedback for its previous dubious "cross-dressing shoplifter" work, published back in August. The Post is clearly capitalizing upon a "man in a dress" punchline to this modest little crime story. But obviously, the potential for some sophomoric joking is no reason to sacrifice accuracy in reporting. The true gender identities of the suspects in the case are still unclear. When you're writing a story that is exclusively centered on the gender of your suspects, shouldn't you wait until you can get it right?

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

Last month, I wrote about DCTC's most recent victory: its campaign to change the D.C. Jail's policy for housing transgender inmates. Admittedly: the new policy, which makes it possible for D.C.'s inmates to be housed according to their gender identity instead of their genitalia, could still use a little work. When the new regulations were announced, DCTC's Sadie Baker called them "a step forward [when] what we really need is a giant leap"; I titled my piece the subtly ambivalent "Are D.C.’s Transgender Inmates Still Screwed?"

Still, without the work of the DCTC and other activists, there wouldn't be any formal acknowledgment of the needs of D.C.'s transgender inmates at all. So that "step forward" is still worth a couple pats on the back: Just Detention International, which also helped to draft the new policy, will also be honored on Wednesday.

The full DCTC presser is after the jump.

DC Trans Coalition Honored with Distinguished Service Award
“We are Grateful for this recognition” says group

Washington, DC – Washington, DC – On Wednesday, April 22nd the DC Trans Coalition (DCTC) will receive the Distinguished Service Award at the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance’s (GLAA) 38th Anniversary Reception. Since its founding in 2005, the DCTC has organized community members to fight for the human rights of and equal access for transgender and gender diverse people in the District of Columbia.

After nearly five years, the DCTC has led and won a variety of critical grassroots campaigns that have improved the lives of many community members. The first and arguably most important victory involved lobbying the DC Council to unanimously pass expanded protections to the city’s Human Rights Act, which included gender identity or expression in 2005. The group then helped inform regulations that were eventually passed in 2006 to strengthen the implementation of this law. Since that time, the DCTC has continued to launch and win critical campaigns, ensuring better enforcement of the Human Rights Act. Several notable campaign victories include:

1. DMV Policy Change. In 2006, the DCTC won a new policy from the DMV on changing the gender marker on DC-issued ID cards. The new form can be signed by a doctor, counselor, or social worker, and requires no additional evidence, and information about a gender change will remain confidential under this policy.

2. MPD General Order. In 2007, the DCTC won a new police order, issued by D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier directing her officers on how to deal respectfully with transgender people. The order sets the highest standards in the nation.

3. Homeless Shelter Policy. In 2007, worked with D.C.’s Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness to finalize and implement a new shelter policy mandating that homeless transgender individuals should be treated according to their self-identified gender identity, housed accordingly, protected from harassment or discrimination, and treated with respect – it serves as a guideline for how all other agencies should treat transgender clients.

4. OHR Factsheet. In 2007, worked with OHR on developing a factsheet on how to comply with the recent gender identity and expression legal protections and continue to help educate area businesses on what these protections mean for them, their employees and their patrons.

The group recently organized a broad coalition of local and national groups in response to a draft rulemaking from the DC Office of the Attorney General which would have provided what amounted to an exemption for the DC Department of Corrections (DOC) from the provisions of the DC Human Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity or expression. Those efforts led to months of negotiations and an improved policy regarding the placement and treatment of transgender detainees in DOC custody, though the coalition’s advocacy and vigilance continue.

GLAA is honoring DCTC for this most recent effort. The DCTC continues to launch and win key campaigns to ensure the proper enforcement of the DC Human Rights Act in an effort to overcome gender-based oppression by organizing the community around these issues. The group is proud to showcase its work at GLAA’s 38th Anniversary Reception amongst so many other community leaders.

“We are honored to receive this award from GLAA, particularly since such work is often overlooked within the broader LGBT community. The victories we have won and the resulting growth of community shows how much can be accomplished with passion, fair-minded leadership, and ongoing dedication, and we are grateful for this recognition.” said Sadie Baker, who will accept the award on behalf of the DCTC.