GetEqual staged a sit-in at Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s Washington, D.C. office June 13 where eight LGBT protesters were arrested. The protesters staged the sit-in to demand a vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the U.S. House of Representatives.
One aspect of this protest story that wasn’t reported on much in mainstream and LGBT media articles was that two of the eight protesters were trans. One of those protesters was Koby Ozias, and the other was Erin Jennings. I spoke recently with Erin Jennings.
Erin is a Texas resident who has recently began protesting by direct action. In late April of this year she saw a GetEqual Texas Facebook entry on a planned direct action at four Texas state senators’ offices in support of the state’s Fair Employment Act, Senate Bill 237 (SB237). The Fair Employment Act is a Texas state bill that parallels the employment antidiscrimination goals of the federal ENDA bill, and the protest was being set into motion to demand, per GetEqual Texas, that the bill get “out of committee, onto the floor, and ultimately to pass this session and become law.”
Erin decided to participate in that direct action that ultimately, with about a dozen protesters, occurred May 1. Erin protested at the office of state Sen. Robert F. “Bob” Deuell (R-Greeneville), the chair of Texas’ Senate Committee on Economic Development, and was one of five who were arrested.
About a week later, Erin participated in a direct action aimed at stopping automobile traffic for that same Texas state bill, but wasn’t arrested as part of that action.
When I asked her why she was engaging in direct action for LGBT civil rights, she answered me in a voice still raspy from loudly chanting at the D.C. direct action, “I am somebody – why not me?” And, “So many trans people are afraid of direct action, and I just wanted to show it’s important.”
Erin has little to lose. On the GetEqual.org Web site, she stated “I’m taking action today because now is the time to stand up and fight for workplace equality. After years of working in a homophobic and transphobic work environment, I was fired inexplicably after three years on the job.”
We, in the LGBT community sometimes forget our community history. Many of the rioters at Stonewall had nothing to lose themselves.
Erin Jennings’ identification card indicates she is female, so she didn’t out herself as trans when she was arrested for the two arrestable actions she participated in. “My chances of being treated fairly [by police] was by not disclosing,” said Erin. When asked how she would have reacted if the police had discovered she identified as trans, or if she were identified as trans in any future direct action she may participate in, she said, “I’ll accept the consequences for my actions.”
Erin gives speeches and lobbies for ordinary equality of LGBT community members. She advocates that “more trans people should do direct action,” and tells her trans peers, “Come out. Be brave.”
Martin Luther King Jr., during the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s talked about tension:
“You may well ask: ‘Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
The LGBT community’s direct action activists, such as Erin Jennings, are working to create that kind of tension toward the goal of LGBT community members across the nation having civil rights and experiencing ordinary equality.
I believe we need more activists like Erin in the LGBT community.
Autumn Sandeen is a past GetEqual board member, and participated with GetEqual twice in direct actions toward repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
The use of “while trans…” always seems kind of odd. It seems to imply a transient condition, something that comes and goes… Oh wait, that is EXACTLY what it is. What is really meant is that someone protested while they were crossdressing. Not that they were a transsexual, who is born a transsexual, but that they were someone who chose a particular behavior for a reason. Whoops….
It implies that what Sandeen was doing was somehow illegal.
Anne