News flash: DADT repeal is NOT going to help transpeople

Word around the campfire is that DADT will finally be repealed after many, many years of queer servicepeople being discriminated against. It’s actually been the main subject of the last two pages of my inbox, including many quotes like this:

"But as long as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are fired from our jobs, discharged from the military, denied marriage rights and immigration equality – as long as we are second-class citizens – I can’t be silent." ~ Recent GetEQUAL email, May 26, 2010

The problem? DADT does not apply to trans servicepeople. Now, I’m not sure whether it’s a result of people actually not realizing that DADT doesn’t apply to trans servicepeople, or if people are subconsciously tossing us in with the rest of the queer community and feeling the need to fill out their acronym.

Either way, this isn’t the way we should go, focusing all of our attention on DADT and none of it on the military policy that forbids people with certain "mental illnesses," one of which is Gender Incongruence. It would be just as easy to add that proposition to all this attempt at reform. Instead, the Human Rights Campaign, GetEQUAL, and every other LGB activist and their mother is, just like with ENDA, appropriating this as a trans cause when it really isn’t. Sure, transpeople are very frequently queer, and very frequently percieved as queer even when they aren’t. But DADT will not change the situation for transpeople at all, and will make it much harder to fix our own situation in the future. Transpeople are still so on the fringe of most of American society that it’s nearly impossible to pass trans-specific legislation. Right now is the best chance we have at getting our own reform sometime in this decade, but rather than putting us on the reform train, the "equality" campaign has decided to appropriate us as workers without letting us get off at the last stop.

This is why I don’t support step-by-step reform like marriage equality and DADT repeal, when what we really should be doing is removing marriage as a legal construct and enacting universal nondiscrimination policies in the military. The time to fight for the real solution is now, before people become complacent now that they’ve gotten their little slice of equality.