Iowa City to Washington, D.C.

Well, I am off to Washington, D.C. this afternoon to lobby Congress for the passage of ENDA. I will be joining many others from around the country to visit with the National Center of Transgender Equality (NCTE) and participate in their ENDA lobby day this coming Tuesday. If any of the group is going to be there, look me up, I will be at the hotel around 7:30 this evening.

I will also participate in NCTE's National Policy Conference tomorrow and Monday, in which we will hear briefings on a range of topics by NCTE, The Task Force, Transportation Security Administration (full body scan), the Census Bureau, etc, etc. I also understand that we will hear a rehash on the National Transgender Discrimination Survey conducted last year - I attended a briefing on this at Creating Change, the numbers are pretty much what we thought, except now we have validation of these numbers.

Many of you may have heard of the rhetoric going on in the Trans / Trans-blog world, where some pretty nasty rumors are being passed around with what will be in the 'final edition' of the ENDA Bill itself. The blog Trans Advocate seems to be the frontrunner in spinning this drama, and has pretty much called for the Trans-activist world to boycott the ENDA Lobby day. They distrust NCTE, Barney Frank (with good cause in his case) and others and pretty much said that they have 'sold us down the proverbial river.' Then again, I have seen the rebuttals from other blogs that pretty much say it like it is, 'there is no substantiation to these rumors at this point.'

My take is this: I am going to see what exactly to expect in ENDA's final form, as much as possible. Secondly, I will have the opportunity to lobby my elected officials in Congress, either them or their staffers. My thougjht is to put this sweet ;) Trans face of mine into their's and say 'here I am, I am trans and 'I am not going away anytime soon!" More importantly, I have seen a list of some of the speakers slated for this National Policy Conference, they are well-respected Trans activists and Community leaders, I have met with them before and don't believe they would support anything contrary to their beliefs. That said, who knows. But I wouldn't being doing any good if I just sat at home wondering what is going on, especially something that affects me (and you) directly. We will see.

I will be 'blogging' of sorts with email posts to the St Louis Community magazine "The Vital Voice," maybe they will publish online, what I have to say. The link to them is: http://thevitalvoice.com I will also publish to one of my own online blogs, but will see what sort of time I have for that there, if not, sometime next week. It will be interesting.... I am just so simply amazed at the drama. But then again, simply how we are, eh?

BTW: thank you all for the congratulary notes last week on my (then) impending marriage. The marriage did happen yesterday in Iowa City, Ia and today I leave my husband of 24 hours behind. Think of it this way: I beat Brittany Spears' record by 30 hours. ;)