By: Chuck Colbert/TRT Reporter
For more than a month now, the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) has run radio ads slamming a bill in the legislature that would add “gender identity and expression” to the state’s civil-rights laws, outlawing discrimination in employment, housing, education, credit and access to public accommodations. The measure would also expand the state’s hate-crimes statutes to include transgender-related offenses.
The proposed legislation, “An Act Relative to Transgender Equal Rights,” is still before the legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary, which held a hearing on June 8 at the State House. The committee can recommend a yes or no vote, or set aside the bill for further study, a move that in effect kills the measure, at least for the current legislative session that runs into 2012.
The radio ads are an attempt to keep the bill bottled up in that committee.
MFI Action launched its ad campaign on July 12 with radio spots on Greater Boston news and radio talk shows. The 30- and 60-second radio spots christen the nondiscrimination legislation “The Bathroom Bill,” stroking fears of sexual predators and child molesters in women’s restrooms.
Dialogue in the minute-long ad goes like this:
One woman to a mother: “You know, pretty soon, you won’t want [your daughter] to go into a bathroom by herself anymore.”
Taken by surprise, the mother asks, “Oh. Why?”
“You will have to worry about who could be in there with her.”
“What?”
“You haven’t heard about the Bathroom Bill?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Beacon Hill is about to pass a bill that lets men use women’s bathrooms … to somehow help transgender people. … Public bathrooms just won’t be safe anymore.”
A male voice then says the bill “will open all public restrooms and school locker rooms to anyone of either sex.” The narrator urges listeners to call their legislators and tell them to “vote no on the Bathroom Bill,” adding, “visit
www.nobathroombill.com.”MFI spokesperson Lisa Barstow said in recent telephone interview, “We’re scared. We think citizens should be scared.”
She went on to explain: “But when people hear about and understand what the bill will do to public restrooms, the chaos it can create in K-12 schools, the opportunity for shenanigans in the school, legitimate threats in school, we’re not willing to take the chance that a sexual predator will not misuse this bill.”
And yet, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley says such concerns are unfounded. In an Aug. 10 letter to the joint Judiciary Committee, he wrote, “Were there any real merit to these fears, as a public safety official, I would say so. The reality does not support the claim.”
Attorney General Martha Coakley also sent a letter, dated July 20, to the committee, voicing support for the transgender bill and decrying detractors’ public safety scare tactics.
Still, Barstow said, “Our hearts go out to transgender people. That does not mean, however, (that) because there is a minority group that needs certain kinds of provisions, that the rest of everybody else has to be turned upside down.”
She added, “We feel pretty confident that the legislature probably won’t move (the bill) forward.”
But advocates of transgender civil rights think the bill has a good chance of not only being voted favorably out of committee, but also of being enacted into law.
“My overall sense is that we have generated incredible momentum,” said Kara Suffredini, executive director of MassEquality, a statewide LGBT organization. Massachusetts House Speaker and state Representative Robert DeLeo (D.-Winthrop) “remains incredibly committed to getting it done,” she said. “I believe he’s going to do it.”
Arline Isaacson, co-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus, a statewide lobbying group, voiced similar optimism.
“We are lucky to have support of legislative leadership and the governor,” she said. “The Speaker has indicated an interest in moving the bill, and I trust that he will try to do so this fall.”
However, Seth Gitell, press spokesman for Speaker DeLeo, was noncommittal.
“The bill is still under consideration by the judiciary committee. That is where the bill is. More than that I don’t have,” he said over the telephone. Gitell noted that DeLeo was a co-sponsor of the bill two years ago.
Meanwhile, transgender women and men have plenty to say about radio ads that, they say, mischaracterize the transgender rights bill.
“It’s hurtful to imply that transgender people are dangerous in the bathroom,” said M. Barusch, a lawyer and activist, who serves on the steering committee of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC).
She added, “For a community that is pushing for basic civil rights and help dealing with violence, access to basic services” like “housing and restaurants, it’s unbelievable that the focus is on some sort of imaginary scenario.”
The ads “are misleading, and it’s hard to hear what I feel like is protections for me being turned around as lack of protections for women and children,” said Chris Miller, a transgender man and activist.
He added, “What I can’t figure out, are there transgender men going in the bathroom, or are there non-transgender men who are going to take advantage of the law?” Miller went on to say the radio ads “blur” that distinction so opponents do not have to be anti-transgender.
Miller, who is a diversity consultant and lives north of Boston, testified before the Judiciary Committee last spring. He owns his own business and is a married father of two sons.
Eva Kraus of Marlboro, Mass., a former naval tactical intelligence officer, said of the ads, “They are beyond distortion. They have boiled down an entire bill that has so little to do with bathroom issues and everything to do with jobs, housing and public accommodations.”
Isaacson was even more pointed. “The ads are pretty below the belt. They are a red herring that go after and create an issue that is a non-issue,” she said. “It’s a brilliant strategy on their part but completely deceptive and misleading. To claim that the bill endangers children is a … falsehood and a mean-spirited way to distract.”
Initially, Isaacson said, the radio ads, “unfortunately,” had an effect on legislators, “who hear the ad and are worried about what constituents think. But once we talk to (lawmakers) and explain the reality they are inevitably relieved and are going then to support the bill. The ads do damage, but we can counter that damage.”
MassEquality’s Suffredini said that in her conversations with legislators, “most have not even heard” the ads. “My sense is that they are not very effective,” she said. “If the only way to argue against protections is to cast all transgender people as criminals, that’s pretty sad. It’s desperate messaging.”
Suffredini also noted MFI’s funding – totaling nearly $150,000 for the ad buys – came from the right-wing Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, “specifically to defeat this bill,” she said. “That $150,000 is more than one-and-a half times MTPC’s total budget of $100,000,” Suffredini added.
Focus on the Family is a designated “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based social-justice nonprofit civil-rights organization that fights hate and bigotry.
Whether the joint Judiciary Committee takes action on the bill is an open question. To date, only four members of that committee – all Democrats – have indicated support of the measure by way of co-sponsorship. They are state Representative Carlos Tony Hernandez (Boston) and state Senators Patricia D. Jahlen (Somerville), Thomas M. McGee (Lynn), and Cynthia Stone Creem (Newton), who serves as co-chair of the joint Judiciary Committee.
But Republican state Representative Daniel B. Winslow (Norfolk) has said he will vote to bring the bill before the Legislature. “I have committed to voting the bill out of committee because I believe it deserves a debate and a vote on its merits,” he said in a telephone interview.
However, Winslow added, “I reserve my right and express concerns on two aspects of the bill – how broad the definition (of gender and identity and expression) is and considerations of modesty and privacy.”
For attorney Jennifer Levi, transgender rights project director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, “Addressing those kinds of issues and concerns is fine and makes sense,” she said.
In fact, Winslow met with Levi to discuss some technical changes to the definition of gender identity and expression that would make clearer the intended scope of the definition.
“What is intended,” Levi explained, “is that for someone whose gender identity is that of female, that person should be treated as female. And for someone whose gender identity is male, that person should be treated as male.”
The same reasoning applies to modesty and privacy concerns in the locker room. “Somebody who has a female gender identity should be in the women’s locker room,” Levi said. “Similarly, somebody who has a male gender identity should be in the men’s locker room.”
Beyond that, she said, is a question of whether the law could create some possibility for clarification for anyone – transgender or not -who seeks a private alternative for changing, that an athletic facility accommodate such a request, if easy and possible to do so.
To be clear, Levi said, “None of what (Representative Winslow and I) discussed would change the scope of the law in any way.”
Already, many local gyms and recreational facilities provide curtains for shower stalls and changing areas to provide privacy.
Sure enough, transgender people have their own concerns. “We don’t want to be seen,” said transgender activist Miller, adding, “We care about our own privacy and safety. Where I work out, I am not parading my junk.”
