Oct 26, 2007   | COMMENTS     

IN THE RECENT debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that “the community” solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgender people.

The evidence for this surprising unity is the fact that more than 300 organizations have signed an online petition, available at UnitedENDA.org. “United ENDA,” the web site boasts, “effectively communicated the strong opposition of hundreds of organizations and millions of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.”

The correctness of an all-or-nothing approach to civil rights is not determined solely by the number of organizations or people who favor or oppose it. The strategy could be wrong even if everybody supported it; conversely, it could be right even if everybody opposed it. But in a society that values representative politics, claiming that you speak for millions of people lends moral authority and democratic legitimacy to your cause.

So is it true that United ENDA speaks for the community? The answer depends on which “community” we mean.

If we mean “the community of gay and trans activists” who lead organizations like the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, the answer is “yes.”

But they may not be representative.

But, it might be answered, they lead more than 300 organizations that collectively do represent millions of members of the community. To determine whether this might be true, I looked at the organizations listed on the United ENDA web site. The list is much less impressive than it first seems.

SOME OF THE groups are well-known players on the national stage, like the Task Force and Lambda Legal. The vast majority are obscure local and state groups. One is called “Coqsure,” described online as a “social group” in Portland, Ore., “for people who were born or raised female who don’t presently identify as totally female.”

Missing from the list is the largest and most influential gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign. There are no gay Republican organizations listed, yet more than 25 percent of gay people regularly vote Republican in national elections.

The list is padded. The National Stonewall Democrats are there, but so are a dozen of the group’s state and local chapters, including both the Colorado chapter and that chapter’s “Transgender Caucus.”

There are about 10 million gay Americans, of whom perhaps 7.5 million are adults. How many of them are “represented” by the United ENDA signatory groups?

One way to determine that is by asking how many active members the groups have. Unfortunately, membership figures are mostly unavailable and are often inflated when they are available. Membership in the listed organizations also overlaps.

The active membership of most of these groups, especially the more than 70 transgender groups listed, is probably tiny. Even many of the gay groups aren’t very large. The Houston GLBT Political Caucus, for example, “representing”

gays in a metropolitan area of more than 4 million people, regularly attracts fewer than 30 to its meetings.

LET’S ASSUME VERY generously that the 300 groups average 1,000 non-overlapping members each. That’s a total of 300,000 people — well short of “millions” and less than 5 percent of the 7.5 million gay adults in the country.

Do the listed groups even represent their own members? A fascinating recent article in the Blade about growing defections from the United ENDA front quoted gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein as saying that few of the 300 groups canvassed their members before taking a stand.

More than two-thirds of the United ENDA signatories appear to be headquartered in states or cities where gay people are already protected from discrimination.
I’m confident many members of the Harvard Transgender Task Force and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club of San Francisco fully support making gay people in Mississippi wait until ENDA is ideologically pure, but they don’t speak for anyone outside their privileged precincts.

There is simply no good evidence for United ENDA’s claim that the community opposes an incremental approach to civil rights.