Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Trans Rights Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

I know that at times patience is not a virtue for this community.  Seeing that we have the Forces of Intolerance engaged in by any means necessary opposition to trans human rights coverage makes us even less so.

But patience is exactly what is needed at this juncture, and we also need to realize that trans rights progress is a marathon, not a 100 meter sprint we run in world record time.

Like all of y'all I wanted trans human rights coverage  yesterday.  I get irritated with the delays and roadblocks in passing trans rights legislation that have at times come from our so called allies and frenemies.  

But perusing my people's history tells me we are going to have setback and false starts before we move forward.   We still struggle to not only get human rights progress that we deserve, but have to fight tooth and nail against any retreat from those gains.

As a marginalized group, we trans people are going to have to realize that this is a long haul process.  We are going to have do some patient strategizing, building of alliances, determined and diligent lobbying, long range planning, much hard solid thinking, a lot of hard work, some perseverance, and combine all of that with a lot of faith. 

Some of this work we do today to secure our rights we may not get the benefits of it.   Some of it we might get an immediate payoff from while other aspects of it may not bear fruit for two, five or ten years.

But that work is necessary for the ultimate success of our trans rights movement and must be done to assure our final victory as we run this civil rights marathon. . 

As we run this marathon, some of us may hit the wall and have to drop out of the marathon for a while or slow down the pace of our running until our energy reserves build back up enough for us to get back into it and finish the race.

It's a human rights race we must run to the best of our ability and we must finish for the benefit of future generations of transpeople and our transkids as well. .

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