Guest Editorial: Queer-friendly suggestions for the well-meaning

On the heels of Olympia’s low score on the Human Rights Commission’s Municipal Equality Index (as discussed in OP&L, December 18), I’d like to offer a few observations about uniquely Olympian quirks in relation to the LGBT community.

I’ve lived here for six years after spending three doing communications work for the Rainbow Center of Tacoma. When I moved here, I found Olympia delightfully full of good intention for equality, but perhaps a little lacking in applied thought and follow-through. So while we need to make sure LGBT folks are protected, represented, and recruited on the municipal level, here are a few social dynamics specific to Olympia around which a little more thought and care would make all the queer people in town feel more comfortable.

Moving to Olympia, I was surprised how many straight people referred to their significant others as “partner”. In Tacoma, dropping the word partner is the least awkward way possible to come out to casual acquaintances and co-workers. “Partner” doesn’t even really sound gay in this town. The word “partner” is language my community struggled to get accepted, meaning “equal in commitment to marriage, but prevented by extenuating (like legal) circumstances.” Among straight people in Oly, it generally means “s/he’s my girl/boyfriend, but that sounds so juvenile, so I’m going to show you how unheterosexist I am by using the gay word.” In the process, queer people in Oly get their relationships devalued. This happens to us in all sorts of ways quite a lot, probably starting with our parents telling us it was just a phase. Do you really want to push that button?

Queer Friendly Suggestion #1: If you’re an unmarried straight couple who’ve been together for more that 5 years, share a bank account, own a house together, or are raising a kid together, congratulations. Your relationship is stable and strong enough to earn the use of the queer word “partner”. It’s what we meant all along, and we’re stronger with you in the partner-pot. But, if you’re in a lingering co-habitation with a friend-with-benefits until something better comes along, please call them your girl/boyfriend, or come up with your own language. Because by stealing “partner” from us to describe a relationship you’re half-assing is not just disrespectful, it’s actually undermining decades of work by queer activists.

Queer Friendly Suggestion #2: Respect the history of “partner” as a gay relationship term by kindly assuming the person using it is in a same-sex relationship unless they’ve stated their straightness. When I told a woman who worked at the co-op I was placing an order for my partner, she asked me, awkwardly, if he had tried the product before. It was instantly alienating. It seemed like she made a quick calculation, and decided that if I was queer, I was less likely to be offended by being assumed straight, than if I was straight and she took away my heterosexual privilege. Gross. If you think about it, by assuming a person using “partner” is straight, you’re actually assuming they’re homophobic and would be offended if you assumed they were gay. Plus you’re effectively closeting someone who is probably trying to come out to you, negating the stand they’re taking for queer visibility. Note: this still stands even though we can get married now. There are plenty of us worried about losing our jobs or worse if our relationships are documented.

Which brings us to another delicate topic: employers. I love the character and uniqueness small businesses bring to Olympia. I’ve worked at Radiance for six years and feel lucky that it’s queer-owned. But it can be scary being out and working for a small business. If we are subject to discrimination, often through preferential promotion, pay or scheduling of co-workers with children, the only legal tool we have available to protect ourselves is the lawsuit. If you work at a large corporation and you file a lawsuit to assert your rights, it will be a relatively impersonal thing, and the payoff could be big, like millions of dollars. In which case, well done, justice fighter!

If, however, you work at a small business in, say, downtown Olympia, and you file a lawsuit, you rip a giant hole in your community and risk bankrupting a business you care about. Your co-workers could lose their jobs, and you’d likely never get hired downtown again. Plus your financial reward for enduring this might equate to a few months’ wages. There’s a massive dis-incentive to speak up or protect yourself. Additionally, with a low number of co-workers, systemic discrimination is nearly impossible to prove. Last, small businesses are less motivated than large ones to self-correct, simply because the tiny group of people providing leadership already have their hands full. They can’t afford a legal team heading off potential lawsuits before they happen. I value my employer and the work I do. But there’s a good reason so many of our community’s trans-women work at Target.

Queer-Friendly Suggestion #3: Do I have a solution? Uhhhgh. That’s a big one. There are some helpful resources to avoid having to sue, like the Dispute Resolution Center. As an employee of a small business, I’d suggest gently keeping your boss on his or her ethical toes as much as is politically safe, and remember that you’re not being selfish, you are actually making downtown better for everybody. The biggest opportunity for change and responsibility falls to downtown business owners. Recognize all families—ones with kids, ones without—or better yet, all employees, as equal; use seniority or another impersonal factor to dictate schedule and vacation slots. Also, update your forms with gender-neutral language like “spouse” and offer a third option (at least) for gender. These signals seem tiny until they apply to you. Then they send a big message.”

Last, I see a big age divide in downtown Olympia’s relationship to transgender members of our community. Older people in this town generally ignore transgender people, and disappear them, when they are forced to interact with them, by referring to them by their biological sex pronoun rather than the gender they may be clearly living. People in their twenties and younger have the pronoun thing down. Some of them even practice up the third un-gendered pronuoun ze to better support the many people here who don’t firmly identify as either male or female.

Queer Friendly Suggestion #4: Retrain your brain. If you’re having a hard time reading someone’s expressed gender, take a moment and separate out the signals you’re getting from physical build, versus the cultural markers. This may clarify who you’re dealing with. Also keep in mind that different socio-economic classes and ethnicities express gender differently. If you’re still in doubt, ask. This will be scary the first few times. Practice. If the person gets offended, explain that you interact with people with lots of different gender identities, and that it’s the only way to be polite to some people. Keep in mind, too, that people can get angry, and that’s okay. Living towards the middle of the gender spectrum is rough and awkward, and their anger may be about past experience, and not about your attempt to be polite. This is extra important in Olympia. Trans people (for God’s sake don’t call them trannies) want to live in a cozy small town for the same reasons you do, and Olympia has become a bit of a magnet for this tender, tough, vivacious community of survivors. Respect them. They’ve more than earned it.

One thing to note: there’s currently a fad among young, male-bodied, male-gendered men – cis-gendered men, to use the correct term – to go out in their guy-liner, in overtly girly jackets, possibly a tasteful pair of size 11 women’s flats. This is, in fact, wonderful. It’s perhaps the most powerful thing a dude can do to undermine heterosexual, male privilege. Unless, of course, he’s not giving it up himself. If he wants to dress like a woman, and get treated like a man, including using the pronoun “he,” he’s making it much more confusing for the rest of us trying to see and support all the ACTUAL trans-people in our community. So Queer-Friendly Suggestion # 5 is a bit of a reiteration of #4: when in doubt, ask. Then we’ll see if the male-bodied person in question is dressing up out of a sense of self-expression, a sense of justice, or merely to get a rise out of people. ◙

[Editors’ note: We are very grateful to Heather for volunteering to share these suggestions. We acknowledge that this piece represents her perspective on the issue, and note that she does not claim to speak for everyone. We welcome your letters on the topic under the usual guidelines (civil, thoughtful, local, under 300 words), and especially encourage members of the LGBTQQIA community and allies to contribute their thoughts. As editors, we also welcome feedback about any errors or misrepresentations OP&L may make regarding the gender identity of any of our subjects, contributors, etc. We’ll be the first to tell you that we’re on a learning curve, and although we may feel under-qualified to facilitate this conversation… well, here we go.]