Thursday, November 06, 2008

Obama's Victory

Barack Obama's electoral landslide is a tremendous victory in a struggle that has lasted, not just two years, but since forces of violent human exploitation landed in the "New World."

Over time, that violence has had many names and faces: genocide, racism, slavery, colonialism, segregation, misogyny, homophobia, anti-semitism, religious bigotry, and transphobia.

We need not make a special intellectual or political effort to connect the transgender movement to Obama's victory; we are already part of it. We are already connected by the fact that his victory gives us hope for overcoming the burdens of fear, distrust and pain that separate and destroy communities of people.

2 comments:

helen_boyd said...

Woohoo! & For the record, since no-one seems to be mentioning it, Obama & Biden were both *against* Prop 8 and all state amendments like it.

I am so pleased I'm drunk with it.

grvsmth said...

When Obama said "gay, straight" in the third sentence of his acceptance speech, I did a double take. Did the President-elect of the United States just say "gay" in his acceptance speech, watched by millions if not billions of people around the world? Not as an insult or a mark of shame, but as an aspect of diversity that we can be proud of?

I didn't need to hear him say "transvestite" to feel that I was included too.