Transgender Advocates Fight Back With First Political Group of Its Kind

[steve2470]

http://time.com/4287288/trans-united-transgender-politics-political-group/

All the presidential candidates will be hearing from the group on Monday

On Thursday night, one of the advisory board members for the newly formed Trans United Fund got a phone call. A 15-year-old transgender girl had been beaten, run over by a car and “left for dead” in Los Angeles. While LGBT advocates have for years tried to draw attention to this kind of violence, by holding vigils and keeping public tallies of how many transgender women are murdered in America each year, Trans United is taking a more systematic, long-term tack.

“What happened to that 15-year-old girl, that is the result of a series of political choices that people in power have made,” says Hayden Mora, a veteran of the SEIU and Human Rights Campaign who helped form the group. “We want to explicate those choices, and we want to move people to make different ones.” And by “people,” he means politicians from the municipal level all the way to the White House.

Trans United Fund is the first group of its kind, a 501(c)(4) organization comprised of transgender leaders and focused on transgender issues, and not just the obvious ones. It will, of course, fight against “anti-LGBT” laws like those recently passed in North Carolina and Mississippi. But the organization will also be endorsing a presidential candidate and asking every candidate to fill out a questionnaire about their stances on issues that advocates believe underlie transgender Americans’ outsized rates of homelessness, harassment, unemployment, discrimination and poverty. (Mora says the Clinton and Sanders campaigns have already informally reached out to the group, while Republicans have not. And yes, they emphasize, transgender people come in all political persuasions.)

[ZombieHorde]

1. I'm glad both Clinton and Sanders have reached out them. nt

[steve2470]

2. me too, and of course the Republicans have not nt

[ZombieHorde]

3. Of course, though I wish they had.

How we treat each other and how we treat the world are my two biggest political issues.