Features
Silenced Majority
Silenced Majority
Free-To-Be Makes Wordless Case for UVM Gender Policy
by Euan Bear
Burlington
– It might have been any committee meeting of any board for all
the notice apparently taken of the 15 silent protesters standing behind
the table. But it wasn't. It was the Diversity Committee of the University
of Vermont's Board of Trustees, and the issue closest to the hearts of
the placard-wearing Free to Be students – gender identity and expression
– had mysteriously been removed from the committee's agenda.
When committee Chairman (and Republican
former state senator) Tom Little called the meeting to order and invited
a review of the agenda, all but one of the protesting students pulled
out white cloths and tied them around their mouths, conveying their sense
of having been silenced.
The students remained standing silently
for all of the nearly two hours of the meeting. Their placards contained
points on a timeline dating from five years ago: meetings held, promises
made, studies and commissions activated, all to add four words to the
"Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Policy" of
the University. Those four words are "gender identity and expression."
Also at issue for the students and supportive
faculty and staff in the audience is a new draft of the policy issued
by UVM President Dan Fogel. In part, the policy reads, "applicants
and employees shall be treated in employment matters without regard to
unlawful criteria, including race, color, religion, ancestry, national
origin, sex, sexual orientation..."
The administratively revised version clarifies
the policy with a footnote after the word "sex": "The prohibition
on sex discrimination shall be interpreted to include discrimination on
the basis of gender identity or expression, in a manner consistent with
governing law."
At the end of the meeting, Chairman
Little invited the students to "become voiced." Ethan Fechter-Leggett
removed his gag, passed around informational handouts, and made a statement.
"We have been silenced by the committee's failure to act," he
said. "Ten months ago, the policy proposal was on the agenda, but
there was no discussion. And today, we are off the agenda entirely."
Fechter-Leggett invited all of the
committee members to attend the Translating Identity Conference on March
5. The conference provides basic information on gender and its permutations
to attendees as well as legal and health information and support for transgender
and transsexual individuals and their loved ones and allies.
Committee Vice Chair Senator Jim Leddy said
he was "trying to understand" the need for a policy change,
while offering himself as someone who is "well-intentioned but ignorant"
on the issue. "Why is [gender identity] different from 'sex'?"
he asked.
LGBTQAA Services staff member Eli
Clare, a self-identified transman, responded from the audience. "The
footnote is a good stepping stone and has an important impact on me personally
and professionally," he began.
Clare addressed the "political
and cultural paradigm shift" wherein concepts of sex and gender seem
the same to non-transgender people: male equals man, female equals woman.
"But for transpeople this relationship is very complicated. Some
of us are female and men, others are male and women. For us these concepts
are connected but not synonymous."
Little thanked the students for their dedication
and courage in demonstrating their concerns. He denied that anyone had
approached him to put the issue on the meeting agenda. Leddy said that
the meeting had impressed him: "The message about not wanting to
be treated as a footnote was a very powerful statement."
Dorothea Brauer, the director of the LGBTQAA
Services Center at UVM, left at the end of the meeting frustrated with
the committee's delaying tactics and what she characterized as "gatekeeper
abuses of power."
"Students are here for four years,"
she fumed. "I know students who have graduated after spending hours
and hours working on this issue, sometimes to the detriment of their academic
careers. It's not fair to them for a committee to sit on its hands for
a year.
"This is the Diversity Committee.
It's the committee's job to prepare an issue for the board, not to delay
it from the board," she added. "When Tom Little says so one
has brought the [gender identity] issue forward, it's really that no one
who trumps his authority has brought it forward. If that's where your
politics are, you need not to be chairing a committee as important to
marginalized people as this one."