“I didn’t just dis a specific member of Congress, right?” Executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), Mara Keisling prods. “It’s not in anyone’s interest for a particular congressman to hear me call him ‘the most dangerous person in America.’

NCTE may be a non-partisan organization, but it so happens, there is one party that has the most to gain from denying trans people rights. And the activist did let a few comments slip about an unnamable Congressman whose anti-immigration policies disrupt transpeople’s lives.

Keisling transitioned at 40 and quickly became an influential activist, co-chairing the Pennsylvania Gender Rights Coalition, and, in 2003, founding NTCE (www.nctequality.org) to focus on trans issues at a national level. The group’s lobbying efforts have, at times put Keisling in the hot seat—even with members of the LGBT community—particularly when NTCE lobbied against the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) because it didn’t specifically include protections for transgender people.

Keisling says at NTCE, “We don’t think that you can advance one cause by hurting other causes.” Before this year’s elections, the D.C. based NTCE released a Voter’s Guide for trans people. Keisling argues “Voting should be a relatively easy thing that people can do to…anchor themselves to their community, and lessen the alienation that they might feel, [but] unfortunately for trans people, voting gets complicated.”

“It’s not that we don’t think trans people should have identification,” Keisling says. “It’s that it’s really hard to have identification. [Identification] has become much harder to have, while at the same time, having appropriate identification is a lot more important.”

Keisling argues that the advent of post 9/11 identification legislation like the Real ID Act may preclude trans people from living under the radar, and she co-authors workshops called, “The End of Stealth.” “It’s our contention that it’s becoming increasingly difficult—if not impossible—to really be stealth.”
The Real ID Act will require all state’s licenses to display the same information and that information be gathered into a central database. In an effort to comply with the Act, Keisling says, “states are doing stupid things to trans people.” She says one state sent letters “to anyone who’d changed their gender on their driver’s license in the last five or 10 years, asking for proof of surgery.”

“In the real world,” Keisling insists, “very few trans people—even very few transsexuals—ever have genital surgery. Yet we all talk about it as if it is a firm qualification for transdom.”

Keisling, who identifies as a lesbian, says that trans people share issues with the broader LGB community. In fact, she argues that the administration’s concern over proper identification stems in part from their response to same-sex marriage. “Suddenly, because of same-sex marriage, the government felt like it had a bigger interest than ever before in knowing who’s a man and who’s a woman.”

Keisling also sees a commonality with drag queens and through NTCE’s “52 Things That You Can Do Locally” program she’s urged trans people to work with their local drag community because, “the drag communities in most cities are doing amazing fundraisings …And they’re trans. They’re differently-trans than I am, but they are trans.”

She’s on record saying, “While we might parse out the differences between gay, bisexual and transgender people, our enemies don’t. If I am ever a victim of a hate crime, the odds are the person stabbing me 48 times is going to be calling me ‘faggot.’” Furthermore, Keisling says, “Every trans person who’s in a relationship, regardless of what their gender is or ever was…they’re either in a same-sex relationship or in an opposite sex relationships that somebody could claim was a same-sex relationship.”
Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at jake@trans-nation.org. He co-authors the Blind Eye mystery series which premiers March 2007 with Blind Curves.