TransCentralPA Honored at the
2012 Fall Achievement Benefit
(Acceptance Speech by Jeanine Ruhsam, President of TransCentralPA)

Ten days ago Vice President Joe Biden said that discrimination against transgender Americans is the “civil rights issue of our time”. Workplace discrimination is undoubtedly the largest problem that transgender people face, because it in turn causes many other problems like homelessness or inability to access health care. When Biden spoke out in similar open fashion favoring gay marriage a few months ago, the President followed a few days later solidly backing him up. That’s probably not going to happen this time; the President is unlikely to expend valuable political capital pushing employment protections for a group of people widely misunderstood by most Americans.

Even when laws that protect transgender people from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations are in place as they are here in this city of Harrisburg, they are insufficient to the task of changing cultural opinions about and treatment of transgender people. These laws are of vital help, but they cannot win the battle alone. The difficulties we transgender people face are not caused by our own gender identity, but by society’s reactions to us. Our task is to force a cultural change, so that our fellow Americans move away from being afraid of us to a place where they celebrate our unique differences and our freedom and ability to express who we are.

This is the task that TransCentralPA, EqualityPA and the LGBT Center are charged with in our part of the country, and we’ve been working diligently at it for a few years now. We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and to be honored by this award from the LGBT Center, one of our allies in this effort, is a great and welcome sign of recognition of our achievement.

Four years ago FAB saw the first significantly visible presence of transgender people, and those of us that were there recall with pride the ovation given us for joining with our gay and lesbian family. Yes, we are all family: what inextricably binds us is not so much our marginalization by greater society, but our transgressing of the gender norms that gives them their comfort.

Joe Biden recognized us as the final frontier, and we know that our exclusion comes from people’s misconceptions of us. We transmen and transwomen are here in equal numbers, we are coming out more every day, and we ask you to join us in an awareness campaign. If you don’t know a transgender person well, then take the time to. If you do, then introduce one of us to someone who doesn’t. Your effort will hasten the day that most Pennsylvanians and Americans will come to accept that transgender people aren't very different from their own friends, neighbors and family.

Thank you.