Yesterday was the hearing on H.1728/S.1687, An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes, here in Massachusetts. Last year this bill never made it out of study, and we're hoping for a better outcome this year. The hearing was set to start at 2:30, and members of our organization met at 9:30 to put the finishing touches on our testimony and plans, and then headed over to the state house.

An anti-gay group here in MA was outside - they are some of the main opposition to this bill. The hearing was held in the Gardner Auditorium which is underground. It got really hot in there - at one point the room was filled to capacity and they had people waiting in the lobby. There weren't too many problems with name calling though some people complained when some trans women used the womens' room in the state house despite the fact that we already have those protections in Boston.

I spent a lot of the morning running around - delivering packets of written testimony to the members of the judiciary committee, making last minute copies, answering phones at our office, answering a question here and there when somebody saw my "Trans Rights Now" sticker (pictured above - aren't they pretty?).

The beginning of the hearing went well - the proponents of the bill were all well spoken, and no legislators testified against it so far as I saw. But as the day went on it was hard to be called a pedophile, told I was unnatural, informed that all I needed was to be saved, and just be generally insulted all day long. And I didn't get the worst of it. The trans women were basically accused of wanting to use the womens' bathrooms only to commit crimes against people or, alternately, that men would use the womens' restrooms to commit crimes and then claim they were there because they were transgender. Not to mention it would STILL be a crime, no matter why they were in the restroom, but that was apparently beside the point.

But the proponents made a good show - we had people from all walks of life, from positions of power to recent high school graduates. We had a great turnout of support and we were really all there for each other. Here's hoping that this bill gets out of study this year and finally grants us the protections we deserve.

I finally left the hearing at 10:30pm - I was exhausted and I didn't know when it was going to end.