Remember, for those of you in San Francisco, there’s a 24-hour vigil in front of the Federal Building (450 Golden Gate) beginning at 8 am Monday October 1.

I wanted to highlight Susan Stryker’s comment on the dropping of transgender protections from ENDA, because I haven’t seen it anywhere else, and I know that people are always interested in what she has to say.

Here’s her comment:

More than a decade ago, just after San Francisco passed local transgender anti-discrimination legislation, I was invited to attend an annual gather of elected lesbian and gay officials from around the United States, to brief them on transgender-inclusive policies and legislative strategies. I remember standing in the hotel lobby in Los Angeles, talking with Washington DC’s non-voting representative to the House of Representatives, an African-American lesbian who considered herself a transgender ally.

Barney Frank suddenly stepped between us, interrupted our conversation, and without even acknowledging my presence starting talk to the woman about some local DC politics. She said “Barney, this is Susan Styker. She’s been talking with me about transgender issues.” Frank cast a glance my way, sneered, and said “Yeah, whatever.” He then promptly turned his back on me and continued on with his business.

I can’t help but remember that personal slight in the context of Frank’s decision to dump transgender inclusion from ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Over the years Frank has offered lip-service to transgender civil rights progress only because it seemed politically inexpedient to buck the trend of an increasingly integrated LGBT community and political movement. Rather than support that inclusive vision, he has shown his true colors at a moment when he feels he can win an historic victory for people such as himself at the expense of people like me. That may be politics as usual, but it is nevertheless repugnant.

That House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed such a move does a disservice to her many years of progressive activism on labor-related causes. It is imperative that her constituencies let her know that she has made a grave political miscalculation.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest gay and lesbian advocacy organization in the United States, seems poised to embrace a transgender-exclusive ENDA. HRC donors and supporters should let the organization’s leadership know in no uncertain terms that HRC is profoundly out of step with all other national LGBT rights groups on this matter—stop writing checks; boycott their fundraising dinners; protest at their events.

To split gender-identity protection from sexual-orientation protection now, after so many years of hard work to educated the LGB community and the general public about the interrelationship of these issues, and the dire need for employment protection, will set back the cause of transgender civil rights by years, if not decades. That would be a tragedy, and an outrage. We need our allies—and it now seems we will find out just who our allies truly are.

Susan Stryker

The Chron’s Carolyn Lochhead has some insider gossip.

The rush to pass ENDA in the House seems odd, however. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has not even introduced a companion measure in the Senate, having just passed a hate crimes bill by a hair — getting the bare minimum 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

The hate crimes bill includes transgender people, but as House Democrats concede, it is much easier to pass a law punishing people for clubbing transgender people with a baseball bat than it is to require employers to hire them. Hence it is unlikely that ENDA is going to get through the Senate anytime soon.