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Academic        
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A Thank You to the Task Force (2005)
Normally my letters are trying to push someone into doing the right thing when they aren't doing it, but this time is a happy change. After I read through several Task Force press releases and read about the speech Matt Foreman, the executive director, gave at the International Mr. Leather competition (which he has attended for several years), I just had to send a thank you letter to them saying how much I appreciated the type of work they do. I may see some areas that I wish they would improve on now and then, but compared to other national organizations they're amazing. The National Center for Transgender Equality is the only other national organization that I like as much, and I've been impressed by Matt Foreman's ability to listen to criticism.
HRC's Action Alert Required Titles (2005)
I'm on several email lists, and often receive Action Alerts, allowing me to "easily" send letters to my congressional representatives. I actually got to a point where I stopped doing this because one of the required pieces of information I had to give was my title (Mr, Ms, Mrs, etc). While I frequently endure having my gender mislabeled by others, I absolutely refuse to mislabel it myself, and of course they don't have a title appropriate for genderqueers. This is also complicated because my representatives may already have me on file as a Mr, and I'm not sure I'd want to risk having them notice a change to Ms. Then I noticed that the ACLU and several other action alerts stopped making this required--Yet the HRC still requires it (as of 8-18-05). Here's the letter I sent them.
Concerns of Dealing with Racism in Student Senate (2005)
When I was a part of student senate I noticed how everyone seemed to decide that none of us could be racist. After all, we were all good people, and we had won elections. The chance of being accused of using personal attacks and doing political maneuvering was much higher if you pointed out racism, than if you had done something racist. I wrote an open letter to the other senators and student programs trying to explain the problem with this approach. It was published in the school paper, who frustratingly titled it "Embrace biases to reach neutrality," when I discussed acknowledging biases, not embracing them.
PFLAG's Pioneer Award (2004)
There are a few areas where the world's ignorance really frustrates me. The word pioneer is one example of that. People still use this word to hold to praise valuable and intrepid individuals, by comparing them to a historical group that participated genocide. I was actually quite pleased by the way this exchange went, and I feel that this letter actually made a difference.
Strict Interpretation (2004)
In Oregon, like the rest of the nation, there was a big debate about same sex marriage. Our state constitution guarantees that no class of citizens will be given rights and privileges denied to another class of citizens [although that didn't stop us from having laws that made it illegal for people of color to own property, or that give privileges to married couples that aren't given to the non-married people]. The state law said that "marriage is a contract entered into by males, at least 17 years of age, and by females, at least 17 years of age." While the constitution points to equality and the law never specifically mentions that marriages must be opposite-sex couples, many argued that the reference to gender at all meant that it was for opposite-sex couples only. I had a different take on things. This was printed in the Register Guard, which is currently updating its website and its archive is either inaccessible or purged.
GLAAD and the Hispanic Media 100 (2002)
When the Hispanic Media 100, which honors 100 reporters, publishers, and broadcast leaders of the Hispanic community for their work in Spanish-language media, announced that they would honor someone who had been actively fighting to remove sexual orientation from non-discrimination policies and had regularly engaged in blatantly homophobic diatribes, GLAAD sprung into action to protest it ( link to GLAAD's press release). I found myself feeling caught in the crossfire between two groups that were both supposedly working for the benefit of anyone who shares my identities. This is the letter I wrote to the Hispanic Media 100 organizer, trying to explain how frustrating this situation was for me.