Meghan McCain’s recent appointment to the GLAAD board of directors is promising. LGBT rights are not a partisan issue, and allies are critical. Her appointment is most important, however, because she was socialized as female from birth, a point of view that is slowly being squeezed out of the GLAAD board, replaced by people who were socialized as boys from birth, including four current transgender board members. I’ve been deeply concerned about recent mission creep and board member conduct at GLAAD, the most problematic of which has recently come from two of the board’s four transgender women: writers Jennifer Finney Boylan and Christina Kahrl.

Before the appointment of Ms. McCain and three men, trans women were represented on GLAAD’s board at 11 times our actual ratio within the LGBT community. Out trans men are not represented at all. Boylan even boasts of this: “GLAAD is now largely run by trans people.” As of May, 80 percent of the GLAAD board was assigned and socialized as boys growing up. Also, bisexual people, who are a larger population than gays and lesbians combined, are vastly under-represented on the board and in GLAAD’s agenda. I believe these disproportionate representations are driving much of the recent conflict within the LGBT community on media issues, where trans people, mainly trans lesbians, are clashing with gay men, lesbians, drag queens and kings, and other gender-variant performers. And they go about it, like, well… people socialized as straight white males.

General GLAAD Board facts, as of May 2014

• Bisexual people are significantly under-represented

• Gay men are over-represented at about twice actual ratio

• 19 of 24 members (~80%) were assigned and socialized as boys

Transgender-related GLAAD Board facts

• Transgender men are not represented

• Transgender straight people (gay/lesbian pre-transition) are not represented

• 44 percent of women are gynephilic trans women, about 11 times actual ratio

• No transgender GLAAD Board members are

• drag performers

• crossdressers

• transgenderists

• genderqueer

• All current transgender GLAAD Board members

• are white, middle-aged

• were socialized and identified as straight pre-transition

• married women pre-transition

• One current trans board member believes drag “achieves nothing of value.” Statistical source: UCLA Williams Institute, 2011.

Trans representation on GLAAD’s board is a recent occurrence. I have volunteered with GLAAD for years, including presenting to their board on trans issues when there were no trans board members. That’s why I cannot believe I lived to see the day when a GLAAD board member felt privileged enough to show her true colors about my friends in the transgender community who’ve identified as drag queens or kings at some point in their lives:

Anyone that out of touch with transgender history, and the ongoing value that drag continues to bring to our community culturally, politically, and financially, has no business serving on the GLAAD board. Having Kahrl on the GLAAD board is like having someone on the Anti-Defamation League board who dislikes certain kinds of Jews.

Drag queens are still on the front lines today, as Mama Tits recently demonstrated in Seattle during their Pride Parade:

Our earliest trans political leaders weren’t wealthy white writers; they were sex workers, drag queens, crossdressers, and androgynous people who often lived on the fringes of society, spending and sometimes giving their lives to improve the lives of all trans people. Now that we are gaining greater rights and acceptance, a few comfortable elitists in the trans community suddenly want to exclude those who are not “true” transgender people.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the recent campaign led by Boylan and Kahrl to make “tranny” a slur under any circumstance. GLAAD has long advocated, correctly I believe, for avoiding the term “tranny” in mainstream media, and its use by people outside the trans community is very likely to cause offense. But “tranny” is a complex term that has been around longer than GLAAD has. The trans community is not a monolithic group, and the term “tranny” is used in different ways by different parts of our community. It can be a self-identity, or a term of affection among friends, or a casual shorthand. It’s not always a slur, and I am somewhat amazed that two professional writers seem to insist otherwise.

In this major philosophical rift regarding slurs, those of us who disagree with Kahrl and Boylan assert that suppressing words we don’t like gives them more power to harm. Dr. Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California, wrote an excellent analysis of this rhetoric of harm, danger, and trauma expressed by Boylan and Kahrl:

When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!

But the big secret at the heart of this debate is not philosophy. This “tranny” debate exemplifies how many transwomen socialized as straight boys dislike drag. They did not come up through the club scene, they were not forced to seek refuge among the LGBT community. People socialized as straight males (myself included) enjoyed respectability and privilege, and now many of these newly minted queers are trying to impose their brand of respectability politics onto a group they joined after transition. They want to exclude drag from the trans community, because they don’t like its countercultural in-your-face offensiveness. Offensiveness is a cornerstone of the LGBT rights movement, and these recent attempts to suppress anything they deem offensive simply reinforces the prevailing prejudice.

Identity politics have limits, and they often come in conflict with performance and expression. That’s why they have such a big problem with RuPaul. The “I fucking hate RuPaul” campaign led by Boylan protégé Parker Molloy gets echoed in Boylan’s open contempt:

Ego loves identity. Drag mocks identity. Ego hates drag — RuPaul (@RuPaul) April 8, 2014

Ru, one reason trans women don’t wish to be called “t—-” is that we don’t want to be mistaken for someone like you. — Jenny B. (@JennyBoylan) May 24, 2014

It’s astonishing to see GLAAD board members attacking RuPaul of all people as an enemy of trans people. RuPaul was fundraising for GLAAD when Boylan and Kahrl were still living as straight married men. And GLAAD staff was working hard to find a soft landing with its longtime supporters while these two were criticizing those efforts in public.

The final part of the problem is GLAAD’s conflicting mission. At the same time Boylan and Kahrl were going after RuPaul and the Drag Race producers and broadcasters who have donated huge amounts of money and talent to the organization, GLAAD gave the producers a media award for Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce. The GLAAD Media Awards have always been a strange mix of cronyism and starfucking, and as the organization has gotten larger, it has run into the same problem as other large media watchdogs biting the hand that feeds them. Groups like GLAAD, NAACP, and ADL often come in conflict with entertainers, particularly comedians, within the communities they are designed to serve. It’s a sign of our community’s political gains, but there are smarter and more diplomatic ways to deal with conflict within our community as we work to support each other.

That’s why I am happy to see Ms. McCain come on board. We should be seeking to build the widest and deepest alliance possible. We need all perspectives represented, but first we need to stop pushing people out from under the transgender umbrella in the name of respectability politics. The revolution will not be sponsored. LGBT activism has gotten so mainstream and bland and corporate that we risk losing what makes our community so great in the first place: freedom of expression.

Andrea James is a writer, director, producer and activist based in Los Angeles.