maybe if we don’t talk about them, they’ll just disappear

Posted bySheila Morris 8 Comments on maybe if we don’t talk about them, they’ll just disappear

In March of this year, two months after the inauguration of the 45th. president of the Unites States, the Department of Health and Human Services dropped questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in two surveys of elderly people (which must surely explain why I wasn’t included in either one of the surveys).

Shortly after the new administration took over the West Wing of the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services removed all information about LGBT Americans from its website. That’s right…deleted…gone…erased.

And now the words transgender and diversity are two of  seven words no longer allowed at the Center for Disease Control according to a recent administration rule. The other prohibited words include vulnerable, fetus, evidence-based, science-based and entitlement. 

Seriously.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I decided to create my own list of seven forbidden actions for the West Wing inhabitants in 2018:

prejudice

discrimination

knee-jerk reactions

selfishness

alternative facts

early a.m. tweeting

maniacal nuclear threats

I lost my holiday spirit with this one, but I promise to retrieve it. Until then…

Stay tuned.

 

 

Published by Sheila Morris

Sheila Morris is a personal historian, essayist with humorist tendencies, lesbian activist, truth seeker and speaker in the tradition of other female Texas storytellers including her paternal grandmother. In December, 2017, the University of South Carolina Press published her collection of first-person accounts of a few of the people primarily responsible for the development of LGBTQ+ organizations in South Carolina. Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home will resonate with everyone interested in LGBTQ+ history in the South during the tumultuous times from the AIDS pandemic to marriage equality. She has published five nonfiction books including two memoirs, an essay compilation and two collections of her favorite blogs from I'll Call It Like I See It. Her first book, Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing received a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Her writings have been included in various anthologies including Out Loud: the best of Rainbow Radio, Saints and Sinners New Fiction from the 2017 Festival, Mothers and Other Creatures; Cowboys, Cops, Killers, and Ghosts (Texas Folklore Society LXIX). She is a displaced Texan living in South Carolina with her wife Teresa Williams and their dogs Spike, Charly and Carl. She is also Naynay to her two granddaughters Ella and Molly James who light up her life for real. Born in rural Grimes County, Texas in 1946 her Texas roots still run wide and deep.

8 replies on “maybe if we don’t talk about them, they’ll just disappear”

  2. I’ve written grant applications for CDC grant funding. The big one was for HIV testing targeting the transgender community. I wonder what that Request for Proposal is going to look like now that they can’t say “transgender.”

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