FERNDALE – It's short, simple and ultimately more inclusive. Affirmations Lesbian and Gay Community Center Executive Director Leslie Thompson announced Thursday that when the center moves into its new headquarters next year, it will be known simply as Affirmations. The announcement of the name change was made at the 7th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance in a nod to members of the transgender (TG) community who have been calling for a new name for years.
As construction continues at the center's new location on West Nine Mile Road with visible signage identifying the site as a gay and lesbian center, some question if the center's new name now inadvertently put the community back in the closet.
"We don't think it's causing more harm than good or we wouldn't have done it," Thompson said. "We're trying to be more inclusive by taking those names out. We can't include everybody that we represent in our name because it doesn't just stop with one or two or three of four identities in our community. As we talked to different groups that we work with within our community, we found this to be what they wanted."
Thompson pointed to other LGBT centers such as Out Front Minnesota and The Center on Halstead in Chicago as part of national trend of LGBT community centers shucking the names and initials that cannot possibly encompass their entire constituencies.
"We're following a model of centers across the country that are doing this," she said.
Increased visibility
Michelle Fox-Phillips, who earlier this year co-founded Transgender Detroit, was the first to start a TG group at the center some eight years ago. When Thompson came to the center in late 1999, Fox-Phillips waited a year before sitting down to a meeting with her partner, the late Jamie Phillips-Fox, and the new executive director. The couple respectfully asked Thompson for a more inclusive center name.
"Her response was, well, there's really no trans involvement yet, and she didn't feel it was right at that time to even think about changing the name," Fox-Phillips recalled.
Thompson said essentially the same two years ago when Rachel Crandall, the executive director of Transgender Michigan, asked again.
"Leslie felt that there was not enough transgender participation to warrant that," said Crandall. "She said there was only one group and no one really was volunteering for anything else and there weren't any other TG programs."
So Crandall set about to change that.
"That's when I started to go crazy," she said. "I started to do all kinds of things there."
Crandall created the transgender concierge, started a transgender hotline shift on Thursday nights and answered the calls herself, sought out additional TG volunteers and signed on to run the center's hotline training.
"I was all over the place, and I'm told that really helped, because all of a sudden there was a lot more TGs around," Crandall said. "We got TG people to go to other groups, like the Ladies of Leisure group, the coming out group. Over time there was a much bigger transgender presence."
Alphabet soup
What sealed the deal though was a cleaver campaign Transgender Michigan orchestrated earlier this year at Motor City Pride. The group passed out petition postcards calling on the center to make its name more inclusive.
"We got 200 signed, and that included staff members at Affirmations, that included board members, and that even included the mayor of Ferndale," Crandall said. "We did not just have TG people sign the postcards. We had everybody sign them. So we had many, many, many members of the LGB community sign them. So I really want to emphasize that, you know, organizations can set up the mechanisms for activism. But it's the community that is the secret ingredient."
Meanwhile, members of the TG community say they're pleased with the new name.
"I understand there were other factors to picking that name that I might not be aware of," Crandall said. "But I'm satisfied it. That was a name that I encouraged, the Affirmations LGBT Community Center. But people thought that, well, if we put that, shouldn't we put intersexed? And shouldn't we put questioning? And shouldn't we put allies in? It was going to turn into a big, huge bowl of alphabet soup."
The important thing, said Fox-Phillips, is that the name is now inclusive.
"Folks in the LGBT community will know what it is, and their friends and relatives will know and word will get around," she said. "The way it's going to be is a lot more inclusive. Calling it just Affirmations includes everybody."
