I can't believe we're still fighting about this.

But then, if we didn't fight about everything, we wouldn't have a community at all.

Andrew Sullivan links to this post by Rex Wockner that seems to sum up the whole controversy fairly well. Money quote, as Sullivan would put it:

In politics, you get what you can get when you can get it and then you go back and try to get more of what you want. That is really simple too.

In the realm of hypothetical virtue occupied, it appears, by so many "activists," on the other hand, if you don't get what you want, then no one should get anything. I have to follow along with Sullivan's analysis in all essentials:

I support enthusiastically the right of transgender people to live their lives as they wish and to be free from government discrimination. But that question is logically separate from gay rights, and always has been. Many transgender people are heterosexual; most gay people have no internal conflict with their own gender. It remains important to insist that, just because so many in the gay world have been browbeaten into repeating the concept of an "LGBT community", that doesn't mean it exists. I don't really believe there is even a "gay and lesbian community" as such. There are common interests in violating heterosexual norms, but the experience of being a gay man and being a lesbian are often experientially more different than the contrast between many straight women and lesbians or between many straight men and gay men. Gender is often a more powerful identifier than orientation.

An added comment on my own: Sullivan notes the pernicious term "LGBT," based on an assumption and an assertion (or, more likely, merely an agenda). I'd like also to call attention to the term "transgendered," which, as I've stated before, I can't assign a meaning to. As far as taxonomy goes, I'm generally a lumper. I got my taxonomy training trying to figure out the relationships among various species of orchids, with a view to beginning breeding. If the major difference between two related species is simply that they occupy habitats a hundred feet apart in elevation, and thus express their genetic makeup slightly differently, I'm willing to consider them subspecies. But, if you're going to lump two species together, there have to be significant similarities. As far as I can tell, "transgender" is a political device meant mostly to fuzz the boundaries between female impersonators, drag queens, transvestites, transsexuals, diesel dykes, fairies, and anyone else who transgresses the commonly accepted gender role stereotypes. (And no, female impersonators and drag queens are not necessarily the same thing. It's the difference between Charles Pierce and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.)

Sullivan quite rightly makes the point that in this realm of categorization, my experience as a gay man is much more likely to mirror the experience of my straight counterparts than it is that of a transsexual or a lesbian.

As far as ENDA and its politics, let's take a look at what gays and lesbians, aside from the activist organizations, really think. John Aravosis reports on the latest poll:

[T]his is important data because up until now there was no real data as to how the community itself, rather than activists, felt about the issue. Now we know. And when the number is nearing 70%, in our community, where divisiveness nears a virtue, that's a pretty large mandate.

Unless, of course, you're a Beltway insider. Or an alphabet soup activist.

Update:

To get back to the real issue, which is simply that, like everyone else, transsexuals deserve to have equal rights, see this post by hilzoy. I suspect that if we in the gay and lesbian territories weren't feeling a little used and abused by those who style themselves our leadership, we'd be able to focus a little bit more on what's really necessary here -- education, education, education: the same thing that has worked for us.