Trans People are People- Period...End of Story
Equality shouldn't be a difficult concept to understand...unless you're a White Conservative Christian heterosexual.
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Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
I suppose it makes sense that red state legislatures around the country are heavily invested in pushing anti-transgender legislation. When you have no ideas and no plans to do anything to improve things for the people of your state, invoking culture war issues are great for keeping the faithful scared and stupid.
It’s an easy thing to do. Transgender people constitute less than 1% of the total population of the US. They lack a robust and well-financed voice to lobby on their behalf, so there’s no one to stand up for them. And, in part because they represent such a small minority group, few Americans truly understand them or the issues they face in simply living their daily lives.
Their small numbers and the lack of understanding of the transgender community and its issues have made it easy for Conservative culture warriors to spread hatred and fear about transgender people. The truth is that there’s nothing to fear from the transgender community. There’s no “agenda” or widespread plan to “recruit” children. There’s nothing but a desire to live their lives authentically.
No one would choose to become transgender out of boredom and curiosity. The process is long, arduous, painful, and medically difficult- to put it mildly. Those who choose to transition genders do so because they believe it’s the best- nay, perhaps only- option to becoming their true and authentic self.
Those who fear transgender people generally do so without knowledge, understanding, and/or compassion. Those who are transgender are no different from you or me in that they have dreams, goals, and aspirations. For reasons only they can fully elucidate, they feel they were born into the wrong gender. I can’t begin to understand nor describe the feelings behind that, but then I don’t need to. I need only to support the decision of another human being to do what they believe is best for themselves.
That’s it. That’s all.
What even Conservative culture warriors fail to understand is that it’s not our place to approve of or even understand the decision of another person to transition. We need not comprehend the “why” behind someone subjecting themselves to a grueling and painful process.
It’s not our place because it’s not our life. We’re free, of course, to our opinion on the matter, but we all know what opinions are like. Everyone has one, and they’re essentially worthless because they don’t confer upon us the power to do anything to impact another person’s right to make a decision or take action.
It’s not our life, which makes it none of our damned business.
The problem, of course, is that too many Right-wing busybodies believe that they DO have the right to give their religious/philosophical/ideological the weight of statute law. They think that what THEY believe should be the law of the land and that there’s nothing wrong with forcing others to conform to their beliefs.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the textbook definition of tyranny. Conservative culture warriors bristle at the idea of having the Left impose their standards on them. To them, that’s an intolerable degree of tyranny. Despite that, they fail to recognize that their desire to install their beliefs as the law of the land is an equally unbearable degree of authoritarianism.
Yes, it’s the worst sort of autocracy and totalitarianism imaginable when they Liberals it to us. But it’s OK for us- wise, pious Conservatives- to do it to them because all we’re doing is installing an enlightened and sensible form of responsible governance.
But when your sense of “an enlightened and sensible form of responsible governance” attempts to legislate less than 1% of the population out of existence, that’s neither common sense nor compassionate. It’s gratuitous cruelty in its worst and most egregious form.
Transgender people pose no threat to America, whether real or perceived. If you look at the above map, the red/orange/black states are those with anti-trans laws on the books (or soon to be on the books). It’s a sad, bigoted overreaction to a community that poses no threat to White Conservative Christian heterosexuals…except in their overheated imaginations.
Red states have banned gender-affirming care for minors and, in some cases, have targeted care for adults. That this care has been proved time and again to save live by reducing the risk of suicide seems of no concern to Conservative culture warriors. They don’t consider transgender lives to have value, and thus, those lives are unworthy of saving.
Some states forbid or make it difficult for teachers to use a transgender student’s preferred name, sometimes requiring them to deadname a child. Laws like this require adults to be gratuitously cruel to transgender minors. That, sadly, is in character for red-state Republicans, who seldom pass on an opportunity to make the lives of transgender minors more difficult and miserable.
As a group, transgender minors are too often hurting and scared. At a point in life where merely being different in the slightest sense is challenging enough, being transgender is a tremendous burden to shoulder. There are far too few places for transgender minors to go where they can find support, a shoulder on which to cry, and someone to whom they can talk. This is also true for too many transgender adults.
America does a crappy job of supporting the transgender community, partly because of a widespread lack of understanding but primarily because too many don’t know or care enough to want to understand or help.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject. Still, I do know enough to know that transgender people, by virtue of the path they’ve chosen to walk, possess a surplus of bravery, unlike anything most cisgender people will ever know or need.
At this point, I can only stress the need to educate yourself on this topic. If you don’t know anything about transgender people or the process they endure to transition, you need to learn. And the reason you need to understand is that transgender people need educated and compassionate people to defend them from the haters and bigots who’d happily see them wiped off the Earth.
Transgender people are PEOPLE. Period. They differ from you and me primarily in the struggle they endure daily to live as their genuine and authentic selves. They deserve every opportunity to be allowed to achieve that goal, just as we, as cisgender individuals, do. We must be conscious that being transgender is a far more complex, trying, and painful journey.
I’m thankful that my parents taught me that people are people. Now here I am, trying to put that teaching to use and hoping that there are good people out there who will join me. Transgender people need brave defenders to stand up for them and their right to be who they believe themselves to be.
I hope you’ll join me in that fight. Be a friend. Lend an ear. Or a shoulder. You might make a world of difference…or perhaps even save a life.
This one of the most searingly passionate, and well written, things that you've posted; and I sign on to all of it, because it's bracing truth. Right-wingers who support and enact these laws targeting trans people, are 21st Century, spiritual descendants of Bull Connor. They are fascists armored with a selected and venal piety of Christianity. And they're the bane to the achievement of equality for us all regardless of who or what we are. In short, they're shittiest of shitty people.