Tag Archives: trans

Anti-trans bigot demonstrates that bullies are cowards… (duh!)

society, , , , , ,

Click to embiggen. (I have found this image on dozens of articles and blog posts about trans issues, but never with an art credit. If you know who made this, please let me know so I can at least credit them!)
Click to embiggen. (I have found this image on dozens of articles and blog posts about trans issues, but never with an art credit. If you know who made this, please let me know so I can at least credit them!)
So, professional bigot Travis Weber (spokesperson for the Family Research Council) was on Chris Matthews’ show on MSNBC last week to speak in favor of the North Carolina law that makes it a crime for trans people to use a public bathroom that doesn’t match the gender on their birth certificates. The other guest was Jennifer Boylan, an English professor and writer who happens to be trans.

No matter how hard Matthews tried, he couldn’t get Weber to say which bathroom Boylan should use. He’s there to defend this law that insists Boylan shouldn’t use the women’s room, but Weber can’t bring himself to say it while she’s sitting right there. It’s almost funny.

I was going to say a lot more about this, but another blogger already hits all the points I want to make:

…[he] can’t bring himself to answer the question. Not with Boylan sitting there—not with Boylan empowered to respond to him directly, personally, publicly, and immediately. Watch as Weber’s bigoted “convictions” and “sincerely held religious beliefs” wilt in the presence of one of the people he’s trying to stir up bigotry against.

And:

Those ridiculous lies [they told about same-sex marriage] won ’em some battles — they carried the day before the Washington State Supreme Court — but they didn’t win ’em the war. Because their lies couldn’t survive us. They couldn’t survive us getting out there and speaking for ourselves, they couldn’t survive the scrutiny of decent and reasonable people, they couldn’t survive our lawyers, and they couldn’t survive satire and ridicule…. The [anti-trans] haters are winning some battles right now, and that sucks, and their hateful rhetoric makes an already dangerous world for trans people even more dangerous. But their “wins” are putting trans people in the spotlight. Trans people are speaking for themselves, disproving the lies, and joining in or leading the joyful mocking of the haters — just as the fight against same-sex marriage put same-sex couples (some half or wholly trans) in the spotlight. We spoke for ourselves, we mocked the haters, we gathered supporters, and we won the war.

I’m not arguing for complacency—we won the fight for marriage equality because we got out there and fucking fought it. We’re gonna have to fight this fight too. And we are fighting it and we are going to win. We are winning.

I didn’t identify the blogger before the quote because a lot of trans people of my acquaintance believe (incorrectly) that Dan Savage is anti-trans.

Regardless of what you think of Dan, this time he is definitely right on this one. The anti-trans bigots are using exactly the same arguments they have used against queer people before to justify denying us marriage rights, to justify sodomy laws, and so on. They claim we are monsters and predators and a threat to children. They raise false alarms and generate panic over things that have never actually happened. And yes, they are winning some battles. North Caroline is one place they have won.

But at the same time, they are losing the war. This bills are bringing more trans people forward. And as the panicked cis-hets see and meet real trans people, see the stories of real trans kids and their families, they are realizing the rhetoric is all lies. A CNN/ORC poll published today found that 57% of Americans disapprove of the North Carolina anti-trans bill. But even more important, only 48% of Republicans support such bills. Now, only 48% disapprove, and somehow 4% aren’t sure, but think about that: less than half of all Republicans approve this latest Republican hot-button issue. Wow.

Oh, and the same poll found that only 49% of North Carolina residents support the law.

It reminds me of one of the most telling stories that happened during the marriage equality fight. Before the Supreme Court ruling, one of the states was debating a marriage equality bill. And the relevant committees of both the upper and lower house of the state legislature scheduled public hearings that same day. So many people showed up wanting to speak and both hearings, that the committee chairs decided it would best to combine the hearings. So they moved both committees to a bigger room.

One Republican legislator who had been staunchly opposed to the bill switched his vote after that hearing. He said because they were in a different auditorium, he wasn’t in his usual spot up near the center of the front, but was off to the side, where it was easy to become distracted by the crowd and not pay attention to the citizens speaking. He said watching the gay and lesbian couples who were waiting their turn to speak interacting with each other and their children was a revelation to him. His whole life, he said, he had thought of gay people not as people, but as sexual acts. He didn’t believe they were actually in love. Watching them, he finally realized that queer people are just people. And that the couples were in love just the same as he and his wife. That they weren’t asking for special privileges. They just wanted the same legal protections for their families that straight people take for granted.

Just from watching them interact with their partners and children in the audience seats of an auditorium. That’s all it took.

We must fight. Make no mistake. And those of us who happen to be cis have to fight just as hard for the rights, dignity, and visibility of our trans brothers and sisters as we fought those previous battles. We have to remember that no one is free until everyone is.

But if we fight, we can win. We will win.

http://mediamatters.org/embed/210426

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here to watch the clip from Matthews’ show.)

A Day of Pink and the Stupidity of the Transgender Bathroom Argument

society, , , , , , ,

A t-shirt proclaiming, "It's time to talk about bullying, homophobia, transphobia. Day of Pink, April 13, 2016."
Today is the Day of Pink, an International Day against Bullying, Discrimination, Homophobia, Transphobia, and Transmisogyny across the world.
I’ve been noticing a theme in the search terms bringing people to my blog lately—many variations of “stupidity of transgender bathroom argument.” Which is understandable. We have certain states falling all over themselves to pass anti-gay and anti-trans laws in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, and the argument which seems to get the most traction with voters (or will get a certain type of person who isn’t a reliable voter to turn out) is the argument claiming that laws protecting trans people leads to sexual predators lurking in public bathrooms. So the laws that are getting passed include specific language demanding that people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender listed on their birth certificate, or that “matches their genitals” and so forth. Which in turn means a lot of people who want to figure out how to debunk those arguments are searching the web for an answer.

And it makes sense that some of those searches will land here, since I’ve written about this topic at least once or twice before:

Setting aside some of the other ludicrous claims, the one take away that we need to return to, again and again, is that many states and cities have had laws that specifically allow transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, and in none of those places as there been a single documented case of someone using that law in order to try to commit a sexual assault. Not one. Which is summed up nicely in the chart below.

mediamatters.org
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)
This chart (which was included in one of those previous posts) is a bit over a year old. Now, in addition to the original Media Matters nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for year (some going back to 1993!) showing that there has never been an assault in a bathroom because of them, we have even more! Media experts, law enforcement, and real live trans people explain why the fear of men “pretending” to be trans to attack women and children in bathrooms has no basis in reality, and More Republican Lawmakers Arrested For Sexual Misconduct In Bathrooms Than Trans People.

But it’s important to note that in the 200 cities and 17 states with laws like this [allowing trans people to use the bathroom that matches their identity] already on the books, there are no examples documented of someone using it for nefarious purposes, of a transgender person who is this sex predator in the bathroom. It’s got no factual foothold. If anything, the irony in this is that it actually would require — and North Carolina now requires transgender men who have beards, who are muscular, to use the women’s restroom. So it actually creates the very problem that it claims to solve. —Dominic Holden, speaking on PBS’s Newshour

Why have I chosen today, the Day of Pink, which is supposed to be a day to raise awareness of bullying to come back to this topic? Because any time a law criminalizes or otherwise penalizes people because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender, it encourages bullying. Businesses, school officials, hospital workers, and so on will reference the law as justification when they discriminate against someone who is queer or gender-non-conforming. The laws foster the notion that it is okay to mistreat, demean, and bully some people.

Ironically, these bathroom bills increase the likelihood that there will be assaults in bathrooms. It’s just that the victims will be the queer kids (or kids who are perceived by their peers as being queer). And it’s not as if school bathrooms aren’t already a place of terror for kids who are perceived as gender non-conforming, let along openly gay or trans children! In my early elementary school days, most of the teachers were women, and so the boys’ bathroom was a place where other boys could gang up on the class sissy or freak (usually me) with impunity. It got so bad for me at one school, that I simply stopped going to the bathroom at school. I avoided drinking anything all day, to try to stay out. My mom kept asking why I was running home from school and rushing straight to the bathroom.

So you can imagine the horror I felt when I read the headline: Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms! Geeze, talk about dehumanizing children!

"More United States Senators have been arrested for sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans women."
It’s not just a meme…
I quote Dominic Holden (who used to write for one of our local weekly alternative papers, so I’ve been a fan for years) for his appearance on PBS’s Newshour above, and I’ve embedded a Youtube video of a snippet below (the link after the embed leads to a longer video and transcript, by the way). And while I agree with most of Dominic’s points, I think he gets one little bit slightly wrong. “…it’s really put LGBT advocates in a difficult place because they haven’t figured out how to respond to this. And for the most part, they have not taken it on directly.”

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

The part I disagree with is where he says that these laws have put advocates in a difficult place. No, we put ourselves there.

We were so giddy at the Supreme Court ruling, that we allowed ourselves to think the battle was won. I say “we” even though I was raising this concern back then. I raised the concern, but what did I do about it? Most of our official advocacy groups have been avoiding taking the issue on directly. They responding half-heartedly, if at all, to some of the earliest instances of backlash. They deployed a really generic fairness response in the Houston equal rights repeal, for instance.

And to imply that we don’t know how to respond is simply wrong. The current trans bathroom bill arguments are not substantially different than the arguments they have always made against queer people. The bigots have always claimed we are delusional—our orientation or gender identity is a choice we’ve made for sinful or other nefarious reasons, not an inherent characteristic. They have always claimed that we are dangerous sexual predators. They have always claimed that acknowledging our existence will cause confusion and harm to children. Exactly how they couched those arguments has changed. Which segment of the non-heterosexual population they were demonizing has changed, but the essence of the arguments are the same.

That is what they are claiming now. We’ve dealt with those arguments before. We have won battles in the court of public opinion against those arguments before. We can do it again. We just have to actually try. Marriage equality was only one touchdown out of a very long game. And it directly benefits only some of us, and only in some situations. The fight still belongs to all of us.

Please don’t ask me to applaud mighty whitey

culture, , , ,

Marsha P. Johnson (on the left) was an African-American transwoman/street queen who actually participated in the Stonewall riot and was seen by several witnesses smashing a police car with a brick near the beginning. Later she was a co-founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The actor on the right is apparently portraying the first brick-thrower in the new Stonewall movie.
Marsha P. Johnson (on the left) was an African-American drag queen/street queen who actually participated in the Stonewall riot and was seen by several witnesses smashing a police car with a brick that night. Later she was a co-founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The actor on the right is portraying the only brick-thrower seen in the trailer for the new Stonewall movie. (click to embiggen)
I have a confession to make. When I first saw the trailer for the new Stonewall movie set to come out next month, the white-washing and cis-washing were not the first things that jumped out at me. At least not directly.

If you aren’t familiar with the controversy: the trailer for the new movie focuses on a white, cisgendered young man as the viewpoint character, and more specifically, causes some people to infer that he is the one who threw the first brick and starts the Stonewall Riot on that June night in 1969. The Stonewall Riots being the event usually credited with starting the modern gay rights movement. This is a problem because, while no one knows for certain who threw the first beer bottle, we do know is that the first person seriously fighting back that night was a butch lesbian who got away from the cops (and was chased down, beaten, and dragged back) while resisting being put in the paddy wagon (it was probably Stormé DeLarverie, though some witnesses claim that it was someone else). A transwoman of color, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, also fought back, was clubbed unconscious, and was one of the few actually taken to jail that night. And no one disputes that it was Marsha P. Johnson (who was at the bar that night with friends to celebrate her birthday) who smashed one of the police cars with a brick… Continue reading Please don’t ask me to applaud mighty whitey →

Weekend Update: 7/18/2015

blogging, , , ,

CKDfPkNUsAAu8YOAs usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.

TUSK81_2015-Jul-17Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.

Tangentially: GoodAsYou.Org’s Jeremy Hooper reads all the news blogs and such of the professional anti-gay haters so we don’t have to, and reports that Maggie Gallagher of NOM is trying to claim that support for gay marriage is suddenly plummeting. Jeremy explains how Maggie has constructed this lie (or is it self-delusion), but there’s also this: U.S. Support for Same-Sex Marriage Stable After High Court Ruling. Which isn’t stopping the wingnuts (especially my relatives on Facebook) from continuing to post foaming-at-the-mouth rants about the coming apocalypse because of the gays, how the rainbow flag is a “dark symbol of tyranny,” and the need to assert their religious liberty by discriminating agains the gay. Patheos has a nice counter to this: Your “Deeply Held Religious Belief” Isn’t Biblical. If only there was some way to get people to stop screaming and listen, eh?

Pronoun trouble

life, , ,
Bugs and Elmer are © and ® Warner Brothers.
Bugs and Elmer are © and ® Warner Brothers.

Unlike Bugs Bunny, I have never been terribly good at drag. Part of the problem is simply a lack of practice, to be honest. Contrary to the stereotypes that some people still hold onto, not every gay many wants to be a a woman or do drag. Another part is I’m hairier than a hobbit. The vast majority of my adult life I’ve been bearded, (and I literally don’t have much practice at shaving my own face, either).

When I was a kid people used to talk about men who had five o’clock shadow: their beards were so dense or fast growing that after shaving in the morning before going to work, by late afternoon they had a noticeable “shadow” of stubble on their face. My dad had something like 10:00am shadow, and by the time I was in my early twenties I had it, too.

Even when I have silly expressions, in person I'm almost always called "sir."
Even when I’m being silly, in person I’m almost always called “sir.”

Despite that, I am no stranger to being mis-gendered. Back in the days when people used phones to (verbally)  talk to other people in distant locations (I think it was the early Triassic), I was constantly being addressed as “ma’am” on the phone. Never mind that when I was still regularly singing that I can hit an E-flat below the bass clef and was usually stuck in the bass section (because choruses never have enough basses), I clearly talk in my upper register. It isn’t something I consciously do. In fact, because the “way” I talk was frequently the excuse for a lot of the bullying I experienced in school (and teachers and administrators were always mentioning to my parents that I’d surely get along better in school if I could just stop talking like “that”) I went through quite a long phase of trying to talk in my lower register.

And it was irritating, to say the least, to have customer service people and other strangers on the phone call my “ma’am” or “miss.” So I can barely imagine how infuriating and demeaning it must feel for trans* people when others call them the wrong pronoun.

Especially when it is being done on purpose. It’s rude and disrespectful. And it infuriates me that there are people who claim that they don’t understand why it is rude. The very same people would get upset if someone refused to address them by their preferred name, right? I’ve known many grown men whose legal name is Thomas who absolutely despise being called “Tommy” for instance. So why is it so hard to wrap your head around preferred pronouns?

Of course, just like those people who would call me “ma’am” on the phone weren’t being intentionally rude, sometimes we use the wrong pronoun because we don’t know or we forget. When a person who is trans*, agender, or gender-fluid is a good friend or close colleague or family member, it’s easy to remember their pronouns. But when it’s at best a casual acquaintance or one of a bunch of strangers you’ve just met, it’s a lot harder.

There are also pronouns that are difficult. A trans woman acquaintance who prefers she/her/hers is fairly easy to remember. A genderqueer casual acquaintance who prefers they/them/theirs is a teensy bit more awkward for some of us. And then there’s the one trans* person who preferred to be called it. That word just has so much emotional baggage for me—bigots of many stripes I’ve had to endure loved calling anyone who was gay, lesbian, in any way gender non-conforming, or otherwise not conforming to their ideas of being “it.” I’ve known racists who referred to anyone non-white and with an accent “it.” I’ve known people bigots of other kinds who call atheists “it” for goodness sake! The point is that I carry a lot of emotional baggage with that word, and can’t use it myself without feeling that I’m dehumanizing someone. 

Which is not a justification for intentionally using a non-preferred pronoun. When you can’t remember or have some other difficulty with someone’s preferred pronoun, it is perfectly okay to just call them by their name. It isn’t that difficult to phrase things without pronouns. And it’s not a bad habit to get into with everyone you interact with, because the other kind of pronoun problem still occurs with everyone. If you use people’s names, everyone is less likely to be confused, in any case.

If you don’t remember someone’s name, well, there are ways to fix this. “Hi! I know we were introduced earlier, but I’m always getting names mixed up. I’m Gene, nice to meet you!” Admit to being less than perfect, and show that you’re making an effort to get to know them.

It really can be that simple!

Bullied Bullies: Putting the bigotry into the school bathroom

news, , ,

DailyKos.com
DailyKos.com
I admit, it’s heartening to see the outpouring of outrage over the latest so-called Religious Liberty laws and that clueless politicians are paying a price for pandering to the bigots. And it’s nice to see that some of the other bigots are starting to realize that pandering no longer works to their advantage.

But there is still plenty of fight left, so we can’t relax or pat ourselves on the back, just yet: Nevada Lawmaker Proposes New Anti-Transgender Bill Pushed By Out-Of-State Lobbyist. And that’s just the latest in this wave: The growing trend of transgender ‘bathroom bully’ bills – Nevada, Florida, Texas and others have proposed bills that would bar trans kids from using certain school bathrooms.

The religious liberty bills are toxic. They address a non-existent problem. Freedom of conscience is already protected thanks to the Constitutions’s first amendment and loads of Supreme Court rulings. And the religious liberty bills can be used to discriminate against a whole lot of people, including trans* kids who just want to got to school and while at school sometimes they need to pee just like everyone else.

But these bathroom bully bills are just as toxic. They are also addressing an imaginary problem. It really is imaginary, and we can prove it:

mediamatters.org
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)
Media Matters has a nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for a while (some going back to 1993!) about whether or not all those predictioned sexual assaults in bathrooms and locker rooms have occurred. Shockingly, no such assault has occurred in any of those twelve states. Who would have thought?

Please look at that chart, and repeat this to any people who start repeating those claims about bathroom assaults: some states have by law allowed trans* people to use whichever bathroom matches their own gender identity since 1993, and not once, ever, has anyone used that law as a means to sneak into a bathroom and assault someone. Not once.

The problem is that while it’s pretty easy to get people worked up about a really broad-based license to discriminate law, it’s a little more difficult to get those same people to rally against these bathroom bully bills. Because a lot of people who think of themselves as liberal and open-minded, who label themselves “gay allies” still have problems with transgender people. And they still get irrational about anything having to do with “children.”

They wring their hands and say vague (but very emotionally laden) things like, “I don’t want my kids seeing… um…”

Here’s part of how you respond to that. “I get it. But think about it, none of us want to actually watch what people go into bathrooms for, right? You want to go in, do your business, wash your hands, and get out, right? Well, so do they.”