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June 3 - June 24, 2019
In very simplistic terms, sex is what’s between your legs, and gender is what’s between your ears.
It isn’t being transgender that’s killing us, though. It is the culture we live in, discriminating against us and instilling in us a deeply rooted self-hatred. How can we value our own lives, when we are constantly bombarded with messages that we have less than zero worth as a person because we are transgender? How can we love ourselves enough to live, when our environment tells us that nothing in creation could love a transgender person?
If being gay means being a second-class citizen in the US, transgender is at least one class below that.
But, as scientific understanding of transgender people is increasing, the way transgender people are regarded is following a similar arc to the depathologizing of homosexuality.
Bottom line up front, however: if you take away nothing else from this chapter, know that every major medical and mental health care professional organization in the US (including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Association) officially supports access to affirming care for transgender people, and the necessity of treatment both legally and for insurance purposes.
the DOD spends at least ten times as much on erectile dysfunction drugs as it does on transgender health care.
In utero, the reproductive organs develop and differentiate earlier than the brain does. When the brain later develops in ways that typically differentiate between male and female, it seems to be based on whether or not the androgens are present and received.
None of these risks for suicide are about being transgender. They’re about what is being done to transgender people. And therein lies the rub. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being transgender. There is something horribly, horribly wrong with the way we as a culture treat transgender people.
As such, arguing that letting transgender athletes compete will destroy sports is ridiculous on its face, given that in the 12 years and eight Olympic Games (summer and winter) where transgender people have been allowed to compete, it has had no effect on the outcomes.
It is also important to know that any strength and endurance advantages a transgender woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen or testosterone-suppression therapy. According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is not supported by evidence.
They found that if a runner was (for example) in the 90th percentile before, they were in approximately the 90th percentile after transition. The study concluded: “Collectively, the age graded scores for these eight runners were essentially the same in both genders.”
Holloway v. Arthur Andersen is one of the earliest and most cited cases as the 9th Circuit rejected the argument that transgender people were protected by the Civil Rights Act. As a result, transgender people were not considered to be protected by the Civil Rights Act in the courts until the early 2000s.
The out-of-proportion reactions by social conservatives are likely because transgender issues manage to hit so many conservative issues simultaneously: a rejection of science as liberally biased, opposition to the bodily autonomy of women, expectation of conformance with gender stereotypes, and general antipathy towards LGBT people.
Fundamentally this is just a continuation of the all-but-lost cultural war on gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Twenty-five years ago, social conservatives were making the same accusations that LGB people are psychologically damaged sexual predators who recruit children.
Transphobia is more socially acceptable than homophobia now
The Catholic Church in Africa has been highly supportive of laws in Africa designed to kill, imprison, or otherwise drive lesbians and gays underground in an act of legislative cultural genocide.
The Mormon Church also brought in experts on LGBTQ youth to develop messaging specifically aimed at preventing suicide in Mormon youth.910 It hasn’t worked; the Church has continued to harden its positions on LGBTQ people, excluding children with LGBTQ parents, and the result has been skyrocketing teen suicide rates.
There is a double standard at play here. Transgender people are routinely expected to bare their souls in ways that others aren’t. There are some things people will only share with their doctor, therapist, or partner. In fact, the things I don’t want to share with the public are the same sorts of things I believe cisgender people don’t like sharing with anyone besides their doctors or partners either.
Until a transgender person matters to you in a personal way, most people will treat transgender issues as “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
For a more comprehensive academic exploration of how all of these modern issues are directly applicable to the transgender community, I highly recommend Julia Serano’s seminal work, Whipping Girl. It argues effectively that most of the animus directed at transgender people is directed at transgender women, and is thus a form of misogyny.
Someone once said that most people only have just enough empathy to accept themselves. That is often true, even within the LGBT community.
In lesbian circles, femme invisibility can be a byproduct of femmephobia. There can be pressure to “butch it up” to establish one’s queer credentials. Lesbians who express their gender in a more stereotypically feminine way are often assumed to be less radical, less feminist, more assimilationist, and more invested in pandering to and sustaining the patriarchy.
Killing is an act of power, a way of re-asserting domination, even a way of saying, “I am the one who decides who lives and dies.” So killing establishes the killer as sovereign in the moment that he kills, and that is the most toxic form that masculinity can take. Trans women have relinquished masculinity, showing that it can be relinquished, and that is very threatening to a man who wants to see his power as an intrinsic feature of who he is.
