Trans rights

In the American political landscape there is some very good news… and some lingering bad news for the transgender community. Yet another election cycle has proven that campaigning against the trans community is a loser for Republicans. While there is a ton of confusion and prejudice against transgender people, the public doesn’t consider this issue important enough to vote for Republicans (especially when Republicans are taking their rights away, as with abortion).

As in 2022, the elections in 2023 proved that anti-trans rhetoric didn’t help Republicans win anything. Transphobia was a loser in the campaign to unseat Governor Andy Beshear, it was a loser in the campaign for the Virginia state legislature, and it was a loser in many of the local school board races where it was front and center.

That’s the good news, and it is very good news. As a transgender man in Virginia, I would never downplay that because it impacted my life directly, making it very unlikely that new restrictions on my medication will come to Virginia.

The bad news, of course, is that nothing has changed yet in the states where legislation targeting trans people made the most headway. We’ve seen bans and restrictions on transition medicine (including for adults in some places), schools banning books with LGBTQ+ characters, and laws removing the ability of trans people to update their documents to reflect their transitions. In addition to these bad laws there are ongoing efforts to use lawsuits against providers of transgender healthcare to drive providers out of the field and make obtaining treatment more difficult for everyone, even in blue states.

The LGBTQ movement—first the campaigners for gay and lesbian rights, and now for transgender rights—deserve credit for shaking up our thinking. They’ve made a compelling case that most of the old beliefs about gender were arbitrary taboos, trapping people in lives that confined them and made them miserable. Just as we’ve rejected stereotypes about how women or people of color were “meant” to live, we’re now confronting these stereotypes in turn.

However, every step forward provokes a backlash from those who benefit—or seek to benefit—from oppression. The Catholic church (and, sad to say, Richard Dawkins) are clinging to the notion that all the old beliefs about gender were fine as they were and nothing needs to be questioned or changed. They continue to insist that people should be compelled into roles determined at birth, with no regard for what those people want for themselves.

“I want to be clear. Trans kids aren’t considering or attempting suicide because of who they are, but because of who we are in this building right now,” he said.

“The authors of this garbage are responsible for trans suicides, for trans attempted suicides. It isn’t the kids and their identities. It’s a society in which actual adults sit down in a room and put pen to paper to try to codify their hatred to try to mask their intolerance as concern and to cover their ignorance with a thin veneer of junk science.”