LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back
We’re Here, We’re Trans, Get Used To It
One of the trans community’s leading intellectuals, Julia Serano, has declared today, December 3, a day of Action for LGBTQ+ & Allies in Response to Democrats Capitulating on Trans Rights. She suggested that all of us with platforms should publish a piece with this article’s title on this day, sharing our own thoughts.
As an elder in the trans community, with a modest platform here on Medium, I happily take up my keyboard for the cause.
I transitioned around the turn of the century when I was in my forties. I had barely even heard of trans people before that, and it was an overwhelming surprise to me when I realized that I was that.
At the time, public awareness of transgender and transsexual people was so low that I spent a couple of years in a trans speakers bureau that dispatched small panels of trans people to groups — most often schools — to introduce ourselves and tell interested audiences a bit about our experiences. At the beginning of a session, we would usually ask for a show of hands of who had ever met a trans person before. Over the time I participated, a growing number of hands started going up.
When I transitioned, it seemed that most trans women were transitioning in their forties, or fifties, sometimes in their sixties. I thought of it as a rather spectacular mid-life crisis.
But I noticed that attention was turning away from us older transitioners in favor of the young. Kids were transitioning while still in grammar school or high school, and it was a beautiful thing. They often had the full support of their parental unit.
I was quite jealous of these youngsters getting to spend their dating-and-mating years in their true gender. On the other hand, I considered how much it must suck to transition in third grade and have to spend the rest of your life on tenterhooks about telling your lovers and potential lovers that you are trans, with often very negative outcomes.
The 1980s AIDs epidemic blasted open closet doors and marked a huge rise in gay visibility and gay rights activism. It took a long time, but eventually AIDs was largely dealt with in the United States (though not so much in Africa). Then 2003 saw Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws nationally, and 2015 — astonishingly — brought the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage.
During this time, I witnessed a political in-fight for keeping the T in LGBT. Often gay rights organizations had the attitude, “We have to drop the T to get what we can for LGB. Don’t worry, we’ll come back later for you T’s.” But trans activists were all, “Like hell you will! You’ll get what you want and we’ll never see you again!” And also, “No one is free until everyone is free!”, a rallying cry of righteous civil rights movements since the sixites. Rights for people of color, women’s rights, gay rights, disabled rights, trans rights — it’s got to be one for all and all for one! Human rights, right?
One thing, however, that I never witnessed or expected to see in my lifetime was for transgender rights to become front and center in the news. There are so few of us: probably 5 times fewer transgender people than homosexual people, and 4 times fewer than that are transexual people that actually transition from living as one sex to living as another. And yet it is us 0.1%-ers that the right wing is all up in arms about.
Hey, people of good will! Leave us the fuck alone! We’re just hanging out living our lives and being who we are. We aren’t bothering you. Get out of our pants! Get out of our bathrooms!
We aren’t corrupting your children. We aren’t assaulting your daughters. We aren’t dominating women’s sports. You are chasing shadows. Find something better to do with your time!
And we are not going away. You can lock the bathroom doors on us. You can kick us off your sports teams. You can take away our healthcare, you sons of bitches! But we’re still here. We’ve been here since the beginning of history, and we will continue to be here as long as there are people. We are just one of Mother Nature’s glorious variations.
We’ve got enough demons of our own to fight, barriers to overcome. Stop making our lives even harder.
Make American Great Again: Ignore trans people the way you used to.
Julia Serano published an article today that provides resources to help you to contact yiour elected representatives to let them know that you will not tolerate any more backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights.
