Walking down 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn yesterday, I saw that someone had added something to a larger graffiti: a small transgender flag and the words: “We Will Always Be Here.”
As I’ve posted before, trans rights are human rights.
If you actually believe in freedom and individual rights, you believe in rights for everyone.
Put another way and borrowing a metaphor from JFK, guaranteeing personal freedoms and rights for the least advantaged is like a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Rights are not a zero-sum game. Ensuring rights and freedoms for more people supports everyone’s rights and freedoms. When you advocate for taking away rights and freedoms from one group, that’s fascistic. Ultimately, taking away others’ rights erode and likely lead to erasure of your own.
The hysteria over trans persons manufactured by the right is not so much about an infinitesimal minority’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s an attempt to erase a group of people from public space and social participation. It’s one beachhead in a multi-headed attack on foundational American ideals.
These attacks are also anti-scientific regarding the reality of both sex and gender. Ignoring transgendered persons about their lived experience and the deep and vast knowledge from biological, psychological, sociological, historical, and legal experts focusing on transgender issues is obviously guided by bigotry and willful ignorance.
For those folks who want to be allies and want to learn more, I highly recommend Dr. Susan Stryker’s Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Revised Edition, 2017). Her website is also an invaluable resource, including links to her other work, such as the foundational (and free) essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (GLQ, 1994).
