In 2015, a study was conducted in Ontario that determined transgender people are the targets of specifically directed violence; “20% had been physically or sexually assaulted for being transgender, and another 34% had been verbally threatened or harassed but not assaulted”[1] The transgender community is in danger. Those numbers from 2015 are probably low because many would not have reported their assaults and over the last few years, the quantity of attacks on transgender people have increased exponentially.
The common claim
against transgender people is that it is mostly men trying to get into women’s
washrooms so that they can commit sexual assault. But really, we just want to
use the bathroom in peace. And the reality is that substantially more transgender
people are assaulted in those bathrooms than the other way around.
What’s happened is
that certain persons in positions of power have done and said things that has
given permission by proxy for transphobic actions and attitudes. People are
attacked while trying to use the bathroom. Kids are afraid to go to school for
fear of bullying. Politicians are making laws that are forcing teachers to out
students to their parents. Transgender people are afraid for their lives but
instead of finding help, they find resistance.
And in so many of
these instances of blatant transphobia, the bible is used as a weapon. Sermons
are preached from the pulpit defending transphobic actions. So-called
Christians rejected transgender people with claims of "it's a fad",
"protect the children", and "God doesn't make mistakes". Transgender
people are in danger simply for being themselves.
The
fear that the public is feeling, or perhaps told to feel, is not real (even if “phobia”
is in the word transphobia). There is nothing to fear from transgender people. We
are not a new concept. Transgender people have been around for centuries. The difference
is simply that transgender people are tired of hiding and are more often living
out and proud. We are regular, ordinary people who want to live, work, play,
and pee without being questioned or attacked. We have friend and families, we
have homes and workplaces, and we’ve been walking this earth beside you
possibly without you even knowing it.
The
transgender community is not dangerous, but we are in danger. Society is confusing
anxiety with threat and that is bringing harm to the transgender community. There
is a mentality that being transgender is new and weird, which must
automatically mean it’s dangerous. We are being falsely accused of influencing children
into having surgeries by wanting gender and sexuality to be discussed in sexual
education classes. Social media lends itself to group bullying as groups such
as 1 Million March for Children, an anti-queer event in September 2023, used Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter to stir up parents and other supporters to protest having
queer-affirming resources and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Education (SOGIE)
in schools.
Anxiety
around the banality of a transgender person has turned into a misrepresentation
of danger. It’s time for this situation to come to an end. We can resist this outrageousness.
All of us. We have the power to choose between abandoning the marginalized or
standing up for them, “to change the ways we encourage shunning and instead do
the work to facilitate communication.”[2] So let’s get at it before
another person suffers the indignity of being asked what’s in their pants, another
child gets beat up at school, or another teen decides that dying is their only
way out.
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