Dear Reader,
I am assuming you will be engaging with this article in good faith.
If you happen to have “critical” opinions on trans athletes, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and or bathroom laws, then I will be assuming that you are coming from a place of care, love, and wanting the world to be a better place. This article will attempt to present why focusing our attention on trans people as a method of tackling issues like equity within sports, protecting children, or protecting women from assault is extremely harmful and is leading us down a path we cannot recover from. I implore you to tackle these issues from a different angle:
If you are looking to support women athletes: Start by being an active fan and watching and or attending their meets. If you are able to, purchasing merchandise, sponsoring players, buying ad space, or getting in touch with companies to do the same are all great ways to support the women’s leagues and players. If you are unable to do those things but still are looking to support women athletes, even changing our speech from just inserting “men’s” when speaking about the men’s leagues can change our cultural attitude of viewing men’s athletes as the default.
If you are looking to support and protect children: Get in touch with local shelters, soup kitchens, and community centers and see how you are able to best support them with time, money, or resources. You can also reach out to your representatives on the city, state, or federal level and voice your concerns about education access, food access, or healthcare access that is available to your local youth. Get in touch with the schools in your area and see if you can support them with time, money, or resources. Similarly, check out UNICEF’s website and see how you can get involved. If you are unable to do those things, focus your consciousness and conversations regarding the well-being of children around access to food, as worldwide, a child dies every 10 seconds from malnutrition. Additionally, explore your views on gun access and safety, as guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the US since 2020.
If you are looking to support women and prevent assault: Reach out to local women’s shelters and see how you are best able to support them by donating time, money, and or resources. Reach out to your city council about creating well-lit and well-monitored public areas with a focus on public transport stops, parks, and suburban areas. Reach out to your workplace and talk about adding safe ways for people to access their cars at night and workplace culture around sexual harassment. Reach out to your local schools and open a conversation about the sex-ed programs at the school and about if and how consent is being taught. Have open and honest conversations with friends and family who are willing about sex, sexuality, and consent.
This is not the post I originally had planned for today. However, in light of the recent political discourse and action around trans people going on in the US today, I felt this article building up inside me, and it needed to be written. If you are unaware of what is going on here is a summary of what has been happening in terms of trans legislation in the past few weeks (the information is taken from https://translegislation.com/ and I urge you to check out the website):
499 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 2023, 43 have been passed so far.
13 states have passed a total of 14 bills banning, criminalizing, or restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Other bills passed include mandating bathroom and locker-room use according to “biological sex”, limiting sports to participation to the team “in accordance: to the athletes assigned sex at birth, restricting pronoun use to the “proper” pronoun according to assigned sex at birth, limiting education curricula to not include any mention of gender identity or sexual orientation, and criminalizing drag or children’s attendance at drag performances.
Florida alone has proposed 57 anti-trans bills in 2023, most notably the senate passing a bill that will allow the state to detain trans children who have received gender-affirming care.
Many states have set up websites in which you can report individuals who have received or facilitated gender-affirming care for trans people.
In Florida, trans parents and youth protested the passing of SB 254, which bans all gender-affirming care for tans youth. The children were detained during the protest and were not released upon their parents’ presence.
Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a trans woman, was silenced during a discussion on a bill regarding banning gender-affirming care for trans youth, after repeatedly being misgendered. Ultimately, her speaking rights were stripped from her for the rest of the season for “breaking decorum.”
It is without question that we are currently in a moral panic regarding trans people. A moral panic is a wide-spread fear that some evil thing or person is looking to destroy the well-being of society. This “evil” will often be amorphous, nameless, and faceless. It is a concept that holds a mystery to it; no one can really define it. It’s things like “witches”, “glorifying fatness”, “Satanism”, “communists”, “wokeness”, and in our case: “transgenderism.”
Now, obviously, being trans has a real definition and trans people are real people; people with lives, faces, bodies, aspirations, family. But that is exactly the problem: moral panics don’t recognize the humanity in people. The moral panic strips people of all human qualities and leaves them as just an evil in the background, looking to destroy all we hold dear. Moral panics are never just attitudes, they always lead to harmful policy and action: witch trials and burnings, fat people not receiving lifesaving treatments and procedures until “they lose weight,” McCarthian senate trials, and in our case: Trans Genocide.
Trans Genocide is an idea put forward by scholars and activists that highlights that the systemic discrimination and violence towards trans people are akin to genocide as an “intentional effort to completely or partially destroy a group based on its nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.” Many legal scholars and trans activists believe that sexual orientation and gender identity should be added to the legal definition that had been put forth by the Genocide Convention. Additionally, many scholars and activists have shown that the United States’ legal and social treatment of trans people is following the 10 stages of genocide.
The 10 stages of genocide is a formula developed by sociologists, criminologists, and historians to show how genocides develop. The essential theory is that a genocide cannot happen overnight; it first requires singling out a group, dehumanizing them, and only then beginning to wipe them out. The 10 stages of genocide (in order) are: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial. In my opinion, we are entering stage 8, Persecution, which is right before Extermination.
Classification: This is the creation of the “other.” Classification functions on an “Us vs. Them” attitude. This can be seen in so many explicit ways throughout America today: Bud-light boycotts, trans people not being welcomed into clubs and places of worship. However, this can be seen in the implicit language of the “Don’t Say Gay” bills. The bills prohibit discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in the classroom, except that is not exactly true; they prohibit speaking about gender-identity that isn’t fully identifying with one’s assigned gender at birth, and sexual orientation that isn’t perfectly heterosexual. However, identifying with your assigned gender at birth and being heterosexual are gender and sexual identities. The underlying assumption of the bill is that trans and non-straight people are fundamentally different than the “norm.”
Symbolization: While symbolization typically refers to a physical symbol, like the yellow star during the Holocaust, in this case it is a verbal or cultural signal. It is referring to a trans child as a transchild (no space) or a trans person as “a trans” with no “person” following that phrase.
Discrimination: Trans people not being hired, allowed in clubs, being denied access to even non-gender-affirming health care.
Dehumanizing: Trans people being stripped of their identity, being misgendered, dead-named, being told they are groomers and fetishizers, and going against nature or God’s will.
Organization: This one will be an article on its own. There is extreme collaboration between Southern Baptists lobbying groups, state legislatures, the oil industry, and the NRA for the control of the state governments to pass laws in their own Conservative Christian and capitalist interests. Even if you don’t want to go that far, the clear collaboration between Moms for Liberty and various Southern Baptist lobbying groups to create and push Anti-Trans legislation is clear and well documented.
Polarizations: It is the right-wing media espousing about the “woke agenda” infiltrating your schools, doctors’ offices, and homes.
Preparation: Preparation means creating the institution and tools that will be necessary for the genocide to take place. We see this happening in forms of registries and various reporting websites.
Persecution: I believe we are starting to enter this step. Laws banning gender-affirming care for trans people (mind you, gender-affirming care for cis people such as rhinoplasty and breast augmentation are fine) can be seen as discriminatory or dehumanizing, but remove a trans representative’s speaking rights or beginning to remove trans children from their parents’ home is the start of persecution.
Dear Reader,
Please do not take this post lightly. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with any of the things I presented, the trend is undeniable. If you have ever question how the German society silently accepted the Nazis, or the Turkish people accepting the Ottoman’s systemic killing of Armenians, please realize we right now are in the same situation. I do not know if we will ever get as far as the systemic killing of trans people, but know as we idly sit by, we are inching closer to that reality every day. I implore you to take action. I implore you to speak up. But even if that is not in your reality, at least mind the way you speak about trans people, because the way we speak and what we speak about can lead us to moral panic, and moral panic always, always, leads to the death of innocent people.