Trying to do better
At least a little
In line with the previous post, and trying to do a little better, these were two things I’ve written recently related to trans rights.
The first is a note I already posted nearly a week ago but merits inclusion here.
The second is a letter sent to my US Senators about the House-passed bill barring1 trans girls from being on girls’ scholastic sports teams. It originated in a petition from the National Women’s Law Center. Like you, I get a lot of emails promoting such petitions but I never send them without extensively re-writing them in my own words and with my own slant.
-
I confess, I don’t know how trans folks do it. Hell, I’m cis and I’m stressed, distressed, and depressed by the spittle-flecked vituperation and legal savagery being directed against them by power-hungry politicos and Bible-thumping reactionaries on the one hand and their victims among the gullible and malinformed on the other.
The fact that in the face of this onslaught they can still keep going, can still find joy in discovering their true selves and in community, can still have hope for the future (even if not for the immediate future), can still have courage, can still, as we said in the old days, carry it on - I admit to being amazed. And respectful.
-
[Addressed to my US Senators]
Vote NO on S. 9, the absurdly misnamed “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.”
This bill protects nothing except, they hope, the power, positions, and perks of reactionary transmisiacs and their theocratic Christian nationalist allies. ("Transmisiacs" rather than "transphobes" because this is not about fear of transgender people, but hatred of them.) It most assuredly does not protect women, either trans or cis, doing more to perpetuate sex-based stereotypes than to challenge them.
Indeed, the very title of the bill reveals it in its reference to "women and girls," with no concern for the participation of trans boys - apparently because we are supposed to think (that is, assume with even being aware of it) that "no 'boy' could really compete in sports against a real boy, amiright?"
I do note with some amusement that the bill requires the Comptroller General to carry out a study to "document the adverse psychological, developmental, participatory, and sociological results to girls of allowing males to compete ... in athletic programs, that are designed for girls," amusing because if the study is done honestly, it will find none near sufficient to justify the blatant and deliberate discrimination of this bill - especially in face of experience which shows that states with inclusionary policies have seen increased participation in sports among all girls, cis and trans alike.
Transgender and intersex athletes didn't suddenly appear from nothing a few years ago. They have been participating in scholastic sports - and, let it be noted, going to the bathroom - all along, since well before the manufactured social panic and accompanied sturm und drang emanating from the right wing. This bill is the classic "solution in search of a problem" intended to advance political and social power and definitely not fairness or justice and certainly not "protection " of women or girls. It should be given the smack down it deserves.
Because of the solidarity shown by the Democrats in the House, I have hope this bill will be, to paraphrase one well-known transmisiac, the place where this combination of sexism and transmisia "goes to die." Still, it should be said again:
Vote NO on S. 9.
-
Technically the law does not ban trans folks from participating according to their gender - just that any school that allows it will lose its federal funding. Which is what’s called a distinction without a difference.