Recent discussions about basic freedoms for transgender people in public life, however the discussion has been framed, have generally been missing the contending theorizations of what we’re really discussing.
The assertion by transgender people is “We exist.” The assertion by the public antagonists of transgender people is “You don’t exist: you rebel against God given order, and you must be eradicated from public life.”
The transgender community’s antagonists are trying to make this about eradicating us from public life by making a male/female dichotomy of “biological sex” replace the scientific understanding of sex and gender as being on a spectrum. The antagonists reject the consensus of most medical organizations that identify medical treatment of transgender people as medically necessary.
One can draw this conclusion by looking at the organizations that are taking vocal, national roles in attempting to limit bathrooms to people in accordance to biological sex, as determined by their understanding of Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” They ignore any other scriptures, which are many, that challenge that simplistic point of view.
The best example of this is from the Family Research Council’s (FRC) white paper Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement, written by Peter Sprigg (Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at FRC in Washington, D.C.) and Dale O’Leary (freelance writer and lecturer and the author of The Gender Agenda and One Man, One Woman). The paper concludes its executive summary this way:
“A person’s sex (male or female) is an immutable biological reality. In the vast majority of people (including those who later identify as ‘transgender’), it is unambiguously identifiable at birth. There is no rational or compassionate reason to affirm a distorted psychological self-concept that one’s ‘gender identity’ is different from one’s biological sex.
“Neither lawmakers nor counselors, pastors, teachers, nor medical professionals should participate in or reinforce the transgender movement’s lies about sexuality – nor should they be required by the government to support such distortion.”
The opposition, transgender people’s antagonists, has been treating transgender people’s gender identities as a lie. They use terms, such as “biological sex,” to explicitly say transgender people’s lived genders aren’t “real.”
Some examples? Nattaphon “Ice” Wangyot, a senior at Haines High School, broke ground by being the first transgender Alaskan athlete to compete in an individual event at a high school championship. Jim Minnery, president of Alaska Family Action, defined her as male, in saying “Allowing students to play on teams of the opposite sex disproportionately impacts female students, who will lose spots on track, soccer and volleyball teams to male students who identify as female.” After she won two medals at the track meet, Minnery was quoted as saying, “Being female or male is set at birth, as the bible says. Male and female created He them.”
Sen. Ted Cruz famously said in the last throws of his campaign for president, “You don’t have a right to intrude upon the rights of others because whether or not a man believes he’s a woman, there are a lot of women who would like to be able to use a public restroom in peace without having a man there – and when there are children involved, you don’t have a right to impose your lifestyle on others.”
This is about disbelief that transgender people are telling the truth about themselves, especially transgender women.
We exist; we transgender people exist. There should be no discussion about our existence. There is reality that we exist; mainstream media is allowing discussion to occur on our right to exist by allowing “balance” in their coverage that denies our existence. They are implicitly allowing discussion that allows for our erasure as a class of people.
We exist; I exist. My existence shouldn’t be up for discussion.
I sent the people who wrote this, a membership in The Flat Earth Society, and the Pope’s statement about the sun circling the earth.