As part of the mass movement for #LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back, I wanted to dust off the blog and write a post, but I'm not sure what to say that hasn't already been said. Trans and gay rights are civil rights. Trans and gay rights are human rights. The only way to maintain human rights for ALL is to defend attacks on human rights that start with the most marginalized groups. We've heard "first they came for..." over and over again, and if people cannot understand that concept, I'm not sure what more we can do to explain it.
I shouldn't have to explain why Nazis are bad, or why putting morally-bankrupt billionaires and sexual predators and men with multiple felonies is a terrible idea. So I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to point out that when bigots talk about "biological sex" they have no idea what they are talking about because BIOLOGICAL SEX IS NOT A MEANINGFUL CATEGORY. Biology includes chromosomes and gonads and genitalia and hormones and secondary sexual characteristics and not all of these factors line up. Most of us don't even know what our karyotype is--the only reason we would know is if we had a health problem that requires testing it. And when bigots attack trans rights, whether in bathrooms or sports or medical care, it's about policing bodies that don't meet incredibly rigid standards of gender identity based on a Disneyfied ideal of what a cisgender woman should look and act like. Even cisgender Republican women can't meet those ideals without dieting and hair dye and plastic surgery and make-up. It's not about keeping women safe or keeping sports fair or keeping children safe, it's about creating bogeymen and impossible standards that keep everyone else scrambling so that predatory men in power can keep accumulating money and shirking consequences for their illegal and immoral acts.
If we look at nature, from clownfish to seahorse to polar bears, we can see that that sex is not categorical but fluid and often changeable. If we look at human history and culture around the world, we can see that most cultures, including early Christianity, had space for gender variance and diversity. In many cultures, queer and especially third gender/trans/non-binary people had important spiritual significance--we even see this is the history of Christian monasticism and saints like Joan of Arc and St. Marina the Monk. The aggressive policing of gender binaries arose more recently in conjunction with European colonization, where colonizing cultures exported a rigid gender binary to cultures that had diverse concepts of gender and sexuality. And now that we have made significant progress past those regressive norms, progress in racial equity and women's rights and gay rights and trans rights, there is fascist pushback to try to take away those rights.
We are not going back. Not with trans rights or queer rights or women's rights or any form of civil rights. Call your representatives, and insist that their constituents need to stand for trans rights. You can find some sample scripts and resources here.
If you are interested in learning more about some of these concepts and history, I strongly recommend Joan Roughgarden's Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Roland Betencourt's Byzantine Intersectionality: Gender, Sexuality, and Race is also on my list, thanks to this great article from the Advocate.
