Decompiling Oppression #127
Sam McVeety
My last few entries have looked at organizing writ large, and how to prepare for the weeks and months ahead. Part of that organizing journey is to get specific about how and where to engage. This week, in observance of Trans Day of Remembrance, I want to offer the many emergent needs around protecting the trans community, both at the national and local level.
One particularly disturbing trend in recent weeks is the attempt by some commentators to paint the election as some kind of referendum against trans inclusivity. There are many problems with this argument, starting with its assumption that trans rights were somehow centered in the Harris campaign. On the contrary, the campaign tended to avoid this issue (frustrating as that is), and so the only forces attempting to make trans rights an issue were the millions of dollars spent on attack ads that demonized trans people. So, in trying to blame trans people for the election, those commentators are doing the right's work for them, and furthering the scapegoating of an extremely vulnerable population.
This same dynamic is present in the very halls of Congress, where newly elected Representative Sarah McBride has become a target. The new session hasn't started yet, but that hasn't stopped some opportunistic parties from inventing a controversy from whole cloth around bathroom use, and taking to social media to chronicle their imagined moral panic. The proponents of this bathroom bill, having made previous statements like "I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality," are acting from a deeply cynical place. There are no deep-seated beliefs here, only a transparent attempt to convert bullying into political capital.
If we rewind to 2004, we can see both causes for hope and frustration. That year, similar moral panics around (opposing) marriage equality swept the country. Even more so for that presidential race, the Kerry campaign actively distanced itself from the issue, but that didn't stop observers from making the connection between Kerry's loss and gay marriage, though this connection is arguably false. What followed, however, charts a hopeful path: from Windsor in 2013 and Obergefell in 2015 to congressional affirmation thereafter.
Here in the present, though, the situation is bleak (and is arguably worse than last year). If you haven't looked at the map of state-by-state risk for transgender youth and adults, please take the time to sit with it. Whole states (Florida and Texas) are recommended as "do not travel", with Odessa's $10,000 bathroom bounty having earned its state a place on this list. Lest words like "bounty" seem extreme, let's look at exactly what the law does: it provides a private right of action for someone to recover up to $10,000 (per "offense") from a transgender individual that they find using the bathroom. It is effectively paying people to surveil and harass trans people (and legally steal from them).
One wildcard is the Supreme Court, which heard arguments for United States v. Skrmetti this week. Here, parents of transgender children in Tennessee are challenging the state's ban on gender affirming care, saying that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It's a very reasonable argument: puberty blockers and the like are available to cisgender children (and specifically exempted from the Tennessee law), so by excluding transgender children, it is discriminating based on biological sex (not to mention racial disparities in access). The Court (with Gorsuch writing, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Roberts) made effectively the same argument in Bostock four years ago, saying that "[a]n employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex." It remains to be seen whether they'll stand by that reasoning this time.
Regardless of what happens at the Court, there are tremendous, meaningful needs for support, wherever you live. For me, that means engaging from Washington State, where communities and organizations in neighboring Idaho and Montana are doing urgent work to build power, develop safety plans, and continue working for long-term change.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Are there places in the United States where you don't feel safe traveling? If not, can you imagine what that would feel like?
Communal: How can we build communities rooted in honoring the fundamental dignity of individuals?
Solidarity: Support Lavender Rights Project in Washington and sibling organizations The Mahogany Project and Save Our Sisters United in Texas.
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