graphic by gillian kwok
In the wake of the last day of classes and in anticipation of whatever horrors were to come with the start of finals season, a group of friends and I gathered together in the cramped living room of one of our friend’s student apartments. We ate bad food from a restaurant down the street, reminiscing on the crazy things that had happened on campus during the school year. Our University is housed on the Northernmost side of the biggest city in our state, and is notorious within the state school system for having recurring incidences of bizarre crimes. In the time that I have attended school here, there have been serial killers, campus menaces, and a whole lot of human trafficking. Despite the prevalence of crime in our city, most of the people here just kind of brush it off whenever a threat appears in our city as a result of the oversaturation of its occurrence.
We sat there in the afterglow of a particularly good story that someone had told about having to break up a drug deal in the parking lot to make it to an OrangeTheory class on time, when the host of the apartment returned from taking the trash out, her face somber: “Someone drew a bunch of swastikas on the sidewalk outside of the apartment.” A hush fell over the group. After a tense beat, my friends broke out into sighs and lamentations at the state of the world, questioning if they had been drawn by some co-ed as a sick and deeply offensive joke or if they were engraved into the sidewalk as a statement by a white supremacist on campus. Despite the fact that we had just been talking about the bizarre crimes in the area, this obviously felt very different. As they hypothesized, I tried to ignore the anxious voice in the back of my head that kept telling me that this was further proof of something that I had been worrying about a lot lately: the culture of the United States quickly veering towards fascist ideals.
It’s not just the hate symbols, it seems like every day there is a new headline about some legislation passing in some state specifically erected to oppress marginalized groups — and I can’t help but notice that the main target is transgender people.The news has been saturated with reports of transgender rights being ruthlessly challenged and desecrated by Republican led legislation. NPR found that in the last two years, state lawmakers have introduced an astounding 300 pieces of legislation targeting transgender Americans, and that number grows every day.
Legislation attacking the transgender community spreads across a wide gambit of concerning issues, from denying gender affirming healthcare to preventing transgender students and teachers from simply existing in the classroom. While the United States has experienced a rise in bills targeting transgender people in the last few years, the 537 bills that have been put through the system in 2023 bring the most devastating ramifications. One of the most extreme bills, OK SB129, refers to the pursuing of gender affirming healthcare by transgender individuals as an “emergency” that threatens the “preservation of public peace”. The GOP’s solution to this so-called emergency is to extend gender affirming care bans to the (GROWN) age of 26, and to charge any medical practitioner who provides care for these people with a felony for providing healthcare that has been developed and supported by all of the major medical associations that you can think of (think World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, etc). It is obvious that the GOP is testing the waters of how oppressive legislation can be by starting with stripping away the rights of the transgender people in this country, the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community.
It is hard to feel like we are not racing towards the cusp of some sort of nationwide social conflict upheaval, but it is important that we are serious and strategic when approaching this targeted legislation. Specifically, cisgender people need to do more to make their allyship intersectional and inclusive of transgender issues. In his 1946 post-war confessional, “First they came…”, Martin Niemoller speaks on how the failure of an intersectional allyship purview to come to the defense of people groups that are different from one’s own led to the persecution of multiple marginalized groups as a whole during the rise of Nazi Germany. It is essential that we recognize the patterns that are laid throughout history to see that the passage of this legislation impacts all marginalized groups in this country, regardless of gender identity.
Maintaining that these issues are not important merely because they do not directly impact you is ignorant and deleterious, especially because that has already proven to be untrue. The introduction of reactionary drag bans, such as TN SB003, contains language that is intentionally non-specific and authoritarian (criminalizing “male and female impersonators”- in their own words) as a way to open the door to all sorts of free form persecution without consequence so long as the perpetrator can defend their actions by the vague words of the bill. In the spirit of oppressive policy opening the door for even more oppressive policy, just one week after the passage of TN SB003, an amendment to Tennessee law code was passed that makes it legal for county clerks to deny LGBTQ+ couples and interracial couples marriage licenses. The GOP claims to support limited government, and yet these overreaching bills are a clear attack on the privately held civil liberties of American citizens.
It is an exercise of cisgender privilege not to fight this legislation. Our country is in a time of rapid social and political upheaval, and as hate rises all across our nation, it is imperative that we remember our history lessons on the importance of speaking out against authoritarianism. These attacks on transgender Americans are part of the first waves of legislative attacks from the GOP, and we can not be lulled by the complacency of perpetual doom scrolling. Civic participation is of the utmost importance in the fight for equality- attend city council meetings, make informed voting decisions in local elections, stay informed on legislation passing in your state and petition that legislation when you believe that it is unjust. We can not sit idly by as the health and safety of our transgender brothers and sisters is threatened. Just like every other American, they are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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