Just Being “Hir”

    There have been a lot of responses to the recent suicides of several gay teens, they come in the form of celebrity sponsorship for organizations like wegiveadamn.org or the itgetsbetterproject , public outreach by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and politicians, as well as a few touching amateur youtube videos.  The focus of much of this is on the lives of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual youth, and while I agree that it’s a fantastic step I can’t help but feel we are once again leaving our transgender peers behind.

    For any who don’t know, Transgender is an umbrella term describing anyone with a gender identity that does not correllate to their biological sex, intersex people, and people who consider themselves outside of the Male-Female gender binary.  It’s not uncommon to hear in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Questioning (LGBTQIQ) communities that Transgender rights are decades behind LGB rights. This lag is in part due to a lack of visibility (though it’s impossible to know how many people are transgender, estimates are low, and the probability of a transgender person coming out as transgender is even lower), the lag in transgender rights is also due to a more severe backlash to the nature of their gender variance. To say that someone may identify as male regardless of their biological sex deprives the class of it’s exclusivity and threatens male privilege. In essence transgender identities challenge the very core of what we understand to justify the subordination of women; biological differences.  For these reasons transgender individuals are still persecuted to the extent that LGB individuals were decades ago.

   So dear reader, I appeal to you to not only jump on the recent band wagon of Gay Rights (because hey, it’s probably the most fun you’ll ever have on a band wagon), but fearlessly educate yourself on Transgender issues. Please, be the same fearless advocate for a group that is in dire need of it’s own wegiveadamn campaign. For your consideration, I submit a powerful spoken word piece on Transgender identity.

Until Next Time,

KillerTofu