Racial Equality And The Transgender Community

Activist and professor Dean Spade, in his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, condemns current law policies surrounding discrimination and hate crimes against transgender and gender non-conforming populations. Spade proposes a critical trans politics that is superior to the equal rights efforts of gay and lesbian activists up to this point in United States history. Instead of desiring to be included in a law enforcement system that oppresses the people it claims to protect, proponents of Spade’s critical trans politics argue that the entire system, along with all related systems of policing and regulation, need to be either fundamentally

Transgendered people in America have made many great strides since the 1990s. They have encountered violence, lack of health care, and the loss of homes, jobs, family and friends. There have been many phases of the struggle of being transgendered in America over the years. The current phase we must be in now is equal rights. There are many variations of discrimination against the transgendered community. In our society we simply do not like what we do not understand. It is easier to discriminate than to try and understand. We are all created different and we should appreciate our differences. The change must come by addressing the views of the public. There is much justification in the unequal rights of transgendered peoples. The Human

Transgender rights and policies have always been an ongoing debate. In the article, “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics,” Schilt and Westbrook (2015) argued that in order to push gender equality forward, we must consider the rights of transgender people by allowing them to have access to bathrooms that support their gender identity rather than their biological sex. In doing so, authors believed that it would make progress in alleviating discrimination against transgender people. However, in this conscious effort to fight for transgender rights and their access to sex-segregated spaces,

The North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signs the House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which undo all previous non-discrimination legislation, to ban transgendered individuals from using restrooms which matches their sexual identification. The law asserts that they should instead use the restrooms which matches the gender listed on their birth certificates. Enraged civil liberties groups around the country has decry the move as backwards and one which may put the well-being of transgenders at risk. Transgendered individuals have historically been a small vulnerable subset of the population, they have often been meted with violence and hostility. They are seen as a perversion and a dearth of moral values and evidence of societal degradation. But like any other vulnerable groups in society, they should be protected, not vilified as perverts and deviants.

Kidd and Witten define the term transgender vaguely, stating it “describe[s] people who transcend the conventional boundaries of gender, irrespective of physical status or sexual orientation” (Kidd & Witten, 2007, p. 36). This term is a reference for the ‘other gender’ that is not particularly male or female. Currently, within the American society, there is a growing awareness of individuals who are transgender. Much of this awareness comes from LGBT movements and

The United States is a divided society. We like to categorize ourselves according to political affiliation, race, and religion. We are members of the middle, low-income, or wealthy classes. We choose what seats to sit in during a football game according to the team we are rooting for. It is oddly comforting to know that you belong. All too often, however, transgender youth are denied that sense of ubelonging because they defy society’s categories of male and female. The gender binary divides society into two separate, unequivocal categories that marginalizes transgender youth and directly impacts their emotional health and well-being. Society’s collective response of demeaning, shaming, and violence further increases the divide.

When approaching public restrooms, most look at the gender on the door that associates with their own gender. However, some stare at those labels wondering which one they belong in. These types of people are often referred to as transgenders. Transgenders are people who identify themselves with the opposite gender of their biological sex. Therefore, for this category of people, entering a restroom is not so easy. They often wonder whether they should go into the bathroom of their biological sex or of their gender identity. The debate has spread throughout America today. Transgender bathrooms have been discussed in politics, education, and even criminal cases. Both sides of the debate offer valid evidence to support their claims. The only compensation

Discrimination has been a problem for many years, from the slaving of African Americans dating back to 1619, to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) individuals being shot in the streets a few weeks ago. However one specific group of people, transgendered people have been targeted for decades, yet they haven’t had the mass media coverage as other discrimination issues have. Focusing on their physical abuse, and psychological impact and the substance abuse from the discrimination they face; I hope to highlight these issues and show that they need help fighting this discrimination as well, and this isn’t just an individual problem but the bigger society’s issue.

“A man with a man's DNA, Adam's apple, male physique and male brain construction who believes with all his heart he's a woman is someone who's seriously confused, not someone who's trapped in the wrong body,” states Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute (partner of the conservative Concerned Women for America.) “It's misplaced compassion to aid and abet someone's abnormal fantasy and to perpetuate their misery.” Similarly, Peter Sprigg (vice president for policy of the Family Research Council) states that he opposes any act of protection from discrimination based on, in his words, “self-proclaimed gender identity.” Restroom discrimination is only emblematic of the barriers transgender people have to face in their daily life to overcome innate prejudice from their peers, schoolmates, and fellow employees. Why then, while gay and lesbian rights are being so rapidly reinforced, are transgender rights so difficult to protect? After all, how are they any different from another minorities’ rights?

Throughout history, differing views on the equality of human rights and beliefs have often sparked highly volatile and deep-rooted conflicts. There are “those who support varying standards of human rights. Others believe that human rights by nature should be universal, and not dependent upon one’s gender or background. Also, there are those that consider both view points and advocate for a middle ground, which serves to accommodate varying beliefs, but still assert a certain degree of universality for human rights.” (Osaka, 2015) It is because of these differing viewpoints that the debate of sex and gender within our society has become an issue of conflict with human rights and standards. This commentary examines transgender rights within our

Throughout the year’s people have worked together so transgender’s can be treated equally. Transgender have been beaten and treated like they are nothing. Now its time to change this. Everyone deserve to be treated fairly.

The social issue that I chose which affects society today is transgender inequality. These issues are more recently gaining attention and becoming a prevalent topic of inequality within our country. A transgender person is someone whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth. As more and more transgender people share their stories in the media, the social problems that arise from these stories are discrimination within their everyday lives. They suffer from scrutiny and judgment from their peers, and thus many hide their gender identity from family and society. This social injustice can be as simple as a glance or staring, or offensive comments and questions to violent hate crimes. Transgender people are prone to violence and harassment, and often not feeling safe in any aspect of society. They are fired from jobs, denied medical insurance, and being murdered left and right solely for being transgender. “A staggering 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population, with rates rising for those who lost a job due to bias (55%), were harassed/bullied in school (51%), had low household income, or were the victim of physical assault (61%) or sexual assault (64%)” (National Center for Transgender Equality). The structure of this paper will consist of adding all the research that was gathered over the semester, news articles and peer

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has become the emblem to defend the idea that biological sex assignments govern what an individual should and must adhere to. How one should dress, speak, express themselves, etc. Dalton Conley explains that gender “[Is] a collectively defined guidebook that humans use to make distinctions among themselves, to separate one being from another, and to comprehend an otherwise fuzzy mass of individuals.” (279) However, when this “collectively defined guidebook” is mildly altered, many individuals are confused and respond negatively towards these changes. Transgenders are individuals who identify with a gender that does not correspond with their sex, and so embrace the attributes of the particular gender they identify with. However, gender is a social construction that has allowed many to make sense of the world, it has established social norms, and those who follow it have been granted a sense of superiority against the transgender community. Consequently, when someone breaks these gender-based norms they are in many cases treated with no respect and unequally. Discrimination against the transgender community exists in nearly every sector of society, from educational attainment, job attainment, and proper medical attention. Transgenders additionally face difficulties within their families, which are supposed to be the primary source of support. There also continue to be those who are highly opposed to the choices these individuals make,

The issue of gender identification is a pressing topic that almost everyone has input on, some more aggressively than others. We find ourselves in a place where we have to decide to classify people as what they say they are or what the government says they are. In a time such as this, we strive to be as progressive as possible, but it is harder and harder to move forward when the chains of the past hold us back, social injust is running rampant due to the lack of laws that would protect genderqueer individuals from workplace discrimination. “As the national debate escalates over accommodations for transgender people, the new figure, though still just 0.6 percent of the adult population” (Hoffman). Genderqueer individuals are still a minority that needs legal protection, which is why it is as important as ever to create a law that would add gender identity to anti-discrimination laws as well as more genders on legal documents to promote individuality and personality.

According to the National Taskforce for Transgender Equality, 40% of transgender individuals are unemployed. There are many varying explanations for this number and often, people cite a hatred for the transgender community as reason for the high rates of unemployment. This number is startling, and it might be even more startling to find that only 16 states protect the employment of transgender individuals, meaning that the vast majority of states do not have measures already in place to protect transgender individuals from being fired for being themselves. Studies have shown that most people believe that there are already many laws in place concerning the treatment of LGBT persons in the workforce, but the truth is that there are no such laws in most states and, according to how ENDA has been voted upon in the past, there are those who believe that no such laws are necessary. While there is a growing need for ENDA, there is also a growing need for the bill to be more inclusive. Two separate times, ENDA has been revised to remove the gender identity clause from the original document. Both times the bill was more widely accepted in congress, but garnered more opposition from the LGBT community. Along with the LGBT community’s opposition were groups of people that stood in opposition of the bill for different reasons. Many oppose anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds that it is not protecting freedom of speech