On Monday the editorial staff of the New York Times launched a series about transgender rights.
Transgender Today used up the entirety of the space usually used for editorials (usually three articles).
One of the great things about an editorial page is that you can decide to make a big deal out of something, and we decided to make a big deal out of transgender equality.
There has been progress in this area, but there is a long way to go. This is not a front-burner issue for people, and we hope to make it one. We want policy makers to read this and think about policies they need to change.
--Andrew Rosenthal
The first entry in a presumed series is The Quest for Transgender Equality, which starts with
A generation ago, transgender Americans were widely regarded as deviants, unfit for dignified workplaces, a disgrace for families. Those who confided in relatives were, by and large, pitied and shunned. For most, transitioning on the job was tantamount to career suicide. Medical procedures to align a person’s body with that person’s gender identity — an internal sense of being male, female or something else — were a fringe specialty, available only to a few who paid out of pocket.
Coming out meant going through life as a pariah.
and concludes with
A generation from now, scientists will most likely know more about gender dysphoria and physicians will undoubtedly have found better ways to help people transition. This generation should be the one that stopped thinking that being transgender is something to fear or shun.
The comments brought some criticism:
I can't help wondering whether well-meaning editorials like this do more harm than good in the long run. Is it celebrating diversity or just transploitation, making transgender the diversity du jour?
Or maybe this is the necessary, uh, transition process leading to a time when transgender is no big deal, neither a freak show nor some do-gooder's cause.
--Hans Christian Brando
It turns out that comments at the NYT aren't necessarily a class above those at anything posted about transgender people anywhere else.
Gender confused people are less than 1/2% of the population so let's re-arrange all our social institutions to accomodate them.
--Doug
Even has the usual misspellings.
And there is this kind of crap that always rises to the top sinks to the bottom:
I am curious, is it just gender which should be considered a matter of personal choice and subject to reassignment or some other attributes too? For instance, I am sure, there are people who feel that they were born into a wrong race and may feel more comfortable after "transitioning" into a race of their preference. Should society embrace this type of choice? Come to think of it, I cannot name any other attribute beside race and gender, which would not be completely defined by a person's economic status. Maybe a caste in India, but in a western society race and gender seem to be it. Except, possibly, one's disability status. Anyhow, if one is allowed to choose and changes his/her gender, then why not race? Or even if one feels like he is "internally" a disabled person, i.e. blind, paraplegic or with hearing problems, should he be allowed to maim himself to conform with his internal feeling?
--David
and...
Is it not possible, indeed, is not certain that there are currently some biracial/bi-ethnic people experiencing confusion and a profound, even paralyzing, sense of the loss of one or even of the two contributing parental/ancestral identities, for reasons that go beyond the sociological, i.e. as a consequence of currently mysterious and scientifically indeterminable causes. It is in contemplation of this that I am reminded of what not a few Sephardic Jews have said regarding their ancient links to Spain: "It is of my essence;" "I have never forgotten Spain, though I have never once been there;" "It is like the sound of my mother's voice..." Surely these testimonies, however anecdotal, suggest a trans-generational connection of a metaphysical (scientifically indeterminable) nature with an ancient Spain, an essence/or powerful dimension of which lives on to the present day there. And yet how can such malaises of a scientifically indefinable nature, often bereft even of all but the faintest of linguistic communicative formulations, be recognized, let alone adequately treated, when they fundamentally lack the slightest empirical/scientific substantiality? Of course, my argument is that the situation is much the same, in certain fundamental regards, with problems faced by transgender and other 'gender queer' individuals. But why limit the societal focus to but one dimension of what is certainly a much vaster spectrum of doubt within the mysterious expanses of human identity?
--Ludovic
Someone who identifies as The Scold shared this:
This editorial, like almost all media coverage of this subject, ignores the truly horrible levels of unhappiness, psychological difficulties and suicide that afflict the transgendered after the process is complete.
So the fault lies with the Times? Actually I have encountered quite a lot of print addressing these things in the last few years. In my pursuit of an understanding, particularly a psychological understanding I have found close to nothing beyond [I was born this way] and how difficult life is as a trans person.
At what point are trans people going to put their cards on the table? Voluntarily offer their story beyond suffering and discrimination and the pain they experience while they are apparently unwilling to come out as whole people who can articulate their own psychology beyond the broken record we have all listened to for the last several years.
Then there is the many different ways trans people express their sexuality. This is apparently also off the table. So the message is, accept us, don't discriminate, don't pry into who we are, don't ask about our sexual identity, all of this is none of your business. So there are a lot of unanswered questions that trans people expect society to blindly except.
Maybe the road to transgender equality requires transgender people sharing who they are.
Maybe, Mr. Scold, we have been doing that for a long, long time, but we don't have the platform necessary for you to find our stories.
Indeed, many of us transgender folk are also aware that there is a "transgender narrative" and has been for decades. That doesn't mean that we like or encourage it to be that way. What is actually being displayed is the "story" that transgender people have been required to tell in order to get anything approaching respectful medical and mental health related treatment.
It used to be, for instance, a transgender woman who mentioned she was a lesbian might a well have given up immediately, because transgender women were only going to get treatment if they would end up being attractive to men. Surely it wan't transgender women who decided on that requirement.
Did I mention that almost all doctors "interested in helping us" back then were men?
Why do transgender women resent being asked about our genital status? We could turn that question right around and ask if everyone else would be okay with talking abut their genitalia in public and have it be a legitimate topic for public debate.
Or maybe we could point out how seriously endangered many transgender would be (indeed, are) when the nature of their genitals does become known.
Why would anyone need to know anything about my genitals unless we were going to be intimate?
The subject seems to be the ultimate in "up-skirting."
OITNB actress Laverne Cox recently posed nude as part of an Allure magazine series...and people actually complained that her genitals weren't properly displayed.
Is it really the case that one would need to see her primary genitalia before determining whether or not she was attractive?