Transgender Rights ... Is it enough?

Transgender Rights ... Is it enough?

At the Franklin High School graduation back in June 2014, all the boys wore blue gowns and all the girls wore white gowns, as per tradition. The exception was one girl who, uncomfortable with her gender, sought out permission to wear a blue gown and did so. Then at the 2015 graduation, many girls were wearing blue and a few boys were wearing white. The previous Fall, Franklin High School found itself wrapped up in a debate whether or not to change the graduation robe tradition. The Gay Straight Alliance’s goal was so that all students would wear one color. The purpose was, as one student put it, “really the idea is just that we don’t have students singled out and made uncomfortable on what’s supposed to be a happy occasion”. Others opposing the change argued that keeping two gown colors based on gender was a matter of tradition and that the needs of a minority should not be able to overpower the interests of the majority. Regardless of anyone’s stance on traditions at Franklin High School, it is undoubtedly not the only place where the issues of transgender people are coming to light in the world. Notably, it can be seen through the appearances in social media of Caitlyn Jenner and Leelah Alcorn. Although transgender people in the United States still face many setbacks and denials of their civil rights, the transgender community at large is finally seeing its much-needed publicity — with a few drawbacks.

While the transgender population is seeing an increase in visibility in the media, many people do not understand what it means to be transgender. As the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences put it in 2008, “sex is a biological construct… Unlike sex, gender is a social construct” (“Transgender”). In most societies, with a few historical exceptions, people consider biological sex to be the determining factor of one’s gender. Someone whose gender internally does not align with his or her physical sex is transgender. Conversely, most people, whose sex and gender align, are often referred to as cisgender. Feeling different from one’s assigned sex was commonly known as gender identity disorder until 2013, when the DSM abandoned the term for the term gender dysphoria (APA). Often, transgender people will dress as their preferred genders, and in some cases they may seek surgery to make their bodies match their ideas of themselves. However, not all transgender people opt to get surgery due to its cost or its having mixed outcomes or for other personal reasons (“Transgender”). Many more transgender people seek out hormone therapy, instead of or in addition to surgery, as it is cheaper and simpler than surgeries. As a result, many people associate a supposedly successful transition with a complete physical change using hormones and surgeries. As transgender people get more of the spotlight in the media, people will hopefully soon realize that one does not need to have surgery and/or hormones to be a real transgender person.

Historically in the United States, transgendered people as well as the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities faced discrimination; in 1953, Eisenhower “issued an executive order barring gay men and lesbians from all federal jobs. Many state and local governments and private corporations did the same”. However, it is imperative to realize that the transgender community is not exactly the same as the gay community and faces its own needs and problems. Because of the recent legalizations of gay marriage in many states starting in 2004, the gay community has seen increasing rights and acceptance in the country over the past decade. However, the transgender community is at least one step behind the gay community in the eye of the public, and it just now is beginning to see the publicity that will hopefully lead to a greater acceptance of transgender individuals.

Back in April 2015, Caitlyn Jenner, a former Olympic athlete and a member by marriage of the Kardashian clan, came out as a transgender woman, which “made him among the highest-profile people to publicly come out as transgender” (Slotnik). Although there are other transgender celebrities, such as Laverne Cox, Jenner is one of the first people who was already famous before her transition to come out. In the interview in which Jenner came out,

Ms. Sawyer told him that his Kardashian years… made people wonder whether this too was a publicity stunt. “Yeah, right,” he drawled. Instead, he reframed his reality show career as the price he paid to create a platform for his new calling. “Yeah, I know,” he said, referring to what Ms. Sawyer described as “a shameless selling of everything.” He said this was different. “But what I am doing is going to do some good and we’re going to change the world. I really firmly believe that.” .

In trying to transition in this way despite her appearances on reality TV, Jenner is making a leap forward for transgender publicity. As Sonya Bell put it, “he didn’t just tell us he’s transitioning. He showed us what that really means”. Her article compares the year leading up to his coming out with the year leading up to Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out in 1997; the media was all over each of their cases, trying to figure them out. However, “this sentiment betrays a basic misunderstanding: that queer and trans people are hiding something from you, rather than just trying to figure things out” . By coming out and being honest in her transition rather than disappearing from the public eye for a year and coming back as a woman, Jenner showed some of the honest and messy side of transitioning, something that many transgender people need to see to realize that they are not alone, and something everyone else needs to see so that they can better understand transgender people.

 

On her Tumblr, Laverne Cox, an actress known for her role in Orange is the New Black, wrote about how she admires Jenner and thinks she is beautiful both on the outside and on the inside. She hopes that people will realize that unlike herself and Jenner, although she is “able to embody certain cisnormative beauty standards…there are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them and we shouldn’t have to [in order] to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves”. Although Jenner is transitioning with the use of hormones and surgery, her thoughts on them seem to align with Cox’s. Hopefully, as the latter said, despite Jenner’s outward beauty as a woman, people will still be able to realize that not all transgender people are willing and/or able to look exactly like their true gender. On the negative side, the media’s non-acceptance of Jenner before her official coming out reveals something about our society as it is now; as one article concludes about the months before her coming-out, “when he wasn’t the brave and resolute spokesperson, we were mocking and nasty. We were unkind at precisely the moment our kindness mattered most. To me, that’s not called progress”. However, at the same time, it is hard to deny that the acceptance Jenner is now seeing in the media would have been unheard of twenty, or maybe even ten, years ago. Progress may be painstakingly slow, but it seems that it finally is happening.

 

One of the things that may have pushed society in the United States to action in defense of transgender people was the suicide of Leelah Alcorn. On December 28th, 2014, the seventeen-year-old scheduled a suicide note to appear online several hours later and then committed suicide by walking into incoming traffic. She was far from the first transgender teenager to commit suicide, but her suicide note and the news of her death were particularly viral on social media. In her note, she cited her parents’ refusal to accept her identity and how they forced her to go to conversion therapy that was supposed to change her back to her assigned gender. Conversion therapy is “‘a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression’”. In response to her suicide note, a petition to end conversion therapy gained enough signatures to reach the White House, and Obama has since “condemned the practice”. In that way, Leelah’s publicity has been a victory for both transgendered people and other LGBT people. However, it may not be enough: “Mr. Obama will not explicitly call for a federal law banning therapists from using such therapies on their patients… Instead, he will throw his support behind the efforts to ban the practice at the state level”. Supporting change at the state level is barely supporting change or looking for an easy way out of calling for change. A good example would be the legality of gay marriage; it was first legalized in the United States in 2004, and eleven years later, it is still not legal in all fifty states. Arguably, gay conversion therapy need not be banned for adults who seek it out for themselves, but it should be illegal to force gay conversion therapy on minors—the population for whom care and acceptance matters most.

 

Whether or not the government is doing as much as it should to protect the rights of transgender and gay people, the publicity of Leelah’s suicide came with other side effects. Soon after her suicide, two transgender teenagers attempted suicide (one teen was successful, and the other was realized before carrying out his plans) with notes on Tumblr that were similar to Leelah’s, and what remains unclear is “what, exactly, social networks and advocacy groups should make of the dangerous, well-intentioned phenomenon of ‘viral’ suicide”. When people share the viral suicide notes, they are well-meaning; they want the teens to be remembered and their deaths to not be in vain. Additionally, as evidenced by the aforementioned petition, they want more acceptance for transgender youth. However, it is almost certain that Leelah’s death played a role in the other two teens’ decisions to take their lives as well. When the suicide notes, which users on social media try to keep alive, “[reach] certain vulnerable, predisposed populations – say, transgender teens who feel depressed and isolated and helpless, to begin with – it can push them over the edge”. So by trying to keep the memory of Leelah alive by keeping her suicide note on the internet and idolizing her, internet users have, to some extent, made the problem of transgender teen suicide worse, or at least threatened to. While it is necessary that society does not forget her or keep alive the things that led her to suicide, particular emphasis must be placed on how the world is to remember her. As the article “Inside Tumblr’s teen suicide epidemic” puts it, “[the Transgender Law Center] suggests… to stop sharing the words of transgender teens who committed suicide – and start looking out for other transgender teens before it’s too late”. Leelah Alcorn has brought the high rate of suicide in transgender teens to light, and now the world must choose how to respond.

 

The Franklin High School administration opted to allow the student body to lead the debate on the graduation gown color tradition. The result was that students are now allowed to choose their graduation gown color. However, as the one student in 2014 did, students could already choose their graduation gown color if they needed to and could get administrative approval on doing so. The only change made was that students are slightly less singled out if they do so since they no longer need approval—and because some students, at least in the class of 2015, chose the color opposite their gender not because they are transgender, but in support of transgender people. On the other hand, the result of the change still has the potential to single students out based on what color they do choose, since everyone can see it. The student body chose a desire for some semblance of tradition over the rights of a minority. Although the minority group is a minority, it still needs to be recognized. As one Franklin High School student, who happens to be neither transgender nor gay, put it, “if we had the ability to make all students feel comfortable and safe, why wouldn’t we?” Hopefully, as transgendered people gain more visibility in the media, more people will begin to ask themselves that same question—and find that there is no reason not to.