Transgender Activist Challenges “Baseless Attacks” From Right Wing Pundits and Pols
By Denise Brogan-Kator, March 31, 2023
To mark the 15th anniversary of the Transgender Day of Visibility, TheRighting commissioned the following essay.
On March 31, 2009, Rachel Crandall-Crocker, of Detroit MI, started the first annual Transgender Day of Visibility or TDOV (I was the Board Chair of Equality Michigan at the time and am a friend of Rachel’s). She did so to counter the cultural narrative that transgender people experience only hardship or struggle and are often brutally murdered or commit suicide (as we memorialize each year in November with the Transgender Day of Remembrance (started by Gwendolyn Ann Smith)). She believed the public needed to see transgender people from a different perspective: as full members of society who have made and continue to make significant contributions.
Over the past 14 years, TDOV has grown and is celebrated around the world. I believe it is especially important at this time in our struggle to be part of the American story to counter the negative and destructive narrative that some legislators and far right commentators have been spinning out these past several months.
Recently, Republican legislators have introduced a record number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, primarily targeting transgender youth. In one recent example, a bill in Kentucky passed over the Governor’s veto despite the testimony of the state’s medical associations and parents of transgender children, and which restricts how doctors and schools treat trans youth. It is a draconian measure which abuses trans youth in various ways. It forces youth to use the bathroom opposite of their gender identity and allows teachers to publicly misgender them. It denies them the ability to participate in school sports. Essentially, it forces them to pretend they are not transgender. Trans youth are already at an increased risk of self-harm due to rejection and hostility; I believe this law will result in the death of trans kids in Kentucky.
It also seems clear that we will see a lot of new anti-trans rhetoric from the right wing as a consequence of the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, TN, where the shooter may have identified as transgender. Unlike other mass shootings, where the shooters were predominately cisgender men, certain media outlets and their followers have chosen to focus on this particular shooter’s gender identity. That’s unfortunate but foreseeable. The trans community is not free from the type of psychopathology that haunts the rest of American society, but it is obviously not correlated with it. It is just as offensive and logically absurd to tie being transgender to being a threat to society as it is to claim that being cisgender is such a threat.
In the not-to-distant past, coming out as trans often meant losing jobs, families, homes. The law didn’t protect us. No courts ruled in our favor. And no elected official — Democrat or Republican — stood up for us. All of this has changed – precisely because of the visibility of transgender people. Several states now have positive law on the books shielding trans people from discrimination in housing and public accommodations and the workplace. The Supreme Court, in the case of a transgender woman who had been fired for her gender identity, has ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people in the workplace. The President of the United States (as VP) has declared that transgender rights are “the civil rights issue of our time”.
It is true that trans people used to be relegated to the margins of society. Despite that, brave transgender people have come out by the tens of thousands and stood proudly to tell their stories – most often by the example of their lives, but also in classrooms and courtrooms across the country. Successful transgender people – however you may define success – abound. Trans people are CEOs of billion-dollar corporations, filmmakers, actors, attorneys, CPAs, politicians, authors, farmers, and blue-collar workers; we are successful in literally every walk of life. We are spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings, young adults, and children.
So, the visible evidence that transgender people can be happy and successful in their lives is a sorely needed counter narrative to the baseless attacks and fearmongering we’re seeing in state legislatures and from right wing pundits. On this Transgender Day of Visibility, let’s focus on the positive and appreciate this special slice of our communities, people just trying to live and thrive and add their color to our tapestry.
Denise Brogan-Kator is Chief Policy Officer (Emeritus) and former CEO (Interim) of Family Equality from where she retired in 2021. She is a transgender woman and has been engaged in advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community for 30+ years. She was the first openly transgender person to matriculate at the University of Michigan Law School in 2004. She is a qualified submariner, having served in the US Navy from 1972-1976.
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Denise Brogan-Kator: “I believe it is especially important at this time in our struggle to be part of the American story to counter the negative and destructive narrative that some legislators and far right commentators have been spinning out these past several months.”
