Time magazine (5/29/14) declared a “transgender tipping point” in 2014, but corporate media continue to treat trans identity as a matter of controversy.
The New York Times (10/21/18) received access to a memo from the Trump administration calling for the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt a definition of sex founded on “a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The memo called for a definition that assumed a male/female sex binary, determined by the sex assigned to a person at birth based on genital appearance. Four days after this decision, the Department of Justice argued that it is legal to discriminate against transgender people in issues of employment.
Many in the media have been quick to denounce the Trump administration in the wake of these actions—without, however, assessing the ways that media coverage of trans issues have set the stage for this formalized discrimination. Ever since the so-called “trans tipping point”—how Time magazine (5/29/14) characterized the spate of attention given to Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox—news media have been fascinated with transgender issues, often using the controversial nature of transgender rights to attract readership. Media outlets have featured many pieces over the last few years that do not simply sensationalize transgender lives, but attempt to frame them as up for debate.
This framing is not new for news media. Writing for the “culture wars” section of The Cut (2/7/16), Jesse Singal previously wrote on the firing of sexologist Kenneth Zucker, who is most famous for arguing against accepting the gender identification of transgender youth. Singal framed Zucker’s firing, from the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto, as the result of transgender activists who were opposed to the questions Zucker is asking. This was depicted as an important debate being been shut down—“allowing a vital scientific question…to be decided by activists.”
Jesse Singal (The Cut, 2/7/16) treated gender identity as a debate club topic.
The underlying assumption of this piece was that transgender lives are up for debate in the first place, and that scientific authorities ought to be a vocal voice in this debate. For Singal, the fact that these authorities deny transgender individuals’ self-identification was less important than the necessity of debate. What was striking about Singal’s piece was the way that it framed transgender individuals as a controversy that needs to be resolved, not by transgender individuals themselves, but through emphasizing the voices of those who study and often speak over transgender individuals. Implicit in Singal’s call for debate is the paternalistic assumption that Zucker is more capable of understanding transgender issues than transgender individuals are.
Singal’s piece was particularly pertinent for understanding the Trump administration’s actions, given that the administration specifically appealed to an “objective” and scientific definition of sex. This appeal mirrors Singal’s own framing of self-identification and science as at odds, and justifies scientists and experts speaking over transgender individuals.
By “twisted social norms,” the Washington Post headline (1/17/17) means the “left’s ultimate aim…to abolish gender distinctions entirely.”
The opinion sections of online news sites have also facilitated the idea that human rights are a “controversy” if the humans are transgender. For example, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post (1/17/17), Thomas Wheatley argues that while allowing transgender people to use their own genders’ bathroom facilities will not hurt women, the left “trivializes the debate as a patently obvious matter of civil rights.” Wheatley maintains that this debate is important because the “broader trend toward gender nullification — and its dissolution of prudent, time-tested boundaries of conduct”—will “directly endanger women,” because “traditional gender roles still serve as a deterrent to predatory behavior” (as if “predatory behavior” can’t be an expression of “traditional gender roles”).
By providing a platform to Wheatley, the Post allowed an abstract debate about hypothetical social norms to take precedence over protecting the right of transgender individuals to safely exist in public. While Singal’s piece framed scientific debate as more important than transgender rights, Wheatley promoted debates about social values as more important: “I do not want to vilify Mother’s Day as transphobic or chide basic chivalry as wrongful discrimination,” he declared.
Wheatley attempted to use a both-sides framing by brushing aside the most odious arguments against transgender rights, but ultimately only did so to make his later rejection and insistence on debate look more reasonable. This clearly demonstrates the extent to which Wheatley sees transgender lives as an abstract rhetorical talking point for a broader debate—about how “a wholly inclusive construction of gender…strips gender of all concrete meaning”—rather than as real human lives with their well-being at stake.
For transgender individuals, the stakes are high; questions of bathroom access deal with the ability to exist in public at all. An actual and fair analysis of the issue would take these concerns seriously and emphasize the effects that these issues have on transgender lives.
Acknowledging that trans people know their own gender “has produced a surprisingly broad backlash, from secular feminists as well as evangelical conservatives” (New York Times, 10/15/16).
Likewise, a New York Times article by Judith Shulevitz (10/15/16), headlined “Is It Time to Desegregate the Sexes?,” argued that Obama era definitions of sex (the same definitions the federal government is scrapping) have been broadened too far in an attempt to protect transgender students. The article maintained that anti-transgender sentiment cannot be described as “mere intolerance,” because some anti-transgender activists are non-religious, presenting anti-transgender radical feminists as a more rational voice in opposition to transgender rights.
The article also framed the debate about transgender rights as an issue of “clashing values”: “Religious pluralism requires accommodation of the demure as well as the less inhibited.” While the piece makes several defenses of trans rights, the idea that we need to debate the federal definitions of sex set the stage for the Trump administration to change those definitions. In fact, the administration is responding to the same concerns that Shulevits says we must fairly consider. While the Times (10/21/18) now bemoans the administration’s proposal that transgender people be “defined out of existence,” its opinion section previously provided a platform for advocating these very definitional changes.
Following the release of the memo, media reporting has continued to use the framework of debatability to talk about the administration’s actions. An Economist piece (10/27/18) titled “Who Decides Your Gender?” condemns the memo, but goes on to suggest that allowing self-identification could harm efforts to “keep women and children safe.” It argues that “deciding how to balance competing rights and how to weigh risks will demand careful debate.” The idea that transgender people’s right to self-identify and exist in public spaces is up for debate is itself central to the justifications the Trump administration has provided for their actions.
Outlets like the New York Times and Economist simultaneously condemn the administration’s assault on transgender rights while propping up the framework that has been used to justify them. If media are truly interested in weighing risks, they ought to begin by understanding the intense forms of marginalization and discrimination that transgender individuals face. Unless we start with these ugly realities, any call for debate will simply function to render transgender lives abstract and potentially disposable.
This is screeching histrionics. Ts are not being erased. That which doesn’t exist in the first place cannot be erased.
Transwomen (that is, male women) exist in the same way that obese anorexics exist.
You know if you are ignorant of the subject you are best to keep your thoughts to yourself.
41% suicide rate/try. Mental illness to the max
It seems that Nature creates everything and everyone. Who are any of us to say what a man is, or a woman or a gay person or a bi person, or a trans person. For all of those people who discriminate on religious grounds—-I was always taught that God make no mistakes. It seems that if people are secure in their own sexuality , that they will not be threatened by anyone else’s sexuality –no matter what that sexuality is. Maybe some Shakespeare will help : ” To thine own self be true, and it follows as the day the night—thou canst not be false to any man…” ( or anyone for that matter,)
Your argument is perfectly ok for an individual adult. If an adult male wants to put on a dress and act as a woman he can. That does not however make him a woman nor does it require anyone else to accept him as one. And children are a completely different situation altogether. Child’s reality is defined by adults. If a child is taught by parents and society that a car can be a car or a plane, then that is what the child will learn. You can teach a child pretty much anything, true or false. The fact is that we are mammals. In mammals there are males and females. Masculine and feminine traits may vary but we still remain either male or female. All genuine manifestations of deviation are mutations. Think of a transgender lion, or a tiger, or a wolf. The whole notion is patently absurd, and so it is for us as well.
“I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them”
“Maggie’s Farm”
~ Bob Dylan ~
Setting aside the smug, the cruel, the self-righteous — who lambaste us principally to swell their own pride — it seems to me that the problem reduces to this difference of perspective: whether being transgender is a choice (something we do) or not (something we are). How this question is answered forms the basis for how one views transgender rights.
People who see us as self-indulgent libertines or mentally ill believe we choose to be as we are; as a result, in their eyes, “transgender rights” are not seen as fundamental, and our attempts to enshrine them in law are seen as an attempt to institutionalize deviance or caprice.
They are allowed to believe this; it’s a matter of freedom of conscience. Therefore, the issue is, how is our society to accommodate both perspectives simultaneously? We can scream at each other, but that’s no solution. We can attempt to cram our perspective down society’s throat — the same way our detractors do toward us with theirs — but that’s no solution, either. A real solution is one that respects both perspectives and their consequences.
I think the solution that accomplishes this will offend most proponents of both perspectives; there is something in it for both sides to dislike — but that’s the way it often is with compromise. Prefatorily, I’d like to say that, imho, the mainstreaming of gay people is not the consequence of legislation or court rulings so much the reverse. What normalized being gay was familiarity; straight people came to realize that their friends, neighbors and family who were, surprise, gay, were not so different from themselves. The stereotype of flaming drag queens parading down Main Street in their underwear gave way to reality, and equality fell from the tree like a ripe fruit. Legislation and court rulings were more in the nature of a confirmation, the end of the process rather than the beginning.
And that’s the way it will be with our normalization. We won’t really have equality until cis society accepts us as normal, no matter what the laws say. And that will take time. Until then, this is how I think it should work:
Government must take the view that being transgender is something we are, not something we choose to do. So long as there is a reasonable chance that this is the case, it must err on the side of caution so as not to disenfranchise or discriminate unfairly against us. Government jobs, government rest rooms, jail accommodations, etc., must respect us by honoring our perspective. A cis woman who is terrified at sharing the ladies’ room at the DMV or post office is just going to have to tough it out or find another place to pee.
Private enterprise, however, must be free to take the view that being transgender is a choice, and to treat us accordingly. This means that private discrimination must be allowed. I can hear the screaming. I live with this inconvenience every day. I mostly use “family rest rooms” because I’m full-time, don’t pass, and won’t use the men’s. It’s not pleasant.
In time, what will happen is this: (a) people will come to recognize us as normal, as they did gay people; and (b) private venues will accommodate us as a matter of sound business, slowly marginalizing those who hold out.
Of course, we want equality now. I want equality now. But you can pass all the laws you want, and people who don’t want to accept you will continue not to accept you. You’ll drive their animus under the surface, where it will fester and turn into something really bad. You can’t force people to be good; you have to convince them that being good is in their own best interest.
I’m convinced that this approach is the only one that will work long-term. I am open to being convinced to the contrary.
@Ann “Government must take the view that being transgender is something we are, not something we choose to do.”
By that argument, and logic, those who injest drugs (meth, smack) are not sick or mentally ill; drug addiction is not a disease — nor is alcoholism. This throws out the concept of treatment for these “something that we are, not something that we choose to do”. Any crime commited can then be ruled “somthing that we are, not something that we choose to do” — law is like that. Business law has made all that was illegal since FDR (bank derivitive gambling) legal and we saw the consequences of that.
CalBusiness&ProfessionsCode already forces ‘health professionals’ to cause minors to be dosed with cross gender hormones as soon the minor ideates a gender change — against their parents’ and ‘health professionals’ ‘ better judgement. This is based on psych studies ‘indicating’ gender disphoria is real; buy we’ll just sweep under the rug the new Nature study that shows upwards of half psych experiments/studies don’t replicate – regardless the sample size or derivation.
No, Trans is a drug addiction/subscription foist upon identity confused/shellshocked minors/young adults by a drug industry exploiting a sales niche at the time of life when ‘children’ are under extreme pier pressure, stress, depression, and loss. Read the well, and continuously, replicated series of Calhoun rat overcrwding studies.
Must be Pharma can’t sell ‘pregnant mare urine’ to baby boomers so they sell it to young adults – or maybe both. That is the marketing ploy, no? Every time we goes to the MD, we are solicited a new oral subscription. I’m not advocating Christian Scientist, but evolution worked fine until we started overcrowding ourselves, eventually some gaian species may even adapt to all of our industrial chemical, and radioactive pollutants: like the ‘radiodurans’ microbe in space, or the moths in 19th cent England.
The ‘identity confusion’ situation is has been understood for milennia; that is why all ‘children’ until about age 25 have been, and continue to be, institutionalized or in elementary, middle, or high school; or in community college and university; in military; or in underpaid jobs, and jail.
Traditional societies bundled them together and mutilated their genitalia manually, now it is done chemically after years of propagandizing in the above described institutions.
All overcrowding causes feelings of inadequacy, submission to pecking order, and dispair. Those who overcome the trials and tribulations of puberty procreate, those who don’t fail.
But their failure should not engender the govt giving them special bennies to be picked up by taxpayers or businesses – Trans doesn’t need a bailout anymore than banks do.
Don’t gamble if you can’t afford it.