I remember the day I finally understood gay people. I worked
with a guy named Adam in the last year or so of college, and he was openly gay.
I obviously knew what it was to be homosexual, and I can say with all honesty
that I held no prejudice for them. But as a straight man, I just couldn’t wrap
my mind around how a person could be gay, and that was simply because…I’m not.
It’s not that dissimilar from the idea that as a white male, I could really
never understand what it’s like to experience racism as a black man, or
experience sexism as a woman. Adam changed my life because he finally put it
into terms that my straight mentality could understand. I remember asking him
(and perhaps it was a bit forward, but he was cool with it), “so when did you
realize you were gay?” I totally expected him to give me this story about
suddenly realizing he had a crush on Lance Bass when he was a sophomore in high
school. Up until this point, the extent of what I understood about my sexuality
was rooted in my adolescent years—the time period where I took more of an
active interest in girls. But he didn’t answer like that. He didn’t even answer
with an answer. He answered with a question:
“When did you realize you were straight?” I was taken slightly aback by
the question, and then I started thinking about it. No, really thinking about
it. I realized that it was long before my hormone-driven adolescence. It was
that day in the lunch line when I was in kindergarten—the day that this little
dark-haired girl named Lee Anne ran up and kissed me on the cheek. I remember
how excited I was, and I realized that was probably the earliest moment I could
remember knowing I was straight. And then Adam said, “yeah, it was right around
that age for me too.” From that moment on, I understood what it really is to be
gay, straight, bi, or whatever. It is what it is, and at that point, this wasn’t
so foreign, and therefore, it wasn’t at all frightening.
Fear plays the most active role in this hotly burning social
issue over transgender people and what bathroom they use. Fear of the unknown.
Fear of things beyond a person’s common capacity of understanding. Fear of
something that challenges the status quo. Everyone wants to feel represented in
society. For some people, a black man in the White House challenges their
status quo. Or turning on the TV and seeing two men kiss on How to Get Away With Murder. Or calling
their bank and finding that there is an option to hear the instructions in
Spanish. Or seeing a Mosque being built in their community. Or seeing that
there are politicians who aren’t huge fans of guns. What often scares people
most is people that are different, and have the exact same Constitutional
rights as the people in the majority. Sociologists would call this the classic
social conflict that permeates every culture in the world—the powerful and
those with less power. The powerful like to remain powerful, and that means
restricting others.
We’ve seen this before. The Civil Rights Movement of the
1950s and 60s inspired a lot of other groups to directly challenge social
norms. After Dr. King, hippies openly opposed the Vietnam War and promoted free
love. After that, feminists began staging their own protests of inequality
between men and women. Another movement in the 70s was a mass, collective “coming
out” of thousands of gay and lesbian Americans, despite a society that grossly
misunderstood and mischaracterized them. Harvey Milk was one of the best known
organizers of this movement who fought against, among other things, a push to
disallow gay people from being teachers, for fear that they might molest your
kids. Because few people before this time had ever really decided to live in
society as openly gay, this sudden rush of closet vacating was new and scary to
the heteronormative status quo. People didn’t understand, much like I didn’t in
my youth. This fear generated and then perpetuated by lawmakers and officials
drove an angry movement to deny gay people of their civil rights. Today, the
notion that a gay person is somehow more likely to molest a kid is
preposterous. We know better. Regardless of whether or not you feel it’s
morally okay or whatever, almost all of us can now agree that gay people are
not, by nature, sexual predators.
We may be over the fear and outrage, for the most part, over
openly gay people. People are acclimated to it. Gay people aren’t going
anywhere. They aren’t hurting anyone. And they’re probably having more fun than
you. But the same thing that happened to gays and lesbians in the 70s is
happening to transgender people today. Just like being gay, it is a thing, and
it is here. And…it has always been around. You can find evidence of it
throughout history and across cultures. But it is the newest scary thing to
Americans. Yesterday, it was Muslims. People freak out and then try to characterize
perfectly normal people as dangerous simply because they are unknown and
misunderstood. And how could you understand what transgender is? You’re not transgender. And that’s okay. It
doesn’t mean that these folks are dangerous.
Try to think of it this way. As Adam asked me all those
years ago, “when did you realize…?” A hundred years ago, Freud did some work on
this. He observed that people commonly come to understand themselves as “boy”
or “girl” somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6. It’s a period of time he
called “identification”. Largely, these notions of boy and girl are laden with
social norms, social expectations, and gender stereotypes. We even attach
sexuality with the concept of gender, which is incorrect (look no further than
Laverne Cox’s character on Orange is the
New Black to see that a transgender woman can still be attracted to women).
Either way, little kids learn early on what boy and girl is, and they identify
themselves based on a combination of personal traits/feelings and social
pressures. When you know what you are, you just know what you are. Ask any
LGBTQ person, and they’ll likely tell you the same thing. And if a person “suddenly
decides” in adulthood that they are a transgender person, it’s more likely that
they always were, but only now have the courage to live as they truly are.
What’s happening today with this bathroom issue is exactly
what happened to gay people in the 70s. It’s new and it’s scary, so people
saddle transgender people with all these negative mischaracterizations. Let’s
face it, when people are suddenly concerned with safety of people in the
restroom, they’re not just worried about people who would take advantage of more
accommodating policies. They’re often outright equating transgender people with
sex offenders. They’re viewed as simply men dressed as women, and therefore
entering the women’s bathroom is sexual offense. But the thing is, this kind of
thing has been happening forever. Men have been caught mounting hidden cameras
in dressing rooms, tanning beds, and bathrooms. They’ve assaulted women and
even kids in public restrooms. We learn to look out for this. We inform and
prepare our kids. We keep a watchful eye. If anything looks wrong, we take
action. And chances are, the transgender person entering the bathroom is going
to go unnoticed. They will look the part and they’ll just go to the bathroom,
and then leave. That’s it. They just want to pee. If you see someone of ANY
gender identity doing anything inappropriate like taking pictures, assaulting someone,
or ogling your goods, you take action. It has always been this way. These acts
are inappropriate regardless of whether a person is male, female, or
transgender. And there has never been mass outrage. None until now. Now that it
involves people who are different, therefore scary, therefore demonized.
So the way I see it, this will pass. There will be a fight.
Gay and lesbian folks know this struggle all too well. Society will evolve on
this. With enough time, they will come to see that, agree with it or not, trans
people aren’t dangerous. They’re just people. They eat, drink, love, and poop
like everyone else. And they are Americans. That means they have the same
rights as anyone else, whether you like it or not. Please, can we return this
non-issue to being a non-issue and get back to figuring out poverty and
starvation?
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