Fight for Your Rights

More than 40 years after the Stonewall riots, you may think our struggles for sexual freedom are over. But that’s not the case. Transsexual activists are now fighting to achieve full equality, just as other minorities have fought for their rights throughout history. When it comes to sexual rights, the transgender community too frequently gets overlooked. On a demographic level, this may be understandable: While one in every 10 or 20 Americans is gay, lesbian or bisexual, there’s only one transsexual for every 10,000 births. But as a matter of principle, demographics are no defense—these are the birthrights of transsexuals as citizens and as human beings.

The recent repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is one example: Patriotic trans people who want to serve in the military are pointedly left out of the reform. That echoes the appalling decision to chuck transsexual Americans from one version of the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act of 2007. Purported allies of transsexual Americans excluded them from a critical piece of legislation. (In fairness, transsexuals were protected in 2009’s Hate Crimes Prevention Act.)

This cynical bit of gamesmanship is made all the worse by poverty and the employment discrimination many transsexuals suffer. The recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey documented that trans folk are four times more likely than the average American to wind up below the poverty line and twice as likely to be unemployed. Predictably, these numbers get worse when you talk about transgender Americans of color.

Our patchwork of laws certainly wasn’t created with the concerns of trans men and women in mind. Take something as simple as a trip to the bathroom. For transsexuals it can be a cause of conflict, harassment or even incarceration. In Illinois, as a result of the passage of the human rights ordinance of 2005, trans people use the restroom that reflects their gender identity. That doesn’t stop them from being harassed, but it has inspired activists in Chicago to start the T-Friendly Bathrooms Initiative. Instead of protesting against businesses and organizations that do the wrong thing, the goal is to give credit to companies that treat transsexuals with dignity. People get credit for observing the law—a brand of everyday courage in citizenship that, unfortunately, we can’t take for granted.

Confusion over how to cope with gender identity and documentation takes other forms, leading in some cases to discrimination. In fall 2009, proprietors of a gay-
owned Chicago-area nightclub popular among transgender women said they would begin barring from entry anyone whose ID or driver’s license didn’t match his or her presentation. The claim was that the measure was intended to curb prostitution and underage drinking by teens “disguised and using their sister’s ID.” But curbing prostitution is a matter for local law enforcement, and the claim of underage drinking was ridiculous in the absence of examples. Protesters challenged the policy and documented that it wasn’t merely illegal but was being capriciously enforced. One transman from out of state whose driver’s license read “F” but whose photo reflected his day-to-day life as a guy with a crew cut was barred from entering the club dressed as a woman—i.e., showing up dressed appropriately for the gender he’d been born into. He went back to his car, changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and—using the same document that identified him as someone born female—was let in. Legal rights organizations and local politicians made it clear the club was violating Illinois’s human rights ordinance. Before matters progressed, the club quietly dropped the policy, but the precedent is unsettling. If a supposedly LGBT-friendly business was discriminating against transgender people, what’s to stop others from doing the same?

Recent recommendations from the Illinois Department of Public Health could make it difficult for transsexuals to change the gender designation on their birth certificate. It could require trans men and women to have specific surgeries, all of them expensive but not all of them necessary, and all of them infrequently covered by health insurance for those lucky few who are insured. If you happen to be transgender, you would have to pay $20,000 or more to define the basis of your citizenship. As a matter of public policy, the government assigns the out-of-pocket expense to a community that usually can’t afford the bill, which results in a basic injustice: Rights as citizens are only for those who can afford to pay for them. And if an individual has a health problem that would make having any of the procedures impossible because of the risks associated with the surgery, then, well, that person may be permanently screwed.

While it would be nice to get government out of the business of what’s in your pants or mine, the pressing concern for transsexuals is their inability to change their birth certificate. This prevents them from doing things most people take for granted—like getting married or reconciling their employment history under another name and gender. Gender is reflected in your Social Security number. The hope is that this is a matter of bureaucratic ignorance of the issues, since transsexuals are so thinly spread on the ground in the first place, and that public health departments, encouraged by supportive state and local politicians and activists, will listen and learn.

Institutional ignorance can resemble outright bigotry, however. In the past year Chicago Police Department officers have harassed transgender citizens, particularly women of color, on the city’s streets. Officers sometimes grope “suspects” to “determine their gender” during stops and searches, often merely for being transgender in an upscale neighborhood. There’s also the question of how the city treats its incarcerated trans citizens. Trans women can get locked up with men, where they’re at risk for rape or other abuse. If they’re jailed, they can be denied access to medical care. Last fall an HIV-positive trans woman who had been tossed into Cook County jail had her life and health put at risk because she was denied the basic medical care she needs to survive. Nobody should have to worry about being profiled, least of all because of gender identity. Activists in Chicago have been pushing the police to change how they observe the rights of trans citizens, and Cook County’s jail has subsequently adopted these changes, but progress with
the city remains to be achieved.

In the trans community you learn fast that your civil rights can’t be taken for granted. While the fight for transgender Americans’ rights has made considerable headway in the past four decades, the battles fought daily in our neighborhoods, cities and states serve as reminders that those of us who were born trans are still being treated as second-class citizens in ways that the majority of Americans—straight, gay or lesbian, allied or opposed—would find inconceivable.

Our rights are your rights, and our need for the same life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is no different or any less than our faith in this nation’s promise. If we have to work to guarantee those rights, you can be sure we appreciate them that much more.

This article appears in the July 2011 PLAYBOY.