Transphobia

 

I was driving home from work last week and I saw this bumper sticker on the back of a pickup truck. I know many people who would smirk or laugh at this.

I did neither. I was furious.

Someone had the audacity to make a belittling comment on the trans and non-binary community.

Some caveats here:  I am neither transgender nor non-binary. I am a cisgender white male. I am not heterosexual. I am bisexual, but that is the only thing that marks me as somewhat different.

I understood what the person was saying who made the argument. They wanted to present the idea that someone who identifies as another gender other than the one they were assigned for at birth is as silly as a pickup truck identifying as a hybrid Prius.

What they accomplished instead was to belittle everyone who is transgender or non-binary. The person who owned this vehicle is a bully. Pure and simple. Besides that, their argument was a false equivalency.

I feel very ill-equipped to speak for transgender and non-binary people. I do not intimately know the struggles they go through. I can only rattle off some statistics.

According to the US Transgender Survey conducted in 2015, 81.7% of all transgender and non-binary people have contemplated suicide. What is even more concerning is that 40.4% of transgender/non-binary people have actually attempted suicide. According to the Human Rights Commission, one of the main reasons for suicide among transgender people is "family rejecting, bullying and harassment."

I work and have worked with colleagues who identify as transgender or non-binary. They are great people, some of the best people I know. They do not deserve to be belittled or put down.

I am not here to argue whether or not being transgender/non-binary is even an issue. They exist. They are created in the Image of God just as they are. In all our attempts to have binary/dualistic/black-and-white solutions, we always forget the gray areas. We should not take an ancient poem from Genesis and say that this poem debunks people who are transgender. That was never the attempt of the person who wrote it.

What is the matter with people? In a word:  Fear. Fear of what is different. How do people react to fear? If they do so intelligently, they study and get to know why something is different from them. If they do so foolishly, they bully. They belittle. They eventually end up dehumanizing someone else.

This is not something new. It seems to happen each decade. We see this in racism: one group of people believing themselves to be superior to another group of people based on the melanin in their skin. We see this in religion:  one sect believing themselves to possess the only truth to the exclusion of all others.

It starts off small, like bumper stickers, but then escalates to legal battles and then outright persecution, including murder. I am furious when I see how various governments enact laws that protect no one, but bully an already repressed people group.

What can you do? Speak up. Do not be silent. If a transgender/non-binary person says they are a particular gender, believe them. If they tell you what their name is, do not call them by their old name. This is called "deadnaming" and is quite offensive. Something very polite to do is also respect the pronouns people use.

One of my favorite teachings by Jesus is a simple one:  "You should treat people the same way that you want people to treat you." (Matthew 7:12 CEB) If people would do that, we would have actual peace in this world.