Trans Rights Are Human Rights
Attacks on transgender people's access to sports and public life harm us all
Vol. 6 - March 4, 2021
In this issue: Essay | Read Local | The Big Picture | The bright side | For your earhole | Final frame
Trans Rights Are Human Rights
You may notice that this newsletter is a day late (or not). Like too many things in this day and age, that’s largely the fault of Republicans.
This week, apparently having decided that there’s absolutely nothing else of pressing concern or importance to be addressed in our state, Rep. Barbara Dittrich held herself a press conference to introduce two bills attacking the rights and personhood of transgender people in our state.
Specifically, Barb is seeking to ban trans youth from participating in organized sports in a way that aligns with their gender identity. She’s doing so under the guise of the bills’ misleading name, “Protecting Women in Sports Act,” and even alleged that Gov. Tony Evers would be “sexist” if he refuses to sign it into law.
You can read my coverage over at Our Lives for the full scoop on these absolutely unnecessary, bigoted, and harmful bills. I’m working on a longer form piece that will appear at tonemadison.com next week and in the print edition of Our Lives in May.
I am fed up with the attacks on my trans and non-binary family. I had hoped that we wouldn’t see bills like this introduced in Wisconsin, but alas, the tide of cookie-cutter discrimination has reached our shores after all. Because this effort is very much tied to similar legislation now swamping dozens of state houses across the country that attempt everything from banning transgender students from sports to making it a felony to provide gender-affirming medical care to trans youth. Nationally, these same people and organizations are trying to block the Equality Act (the modern version of the long-languishing ERA). Internationally, it’s connected to similar, misleading, misguided, and hateful rhetoric that’s particularly virulent and insidious in the UK and elsewhere.
Too many folks who would otherwise not go out of their way to target and harass trans folks are being caught up in the movement, too, thanks to the appropriation of feminist language and the taking advantage of people’s relative ignorance of trans people and issues.
I’ll let me friend and derby teammate Tipsy Velvet explain it better than I could:
“What's so insidious about these bills is their ability to hook into people with honest questions and drag them down a path towards some dangerous conclusions.
In our present situation, in 2021 America, familiarity with trans people and trans issues just hasn't quite permeated through our mainstream cultural consciousness yet. And one consequence of this is that, if you're a parent, you don't need to have any hate in your heart for a question like ‘is it safe for my daughter to compete against a transgender student?’ to pop into your mind. For years, online hate groups have been taking advantage of this, using the honest questions of those unfamiliar with trans issues as an open window to throw hateful rhetoric into.
And make no mistake, the decision to go after sports is a calculated move. It's not about young women in sports. In fact, a significant contingent of the people nodding their support for these anti-trans bills have a history of decidedly not caring about the opportunities women and girls have to play sports. No. By formalizing this in a bill, they're using it as a vehicle to get more people asking these questions, so they can rush in and be the first to write hateful comments onto the blank slates many people have on the matter of trans people in sport. It's about pouring gasoline over their own trash fire and wafting the fumes over the entire country.”
In short, this is part of a coordinated effort to further marginalize and exclude trans people and anyone who doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes or the gendered power structures to which so many people still desperately cling. It’s part of a paternalistic, patriarchal continuation of the idea that women and girls (i.e. white, cisgender, Christian women and girls) “need to be protected.” Even more frustrating is that there are some folks who otherwise claim to be feminists who have swallowed whole the lies that ultimately align them with the very oppressors/oppression they claim to oppose.
It’s beyond frustrating, heartbreaking, and angering. Let people live, for crying out loud. Trans and non-binary people hurt no one by being themselves. In fact, our lives are all richer for it when more people are able to bring their full, authentic selves to our communities.
I am a cisgender woman who happens to also be pretty genderqueer/gender non-conforming. I can confirm that the same invasive, bullshit laws and ideas being peddled about trans folks tend to harm people like me, too. I was frequently misgendered as a child participating in team sports, sometimes yelled at for being in the “wrong” locker room or bathroom, “Why is he playing for a girls team?!” and so on. Thank goodness no one ever demanded I pull my pants down or take a genetic test to “prove” that I was a girl. I can’t even imagine the added layers of trauma that would have brought to already traumatic situations. Thank goodness I had access to play on those teams at all, to find community and build my sense of self and my relationship with my body through sports.
To be very clear, I have not and do not face even half what my trans and non-binary friends and loved ones are facing. I am not the priority here. But I think it’s important to point out this aspect of the issue, too. Ultimately, applying rigid, unscientific standards to how people can or can’t participate in sports or public life absolutely creates cascading levels of oppression that touch all of us.
It’s incumbent on ALL of us, then—and particularly cisgender people—to stand up and speak out in support of transgender and non-binary people. You can do this through your everyday words and actions, by working hard to respect pronouns and chosen names, by teaching your own kids about different ways of being and identifying and that they themselves are free to explore without fear or shame. You can do this by calling and writing to people like Rep. Dittrich to oppose her misguided and dangerous legislation, as well as showing your support for the trans-inclusive Equality Act.
Don’t be silent. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Take the time to educate yourself, to listen to trans people, and then take action--in ways large and small--to create a world in which all people are free to be exactly who we are.
Read local.
Speaking of anti-trans bullshit, there’s a fight at the UW over the Law School’s decision to allow a known anti-trans group to table at their job fair, despite the group’s clear violation of the school’s non-discrimination policy.
Dylan Brogan has excellent, if disturbing, coverage at Isthmus regarding more gross invasions of staff and student privacy at East High School. While I’m of course disturbed at the implications for student privacy, I don’t want it to get lost that the reason these cameras were illicitly installed in the first place was to surveil a night-shift janitor on the suspicion that he might be sleeping on the job. He wasn’t, but honestly? It doesn’t matter. Guarantee you that man doesn’t get paid enough in the first place, and night shifts are already hard enough without being told you can’t use your government-mandated breaks to take cat naps.
Ron Johnson is a piece of shit. Also, he’d like us all to die, please.
The Daily Cardinal has a really good analysis (and mild takedown) of a recent claim made by CBS News that Madison is and will be a “haven” from climate change.
A national wave of renewed GOP efforts at voter suppression and disenfranchisement is happening here in Wisconsin, too. If they can’t win fair and square, best to resort to cheating!
The big picture.
“Why So Many Organizations Stay White” [Victory Ray for Harvard Business Review] - “In the United States, white organizations are a kind of social structure combining ideas about race (for instance, who should manage and who should work) with organizational resources. The forming of this structure goes all the way back to the central role slavery played in the formation of the country. By limiting access to property and the material resources necessary to found and run organizations, slavery created an unequal competitive environment whose effects have yet to be fully overcome.”
“It’s Always the Same Lie” [Kelsey McKinney for Defector] - “Americans are being failed in every state. They are dying and suffering while our representatives are arguing over whether to give us 1,400 more dollars in the 11th month of a pandemic. Every level of the United States government is lying to you right now. They are looking you dead in the eye as your family members freeze and cough and drown in debt and telling you that, actually, you’re fine.”
”UK Supreme Court Says Uber Drivers Are Not Independent Contractors” [ars technica] Death to the gig economy!
“Britney Spears Was Never In Control” [Tavi Gevinson for The Cut] - “Among all this trauma — Spears’s, mine, that of many women who grew up in the ’90s and early aughts — I can see why a viewer would find relief in concluding that Spears was always in complete control. But it is absurd to discuss her image from that time as though there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where young women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded.”
“The Case of the Vanishing Senator” [Jared Yates Sexton at Dispatches From A Collapsing State] - “To begin, the lack of investing in public good and public services created this situation. It wasn’t “wind turbines,” “the Green New Deal,” or any number of scapegoats that either don’t exist or haven’t actually contributed to the state of Texas falling apart in record time. It was the relentless pursuit of power and wealth by the Republican Party and the associated wealthy and elite who own them and control government from the state level to the federal level. It was the building climate catastrophe that now threatens every season and every person, from sea to shining sea. This is another stepping stone in a building collapse that involves Hurricane Katrina, countless floods and wildfires, and more tragedies than we have time to name.”
Do yourself a favor and read this thread from Michael Harriot about “cancel culture” and the Dr. Seuss books.
The bright side.
“Buffy Sainte-Marie Is An Indigenous Singer, Activist, and Icon” [Ruth Hopkins for Teen Vogue] Read this great profile of an under-appreciated American folk hero on the occasion of her birthday.
A cool thing you can do: “Building A Multiracial Environmental Community” is a workshop being presented by Nearby Nature, Hummingbird Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee Environmental Consortium that will use “collective study and action, [to] commit to ending the oppression and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in our community and in the environmental movement.” The series begins on March 16.
Take a minute to read Toni Morrison’s stunning eulogy for James Baldwin: “The second gift was your courage, which you let us share: the courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us.”
For your earhole.
Madison’s own Raine Stern rightly blows away the judges on The Voice, makes us all proud. Check out Raine’s original music here.
Add this podcast to your rotation: “Hope & Hard Pills” - Exploring practical insight on racial justice and social change.
Best album of the year so far, IMHO? Black Coffee’s “Subconsciously” [Spotify]
Final frame.
‘Til next time.
Thanks for reading! Hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots.
Disclaimer/Disclosure: I am employed by the Wisconsin chapter of The Nature Conservancy. However, any and all opinions expressed in this newsletter are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of my employer.
“Dirty Dancing” is my queer root.