Public Supports Women In Combat And Transgenders In The Military

 

The charts above are from the Gallup Poll -- done between January 21st and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,001 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.

Religion Plays A Big Part In Views On Transgender People

The charts above are from a survey by the Pew Research Center -- done between May 16th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 10,188 adults, with a 1.6 point margin of error.

Four Myths About Trans Athletes Are Debunked

 The following is from aclu.org:

Below, we debunk four myths about trans athletes using the expertise of doctors, academics, and sports psychologists:

MYTH: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women.

Many who oppose the inclusion of trans athletes erroneously claim that allowing trans athletes to compete will harm cisgender women. This divide and conquer tactic gets it exactly wrong. Excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being “too masculine” or “too good” at their sport to be a “real” woman. In Idaho, the ACLU represents two young women, one trans and one cis, both of whom are hurt by the law that was passed targeting trans athletes.

Further, this myth reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. Politicians have used the “protection” trope time and time again, including in 2016 when they tried banning trans people from public restrooms by creating the debunked “bathroom predator” myth. The real motive is never about protection — it’s about excluding trans people from yet another public space. The arena of sports is no different. 

On the other hand, including trans athletes will promote values of non-discrimination and inclusion among all student athletes. As longtime coach and sports policy expert Helen Carroll explains, efforts to exclude subsets of girls from sports, “can undermine team unity and also encourage divisiveness by policing who is ‘really’ a girl.” Dr. Mary Fry adds that youth derive the most benefits from athletics when they are exposed to caring environments where teammates are supported by each other and by coaches. Banning some girls from athletics because they are transgender undermines this cohesion and compromises the wide-ranging benefits that youth get from sports. 

MYTH: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.

Women and girls who are trans face discrimination and violence that makes it difficult to even stay in school. According to the U.S. Trans Survey, 22 percent of trans women who were perceived as trans in school were harassed so badly they had to leave school because of it. Another 10 percent were kicked out of school. The idea that women and girls have an advantage because they are trans ignores the actual conditions of their lives.  

Trans athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes. “One high jumper could be taller and have longer legs than another, but the other could have perfect form, and then do better,” explains Andraya Yearwood, a student track athlete and ACLU client. “One sprinter could have parents who spend so much money on personal training for their child, which in turn, would cause that child to run faster,” she adds. In Connecticut, where cisgender girl runners have tried to block Andraya from participating in the sport she loves, the very same cis girls who have claimed that trans athletes have an “unfair” advantage have consistently performed as well as or better than transgender competitors. 

“A person’s genetic make-up and internal and external reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators of athletic performance,”according to Dr. Joshua D. Safer. “For a trans woman athlete who meets NCAA standards, “there is no inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to athletic performance should be treated differently from the physiological characteristics of a non-transgender woman.”

MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics. 

Girls who are trans are told repeatedly that they are not “real” girls and boys who are trans are told they are not “real” boys. Non-binary people are told that their gender is not real and that they must be either boys or girls. None of these statements are true. Trans people are exactly who we say we are. 

There is no one way for women’s bodies to be. Women, including women who are transgender, intersex, or disabled, have a range of different physical characteristics. 

“A person’s sex is made up of multiple biological characteristics and they may not all align as typically male or female in a given person,” says Dr. Safer. Further, many people who are not trans can have hormones levels outside of the range considered typical of a cis person of their assigned sex. 

When a person does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, they must be able to transition socially — and that includes participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. According to Dr. Deanna Adkins, excluding trans athletes can be deeply harmful and disruptive to treatment. “I know from experience with my patients that it can be extremely harmful for a transgender young person to be excluded from the team consistent with their gender identity.”

MYTH: Trans students need separate teams.

Trans people have the same right to play sports as anybody else. “For the past nine years,” explains Carroll, “transgender athletes have been able to compete on teams at NCAA member collegiates and universities consistent with their gender identity like all other student-athletes with no disruption to women’s collegiate sports.” 

Excluding trans people from any space or activity is harmful, particularly for trans youth. A trans high school student, for example, may experience detrimental effectsto their physical and emotional wellbeing when they are pushed out of affirming spaces and communities. As Lindsay Hecox says, “I just want to run.”

According to Dr. Adkins, “When a school or athletic organization denies transgender students the ability to participate equally in athletics because they are transgender, that condones, reinforces, and affirms the transgender students’ social status as outsiders or misfits who deserve the hostility they experience from peers.”

Believing and perpetuating myths and misconceptions about trans athletes is harmful. Denying trans people the right to participate is discrimination and it doesn’t just hurt trans people, it hurts all of us.

5.1% Of Young People Identify As Transgender/Nonbinary

The chart above is from the Pew Research Center. It is from a survey they did between May 16th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 10,188 adults, and has a 1 point margin of error. 

Right-Wingers Blame Trans Woman For Uvalde Murders

 

Right-wingers don't want to admit that this country has too many guns and gun laws that are far too lax, so they look for other excuses. Sadly, they have now decided to blame transgendered people. It's a stupid and bigoted theory, but any conspiracy theory is better for these nuts that facing the truth.

The following is part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Katelyn Burns:

It didn’t take long after an 18-year-old brutally murdered 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before the internet misinformation machine cranked into action. Starting on 4chan, a false rumor began to spread that the school shooter was a trans woman named Sam. Right-wing troll Candace Owens continued to push the false narrative long after it had been disproved. The online chatter even grew to the point where far-right Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona claimed the shooter was trans in a since-deleted tweet.

The woman targeted by the false accusation eventually had to post a photo of herself holding a sign with the date, which was after the shooter had died by police fire during the attack, to prove she was not the shooter. Later that evening, a teenage trans girl in El Paso was accosted by a group of men who taunted her with the internet rumor, insisting the Uvalde shooter was one of her “sisters.”

This is not the first time a false narrative that a shooter was a trans woman has quickly taken hold following a mass murder. In 2015, a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was shot up by a gunman who killed three people and injured nine. Not long after the shooting, the far right Gateway Pundit reported that the shooter was registered as female on his voter registration card, and an internet conspiracy theory was born. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz repeated the rumor in a statement to the press, claiming the shooter was a “transgendered leftist.”

In 2018, a cisgender woman carried out a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, wounding three people before dying by suicide. The internet transphobia mob quickly sprang into action, falsely claiming that cis women aren’t capable of perpetrating violence on that scale and concluding that the shooter must have been trans.

They pored over hours of her videos, picking apart her Persian appearance and voice and deeming both to be inadequately feminine to belong to someone born female. This conspiracy theory gained much traction on gender-critical and far-right Twitter, reaching higher profile figures like far-right activist Laura Loomer, who then spread the false rumor to their followers. After a deep investigation that involved speaking with San Bernardino police and the coroner’s office, and obtaining the shooter’s immigration documents, I could conclude that she was not transgender at all.

And now the Uvalde school shooting can be added to a — growing, if we are to be realistic — list of gun atrocities falsely attributed to a trans person.

This keeps happening over and over again because of the larger project of monstering trans people, particularly trans women, that much of the far right and its gender-critical allies have engaged in for the past several years. . . .

The rhetoric has only increased over the past several years. In 2018, gender-critical feminist Sheila Jeffreys told a U.K. Parliament panel that trans women were “parasites.” As the outrageous claims built, some American conservative politicians decided to take action. In Texas, where this week’s shooting occurred, Gov. Gregg Abbott and his attorney general Ken Paxton have sought to essentially make it illegal to be a trans kid or teenager. They’ve deemed providing a trans minor with trans health care a form of child abuse, meaning loving parents who support their children’s well-being can have their kids taken from their homes by the state as a result.

The El Paso teen trans girl who was assaulted by a group of grown men on Tuesday tried to report the incident to her local police department, but the police refused to file an assault report. The 17-year-old tried to contact a local LGBTQ support center but was turned away because the center had stopped providing services to trans people; it became too risky after Abbott’s bill went into effect. She was eventually forced to contact an Indiana-based LGBTQ support line, which also tried to help her report the assault to the police, who again declined to take a report.

The hostile environment against trans people, so often fostered in far-right chat rooms and social media platforms, is amplified largely by right-wing and centrist media. It’s helped create fertile ground for open transphobia, where trans people are easily blamed for every societal ill, even a deadly school shooting. You don’t get to this place where trans people are consistently falsely slandered and denied legal and emotional support through civilized or informed debate. You get here by demonizing a tiny, near powerless minority.

That’s been the endgame for most of the media makers who push these ridiculous transphobic narratives. Let’s keep that in mind the next time you hear some outrageous story about something a trans person allegedly did.

Life In The U.S. Is Dangerous For The Trans Community

The following is part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Katelyn Burns (the first openly trans Capitol Hill journalist in this country's history):

To be a member of the trans community is to be intimately familiar with death. When I first came out as trans in 2016, I quickly became friends with a younger trans woman who later took her own life. The risk of death or losing a friend or loved one seems to be ever present for trans people, and this year a record 47 trans people have been lost to violence.

The number of trans people murdered has grown each year over the last decade. At the same time, we’re seeing a simultaneous growing chorus of anti-trans objectors trying to poke holes in the statistics.

A common anti-trans refrain includes a makeshift calculation that takes the number of murdered trans people and divides that number by estimates of the size of the U.S. trans population to infer that statistically trans people are actually safer than the general population.

This argument falls apart when you consider that most trans victims of violence are not initially reported as trans in police reports, with many departments instead using language like “a man in women’s clothes” in news releases. This adds an extra layer of verification on the part of local news organizations when confirming the identities of trans murder victims. While improvements in this reporting have happened in recent years (and is likely the primary cause of the increase in confirmed reports of trans victims), the gutting of local news infrastructure means the full extent of anti-trans violence is likely to never be fully realized.

Another anti-trans argument points out that we can never know if a murder victim was actually killed because they were trans or for some other reason. This is true, at least in part, but misses the full picture. We know trans people are much more likely to live in poverty than the general population. Trans people are chronically unemployed or underemployed due to discrimination, and poverty is a large predictor of risk to violence.

But both of these arguments fail to capture the full scope of trans lives and our experiences with violence. . . .

Combined with an extended conservative media campaign against trans people in general, the end result is an America in which trans people not only feel unwelcome, but also unsafe.

This is, in the end, the entire point of anti-trans activism, even those doing back-of-the-envelope math to naysay trans murder statistics. None of this actually helps trans people in any way. Instead, trans people need protection, both in life and in law.

The Equality Act, which would include trans people under existing federal civil rights law, would go a long way in protecting trans lives. It’s currently dead in the Senate, as Democrats don’t have the votes to break a threatened filibuster.

The U.S. Public's View On Transgender Rights

The charts above are from a recent YouGov Poll -- done between August 25th and 31st of a national sample of 1,000 adults. The poll has a 3.6 point margin of error.

Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Anti-Transgender Laws

 

Republicans love to play on the fears of their supporters. And they have found a new group they believe they can discriminate against to get votes -- the transgender community. Republican legislatures in several states are passing laws that make it legal to discriminate against them -- especially those who are children.

But they are once again making a mistake. Their right-wing evangelical base make love these new laws legalizing discrimination, but this new poll shows that most Americans do not. They want all Americans to enjoy the same right.

The charts above are from the new PBS NewsHour / NPR / Marist Poll -- done between April 7th and 13th of a national sample of 1,066 adults, with a 3.5 point margin of error.