Laws Prohibit ‘Transgender’ Discrimination
A
Boulder, Colorado law has just taken effect forbidding businesses, schools and
other organizations from discriminating against “gender variants,” also known as
“transgenders”—even requiring that public facilities provide separate bathrooms
if necessary for these individuals.
A
similar law just passed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while Atlanta added “gender
identity” to its charter in January. And last summer, Louisville and Lexington,
Kentucky, both passed laws protecting transgenders from “discrimination.” With
little media coverage, the transgender movement is gaining momentum throughout
the U.S. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, three counties,
20 cities and the state of Minnesota now prohibit discrimination based on a
person’s gender identity. Transgenders believe they are part of an international
movement to free individuals from “gender oppression”—which they define as
society’s practice of dividing the human race into male and female. The term
“transgender” encompasses a wide range of sexual behaviors, including
cross-dressers, drag queens, transsexuals (those seeking sex change operations),
and even “she-males,” hybrids who choose to go only halfway through a sex change
operation. They remain partially female and partially male in their
anatomy.
Many transgenders identify internally with the opposite sex, and try
to adjust their outward appearance to match what they believe is their real
gender. Thus, a male who believes he is a woman dresses like a woman; a woman
who believes she is really a man, dresses like a
man.
Hollywood aids the transgender
movement
Early in February, actress Hilary Swank was named as an Oscar nominee
for “best actress” for her performance in “Boys Don’t Cry.” As a result of her
nomination, the growing transgender movement gained worldwide publicity for its
cause.“Boys Don’t Cry” tells the true story of a seriously disturbed Nebraska
woman who pretended to be a man. The woman, who called herself Brandon Teena,
believed she was a man trapped in a woman’s body. Teena posed as a young man,
dated girls and went cruising and drinking with a rough crowd in a small town
near Lincoln.Brandon Teena’s charade began to unravel when she was arrested on a
check forgery charge and police released her real name, Teena Brandon, to the
local newspaper.
Her drinking buddies were enraged to find out who she was. In a
violent act, they stripped her naked to reveal the truth. Then they took her to
a secluded location and raped her. The local police did not file charges against
her rapists—both convicted felons. Later, in revenge for Brandon’s having turned
them in to the police, her rapists murder her.
“20/20 Downtown” devoted a segment on February 10 to another Brandon
Teena film called “The Brandon Teena Story,” recently released on video. The
tragic murder of Teena Brandon, because of the natural sympathy it evokes for
the victim, is being used by transgender groups to promote their political and
social goals.
What is a
transgender?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM-IV) of the American
Psychiatric Association lists transvestism or transgenderism as a mental
disorder or a gender identity disorder. While the APA still considers
transgenderism to be a sexual dysfunction, this could change if transgender
activist groups are successful.
One of these transgender groups is the High Risk Project Society
based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The group has published “Gender,
Transgender and Transphobia,” by Sandra Laframboise, to explain the movement and
its goals.According to the High Risk Project Society, “Transgender people seek
the freedom to express themselves and to present themselves in a manner that is
consistent with their own identity, rather than with the gender identity imposed
on them from birth.”
This includes transsexuals, who “internally experience a
contradiction between their identity and their anatomic sex, and usually shape
themselves physically to recreate a more healthy and harmonious balance between
their bodies and their internal world.” The term transgender also includes
“intersexuals,” or those more commonly known as hermaphrodites. “Intersexuals
exist on the biological continuum between the poles of male and female. ...”
says Laframboise. “Intersexuals struggle against our rigid two-sex system, for
the right to physical ambiguity and the acknowledgment that there are more than
two sexes.” Cross-dressers are also
transgendered persons. These are typically heterosexual males who enjoy dressing
up like women. Drag kings or queens are also cross-dressers, but usually
identify themselves as gays or lesbians.Transgenderists are those who do not
“identify with the gender identity assigned to them at birth. ...
Transgenderists generally perceive their experience of conflict between their
sex and their gender to be the result, not of ‘being in the wrong body’ (as may
be the case for transsexuals), but rather of society’s expectations that they
assume a gender identity that is, for them,
inappropriate.”
Transgender bill of
rights
The primary goal is to have all forms of trangendered behavior
normalized, accepted and protected. In addition, criticism of transgenderism is
to be stigmatized as a mental illness or criminalized in hate crimes laws. In 1993, an International Conference on
Transgender Law and Employment Policy passed an “International Bill of Gender
Rights.” This bill of rights laid out a lengthy list of goals and “rights”
demanded by transgenders. The first
of these is the individual’s right to define his own gender identity. “The individual’s sense of self is not
determined by chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender
role. ... It is fundamental that individuals have the right to define, and to
redefine as their lives unfold, their own gender identity, without regard to
chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender role,” said
the document. The “bill of rights” also demands that transgenders be free from
psychiatric diagnosis or treatment based on their chosen gender identities, and it calls for the right
of transgenders to marry and to adopt children.
Nancy Nangeroni, a transgender activist
and founder of the International Foundation for Gender Education, says that
Western culture is “sick” because it “pathologizes” anyone who wishes to go
through a sex change or live as a member of the opposite sex. Society, notes
Nangeroni, forces individuals into two molds: male or female.“This is the
pathology of a sick society,” she says. “The sickness rests not in the
individuals who sense discord between themselves and the mold, but rather the
system that produces the molds. ... Let us end the unconscious manipulation that
traps us in a system of fear and prejudice.” Nangeroni’s views are echoed by
Martine Rothblatt, a transgender who authored “The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto
on the Freedom of Gender.”
According to Rothblatt, Western
culture’s insistence on categorizing people from the moment of birth as either
male or female is as evil as racial apartheid. Rothblatt believes traditional
concepts of male and female gender roles are socially constructed and come from
ancient, oppressive patriarchal cultures. In reality, says Rothblatt, there are
multiple sexes and expressions of sexuality. Maleness and femaleness are on
opposite ends of a continuum, with gradations of sexual orientations in
between.
While Nangeroni characterizes societal
disapproval of transgenderism as
pathological, the High Risk Project Society says individual disapproval of
transgendered behavior is “transphobia,” akin to “homophobia,” the term
sometimes employed to stigmatize those who oppose the “gay rights”
movement.Transphobia, says Laframboise is “the fear, hatred, disgust and
discrimination of transgendered people because of their non-conforming gender
status.”
Gaining protected class
status
Early in 1999, Sandy Crosby became outraged when she learned that the
school district had hired a transgendered music teacher to teach in her
daughters’ middle school. She said she did not want her daughters to consider a
man who dressed in pantyhose to be a role model. Nor did she want her daughters
to have to share a restroom with a man who thinks he’s a woman, she
said.
Crosby and other mothers teamed up with some conservative groups in
an attempt to have the term “transgender” removed from the Human Rights Act.
They have not succeeded. However, in February 1999 the transgendered teacher
resigned, claiming he/she was being harassed.
Parents in Antelope, California also went ballistic in 1998 when
teacher David Warfield informed his students that he would be returning in the
fall as a woman named Dana Rivers. Parents were informed by their children that
Warfield had described to the students his upcoming sex change operation and his
molestation as a child.
The Pacific Justice Institute, a Christian legal group in Sacramento,
filed suit against Warfield for violating the rights of both the children and
their parents. PJI claimed Warfield had engaged in unprofessional conduct by
having sexually explicit discussions with his students—without parental
knowledge or consent. After coming back to school as Dana Rivers, Warfield
eventually was put on administrative leave and, to avoid a trial, agreed to
leave the high school with a $150,000 severance
package.
Allied with ‘gay rights’
movement
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual lobbying group
in Washington, D.C., a transgender is a “broad term that encompasses
cross-dressers, intersexed people, transsexuals, and people who live substantial
portions of their lives as other than their birth
gender.”
Shannon Minter, a transgendered lawyer and member of the
Female-to-Male International group, works with the National Center for Lesbian
Rights in San Francisco. According to Minter, HRC first began meeting with
transgender rights groups in 1995, and in 1996 invited GenderPac, a transgender
group, to join the Hate Crimes Coalition, which was lobbying for federal hate
crimes laws.
In April 1997, HRC invited Minter to a
luncheon to discuss discrimination against transgendered and transsexual youth.
Representatives from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National
Organization for Women, and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
attended.
According to Minter, “Although much remains to be done before trans
people are fully accepted and included in the gay rights movement, trans
activists have done an extraordinary job of propelling transgendered issues into
the forefront of lesbian and gay policy discussions and political
debate.”
In September 1998, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
voted overwhelmingly to amend its bylaws to include transgendered people in its
mission statement. PFLAG now has a Transgender Special Outreach Network, which
includes coordinators in more than 170 chapters.
It has also published and distributed more than 12,000 copies of the
booklet, “Our Trans Children.”According to PFLAG’s materials, “There is no known
cure or course of treatment which reverses the transgendered person’s
manifestation of the characteristics and behaviors of another gender.” The goal
of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays is to promote tolerance
and understanding of the transgender, not attempt to “cure” him of his or her
condition.
‘Worst day of my
life’
Jerry Leach is a former transgender. With his wife, Charlene, he
operates a pastoral counseling ministry in Lexington, Kentucky, and has worked
with more than 1,200 men and women who have suffered from a gender identity
disorder.
Leach says he began fantasizing about being a girl when he was three
or four years old. He played with girls’ toys, wore girls’ clothing—with his
mother’s approval—and became aware early on that his mother had wanted a girl
instead of a boy. “I can remember my first day of school, with my mom sitting
with me on the edge of my bed, letting me know I couldn’t wear a dress to
school. That was a vivid memory for me and the worst day of my life,” recalls
Leach.
He cross-dressed at home—both his parents knew about it. He left for
the Navy when he was 17, hoping the service could straighten him out. But after
visiting a Navy psychiatrist, the doctor told him he couldn’t find help in the
Navy, and Leach had been discharged within a couple of
weeks.
He met and married Charlene when he was barely out of his teens,
confessing his cross-dressing problem to his bride-to-be and telling her he was
healed.
“During our first year of marriage,” said Leach, “she came home and
found me fully cross-dressed. I had hoped she would love me enough to accept it
in the privacy of our home. But of course, she was very strongly opposed to
it.”
Leach entered public ministry and spent the next 20 years working as
a pastor, assistant pastor or youth leader in a variety of churches. He would
control his urges to cross-dress for long periods of time, but then would fall.
His wife kept his secret for two decades, until she could bear it no longer.
They eventually separated for nearly a year, while he sought serious
help.
The turning point for Leach came when he and Charlene met a couple at
church who were willing to spend time counseling them. Eventually, he and
Charlene became associated with Exodus International, a ministry to
ex-homosexuals. They operated CrossOver Ministries in Lexington for a decade,
and are now counselors to transgenders and the sexually
addicted.
Molestation, rejection,
fantasy
Childhood molestation appears to be a major factor causing a person
to believe he should be the opposite sex. “Eighty percent of the people we have
worked with over the last 10 years have been molested,” said Leach. “I was. I
grew up feeling like I hated men and didn’t want anything to do with
them.”
Another cause of transgender desires, says Leach, “is a sense of
being rejected or being unwanted as a boy.” Leach experienced this as a child
when his mother repeatedly expressed the wish that he had been a girl. As a
result, he grew up with a feeling of self-hatred for being a
male.
“Every time a person cross-dresses, he feels like he’s escaping the
reality of being a man,” notes Leach. “It’s an illusory world, it’s a form of
addiction, escaping reality into a fantasy world.”
Leach says that after repeatedly fantasizing about being a woman, the
man disassociates from himself and decides he just wants to stay in the fantasy
world of being a woman. Sex-change operations only mask the person’s sexual
identity disorder, he said.
“The majority of men I’ve dealt with who have had sex-change
operations realize they’ve done the wrong thing, but they don’t know how to
change it,” says Leach. He is currently working with a transgender male who has
lived as a woman, but who now wants to live as a man. Once the change is made,
it is a difficult and painful ordeal to switch back to the male gender. Many
just give up.
Leach quotes Dr. Rene Richards, one of
the nation’s first male-to-female transgenders. Richards gave an interview in
the March, 1999 issue of Tennis magazine, offering this advice to those
considering a sex-change operation: “I wish there could have been an alternative
way back in 1975. If there was a drug that I could have taken that would have
reduced the pressure, I would have been better off staying the way I was, as a
totally intact person. I know deep down that I am a second-class woman. I get a
lot of inquiries from would-be transsexuals, but I don’t want anyone to hold me
out as an example to follow. Today, there are better choices, including
medication, for dealing with the compulsion to
cross-dress.”
“In five years, if not sooner, transgenderism will be legislated into being as an alternative lifestyle,” says Leach. “And if you dare say anything against it, you’ll be cited for committing a hate crime.” Leach does take consolation, however, in the increasing number of calls he’s been getting from transgenders who want help in overcoming their gender identity problems, and will soon launch a website, RealityResources.com, to help provide more help for those struggling with gender identity disorders and other sexual addictions.
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