NO TRANS PERSON LEFT BEHIND
Actress and activist Calpernia Addams sheds light on how trans Americans get shut out of the system, and what needs to change.
As George W. Bush’s eight years in the office of President come to a close, we can survey the damage done and see why the upcoming election is profoundly important to the GLBT community. While many may make easy snipes at his seeming difficulty with expressing coherent ideas and his confidence-shattering permanent facial expression of bewildered petulance, the larger view shows a nation entangled in war, manipulated by fear and shaped by often hypocritical religious ideals that mostly benefit a conservative herteronormative Christian upper class.
If we allow conservatives to enthrone another President, there might very well come a day when we are all swiping our National ID card to buy a ten dollar gallon of dirty gasoline on the way to cover for the hetero office-mate who left for the work-sanctioned honeymoon vacation we will never have.
On a deeper level, most of the rights and provisions that gay and lesbian people want are tied to legal identity in fundamental ways which they never have to consider. Jane Smith will most likely always be Jane Smith, so the marriage issue is a matter of securing equal access to marriage’s legal privileges for same-gendered partners and preventing heterocentric language like “one man and one woman” from being amended to the Constitution.
For trans people, our right to legally claim even our basic gender identity is barricaded behind an often unhelpful, unaccepting bureaucracy of heterosexual faces, and frequently at the whim of a particular clerk or presiding judge.
When a person’s legal gender identity does not match their gender presentation, even accessing justice normally accorded to “everyone” becomes difficult at times, much less the advances being sought by the larger gay and lesbian community. This fact highlights the looming danger to trans people from conservative pet ideas like a “National ID card,” which would tie a trans person’s history of governmentally determined identification into a central national database available to unspecified agencies and businesses. Once identification is codified and centralized into this Big Brother system, a single governmental decision along the lines of “a transsexual woman is not really a woman” could expand into every instance of a trans person’s interaction with government, work and commerce.
For trans people, before even issues like equal marriage rights are considered, I believe we must attain full and protected legal rights as our gender. This will not happen under a Republican controlled government.
Voting in a Presidential election is a simple process for most people, but registration and contact with governmental agencies is required. Many trans people have dealt with rejection by crucial support systems such as family, school and the medical establishment beginning at an early age. They shift to living off the government’s radar by abandoning their incongruent legal identity and earning their living in parallel economies of grey market employment and under-the-table payments. They lack the mentoring necessary to learn basic civic procedures like voter registration, and often are reluctant to reveal or reactivate their abandoned, wrong-gendered identities in order to perform these procedures. The GLBT community, and specifically those in the trans community with the time and ability, could add crucial voters to their rosters by helping trans people accustomed to living outside of the legal system register to vote.
A significant section of the trans population is occupied with simple survival, and another section lives hidden in precarious stealth to avoid society’s prejudice. But there are many trans people who are out and active in the GLBT community, and they can bridge to the larger trans community with some help.
Trans people are often among the most visible representatives to outsiders, so involving, helping and mobilizing this “face of the community” serves to disarm some of the favorite conservative criticisms and empower an inspiring part of our group. I hope that the GLB community will continue to grow their appreciation of the T, and make sure no one is left behind as we marshal our forces in this upcoming push to elect a President who will consider our needs along with those of every other American.
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