Why South Dakota is No Win for the Trans Community

Yesterday Gov. Dennis Daugaard vetoed South Dakota house bill 1008 which would have relegated transgender students to use the bathroom associated with their biological sex and had teachers monitor bathrooms to make sure this policy wasn’t violated. Many LGBTQ groups see this veto as a victory, something to be celebrated. While it is a good thing that this bill was vetoed, it is by no means a victory.

Firstly Gov. Daugaard did not veto this bill because he wants to protect transgender students. He did it because he staunchly believes in the republican ideal of local control and not having much be regulated by the states. In his statement he says “Instead of encouraging local solutions, this bill broadly regulates in a manner that invites conflict and litigation, diverting energy and resources from the education of the children of this state.” Make no mistake, if an individual school still wants to discriminate against a trans student, they can and no one will stop them. If there had been a bill sitting on the governor’s desk that said schools must accomodate transgender students and let them use the facilities of their choice, it still would have been vetoed.

This bill does not make South Dakota a safe place for trans students, it just makes it a less dangerous one. The defeat of this bill does not have a positive outcome, rather a less negative one. Is this really what were striving for in the trans movement? Have we settled for what little we can get? Are we losing to the radical right and transphobic speakers who fear monger by going into women’s bathrooms to “prove a point”? If that is what the movement has come to, it is a very sad state.

We do not need to pander to cis people and accept the establishment to make our point. We should not have to lobby for weeks to defeat a bill that demolishes transgender people’s right to safety and privacy. We need to get radical and we need to move away from the mainstream politics that says these problems can only be solved through the legislature.

One problem that is apparent with this is that it is not trans people who are running the show, but cis people. We cannot let cis people fool us into thinking that this is change, Now, I am not saying that cis people are the enemy, but they are not the leaders of the trans movement and their voices should not ring louder than ours. Cis people created this problem, especially cis white gay men, and they cannot be the ones to fix it. Cis white gay men paved the way for these bills by trying to separate themselves from the T in LGBT and to make themselves seen as civilized middle class respectable Americans while we are in contrast self-mutilators who want to enter bathrooms as pedophiles.

These bills have not ended with South Dakota. My home state of Tennessee is next with HB 2141, The Transgender Bathroom Harassment Act. Like a good citizen, I emailed my representative to stop the bill from passing. However, this does not make Tennessee more safe for me. When I go home in 2 weeks for spring break I will inevitably encounter the fear that runs through my blood when I land and know that hiding myself is the best way to keep myself safe. Safety is a basic right, and not something that should have to be strived for. We cannot settle for safety, we cannot settle for privacy, we need more, we need to abolish the binary, abolish gendered bathrooms, and radicalize the way we think about our bodies and ourselves.

We cannot do that until our movement has seen the error of its ways and solved the cognitive dissonance that the last few years of problematic media exposure. We cannot save ourselves until we dismantle this system we have built and start from the ground up to change our strategies and put us in a better position to actually win, not keep patting ourselves on the back with false victories.