On Transgender Visibility: A Note to Cisgender Allies
DISCLAIMER: I am one woman within a vast sea of transgender people, each with their own unique lives, experiences, and perspectives. I do not speak for the entire transgender community (whatever that means) and do not wish to. If you are unfamiliar with any of the concepts or terms here, I encourage you to Google them and educate yourself. After all, why waste an opportunity to learn something new? :)
March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility. For the past few years, I’ve participated the same way countless other transgender folk around the globe do: by sharing my selfies on social media with the hope of our combined visibility making the world a little more beautiful. This year I want to see visibility from you.
First of all, why do we celebrate visibility? Well, generally the idea is that the visibility of transgender people correlates directly with the acceptance of transgender people; the more people see us and know we exist, somehow the better our lives are. In theory, that’s great. I mean, I would give anything to go back in time to my childhood and get those years back, with transgender role models like Jazz Jennings, Laverne Cox, and Angelica Ross thrown in the mix. The increased visibility is certainly helping new generations of transgender kids discover and express their identities earlier and earlier, but the current portrayals and attempts at “visibility” saturating the mainstream media don’t paint a very realistic picture of what life is actually like for most transgender people, or where to go next for transgender youth. Can someone tell me if Caitlyn Jenner even knows what non-binary means yet?
Great, so you know we exist. Obviously, you can’t assign an identity to someone at birth, before they can even possibly conceive anything remotely close to a concept of “self”. And “biological sex”, like gender, is not determined exclusively by genitals or “sex chromosomes”, and does not exist on some ridiculous binary. ***Please don’t erase intersex people!*** Got it? Good. Transgender people are not a phase or something new. We have always been around and we will always be around, so don’t forget about us when the mainstream media has had their fill exploiting our identities for profits. The reality is that visibility is a double-edged sword and the violent, oppressive backlash against us will last much longer than the media’s creepy fascination. Being transgender itself just isn’t that interesting honestly — everyone has some form of gender identity and expression. Is that enough visibility?
While Caitlyn Jenner dreams of golfing at the Mar-a-Lago with her good friends Donald Drumpf and Ted Cruz, the rest of us are stuck in the real world facing an unprecedented relentless onslaught of legislative attacks by Republican bigots just like them. The fight for LGBTQ rights ended the day marriage equality passed and the organizations supposedly fighting for us became comfortable and lazy. Since that day, “bathroom bills” have been introduced state by state as legislators locked their sights on to the next newly visible target: the transgender community.
Some white cis-passing transgender cowboys might have you believe that they are the true victims of these attacks, but the real victims are the ones who get the least amount of *visibility*. These bills disproportionately affect transgender people of color, transgender women, non-binary transgender people, disabled transgender people, and elderly transgender people.And they start within elementary schools specifically targeting young transgender girls. These attacks pop up every week. We barely even get time to worry about our already existing problems, such as trans panic defenses, which legally excuse the brutal murders of transgender women in 49 out of 50 states (seriously). On top of facing increasingly cruel barriers to basic healthcare, employment, and shelter; we are being slaughtered at an unprecedented rate.
You probably won’t hear much on I Am Cait about this global epidemic of transgender murders that’s been taking place the past few years, but many in the transgender community, who sometimes depend on social networks for support systems because of their location, can’t go a day without seeing or hearing about another fucking death of one of our own. It all takes a very serious toll on us.
And we’re EVERYWHERE. Take a good look at this map. This is a map of the distribution of callers to the Trans Lifeline, a relatively new transgender-specific suicide hotline run by an extremely small network of incredibly dedicated people. Keep in mind, this is just callers who even knew about the service, and that actually took the leap to call out for help. Clearly, transgender people are suffering all over the United States and it’s not difficult to imagine this pattern extending everywhere there are humans across the globe. Other countries, like Brazil, have it much worse in fact. I wasn’t even aware of how bad it really is around the world, until the global response to my Transgender Flag filter brought the visibility to me in the form of new Facebook friend requests from 6 different continents. I don’t want to fill this up with terribly depressing statistics, but right now a transgender murder occurs every 21 hours and Brazil accounts for almost half of that. Transgender people only make up less than an estimated 1% of the population so it’s also not difficult to see why our life chances start to shrink when we’re haunted by numbers like this.
So how much more visibility do you need before we can start being treated as equal humans, instead of merely taking up space in your world? We need the *visible* support of cisgender allies standing up for transgender rights more than ever, everywhere in the world. We don’t need saviors — being a good ally means asking us for what we need. We are everywhere so every little bit helps no matter where you are. If you hear a transphobic joke, call it out. Every opportunity is a teachable moment. Silence is violence and we can’t afford to try to get through this alone. It’s 2016 and about time to join us in securing a safe place in the future for transgender youth growing up in the middletoday and generations to come.
