Trans Rights Aren’t Special Rights
What’s special about wanting to have the same rights as everyone else?
I never thought that I was something special. I grew up in a huge Catholic family. Growing up in such an environment, I was just another pair of hands to do the work, a mouth to feed, just another number, part of the collective, sixth of nine.
On my birthday, my father would come home and say to me:
“I hear it’s your birthday; how old are you today?”
It wasn’t validating. I had low self-esteem; I was the quiet, hidden kid who wanted to be invisible. It was too much to ask to be seen and heard, so I adapted to my life as a wallflower.
In the days that I went on to middle school, the characteristic that made young men special was athletic prowess. I couldn’t hit, throw, or catch a ball to save my life. I was always among the last to be picked for any team sport. I lacked any athletic abilities.
Well, that’s not entirely true. On track and field day in 5th through 8th grades, I won the standing long jump: possibly the nerdiest, most uncool event in all sports. Nobody ever asked to have a horizontal jump-off: “Oh yeah! I bet I can jump further than you!”
Even when I became a young rebel and hung out with the wild crowd, I was still the shy kid in the corner who blended in and never stood out. So, I don’t have a historical sense of being treated as something special.
I recently got my first Medium post boosted for broader circulation, and it’s been an interesting experience. I knew there would be a certain number of folks who would completely ignore the substance of the article and use the comments to go off on transgender rights.
Two comments stated something I found most odd. They claimed that:
Trans rights are Special rights.
I am still trying to figure out where this notion originated from. I always think there’s a certain amount of zeitgeist regarding these accusations. People will see a Fox News broadcast where the personality will accuse the transgender community of asking for special rights, and off we go…
When we frame the discussion of transgender rights as special rights, we fall down the rabbit hole of gender essentialist logic.
Following the logic, a fixed genetic binary endows certain rights on classes of individuals: Men and Women are considered separate but equal (not really, but that’s another discussion).
Transgender folks, by insisting that we are treated as the opposite of our genes, subvert and break down these social frameworks. They frame it as: by accessing women’s spaces, I am not just asking but demanding to be treated as something out of the ordinary, “something special”. A special exception to a rule that has worked fine for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
I always have to remember to put on my tiara when using the Ladies toilet because, you know, I am so damned special. And no talking or farting allowed in the ladies; those are the rules.
The idea of demanding special rights also reinforces the insidious notion that being transgender is a “mental health issue.” Because when you want to dehumanize a group of people, the easiest way to do so is to question their mental fitness.
Tiara or not, my perspective on life and privilege has changed radically over the past five years. I want to be treated like just one of the gals, nothing special about it. And this is the truth of my life. Is it ok to say that I am an extraordinary woman living an ordinary woman’s life?
Last month, I attended a Pride event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I met three couples whose presence at that event said everything about what it means to be transgender at this moment in time.
They all were Transgender Refugees.
Four from Florida and two from Texas. When you have to leave your home, job, friends, and family because legislation has made it impossible to continue living in a state, does anyone believe Transgender refugees are fleeing their homes because they want special treatment?
This was the first time in our “free” country that I met anyone who had to flee from where they lived because of legislation. They had left because they could no longer receive medical care. The whole point in places like Florida is to make transgender healthcare (for adults and children) so onerous, so expensive, and difficult to obtain that the average person will stop seeking treatments.
I had always believed that this was a country where freedom reigned. Do the words on the Liberty Bell mean anything?
Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.
All inhabitants.
Not some inhabitants, not just the good, private, and reasonable inhabitants. We are not asking to be treated as something special; we are asking for those rights all other Americans take for granted.
The truth is: Transgender rights are human rights. Nothing more, nothing less.
