Dr Gabrielle Hosein
March 31 marked International Transgender Day of Visibility. One of its goals is to raise awareness about discrimination of transgender people worldwide.
I was reminded about how important this is after hearing a conversation between two women last week.
The first woman began a story about a transwoman – a person who was assigned to the category “male” at birth but who chooses to live and identify as a girl or woman at some point in their lives.
Of course, the story was about a transwoman in a women’s locker room at a gym and how a woman who felt this was inappropriate and threatening was the one that was removed for being discriminatory.
“Can you believe?” I overheard the first woman exclaiming.
“They have more rights than us!” responded the second.
I was aghast and stood there wondering if this was one of those moments when 21st-century Jesus would weep.
First, transgender people do not have more rights than “us.” They experience discrimination in housing, employment, police protection, schooling and health care, particularly transwomen, because they defy rules of manhood.
Trans people face risk of bullying, stigma and violence potentially anywhere and anytime for not fitting expectations regarding how they should identify, look and live.
They often have families that do not accept them and navigate its psychological costs.
For example, last month, I had to help a teenager, who appeared as a tall, dreadlocked man but who identified as a woman, remember she deserves better than suicide.
Trans people make livable lives out of hugely prejudicial contexts, but they do not come close to having rights, and certainly not more than those whose sex, gender and sexuality conform to patriarchal expectations as institutionalized across the state and law, the labor market, family, education system, religion and media.
Identifying as women, transwomen can face sexism, homophobia, transphobia and male sexual violence.
Somehow, bathrooms have become a locus of the backlash to trans rights, just like patriarchal men used to take the vast complexity of legitimate global feminist issues and simplistically reduce them to who opens the door.
Separate bathrooms by sex provide safety and privacy for women (including trans women) from male strangers. Unfortunately, this is well justified by statistics everywhere in the world, though most predators are those known and trusted by victims and much sexual violence happens in private settings such as homes.
Ending men’s sexual violence, and its never-ending threat in women and girls’ lives is an issue which the men’s movement has not truly taken on, but it’s absolutely necessary.
However, transwomen are not the same as heterosexual men who abide by patriarchal norms of hegemonic (or dominant) masculinity, and who pose a threat of sexual violence as a form of showing their control over a more subordinated sex.
There are also no statistics that show that transwomen (or transmen) are a comparable threat to non-transgendered women (or men
