Opinion | Criminal indifference 

Late last year, I traveled from my home in Huntsville to attend a friend’s wedding in northern Virginia. While I was there, I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The election had concluded with Trump’s victory, and there was an air of uncertainty around the fate of transgender Americans. I hoped that I could look to the battle for racial justice and find wisdom. 

I was introduced to author James Baldwin. Somehow, in my time on this earth, I had never heard of him. I found myself completely engrossed. Of all the civil rights figures I learned about that day, his words were the most emotionally rousing and compelling. One quote in particular became the object of my obsessive rumination: 

“A complex thing can’t be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.” 

It was part of a longer answer to the question: “What is it like to be black in America?” In his response, Baldwin spoke of being in a constant state of rage at the indifference of white people in the face of rampant injustice. The rage he described was familiar. I could feel his pain, his pain caused by people careless to his plight, and his frustration with their monumental ignorance. It felt like Baldwin had captured what it is like to be the target of discrimination in a manner so succinct, so logical, and so human that it managed to travel over 60 years into the future and plant itself in my mind. 

I found myself looking at the battle faced by transgender Americans. I looked at times I struggled to describe what it’s like to be a trans woman to a friendly and attentive audience. I juxtaposed that with the larger, more prevalent audiences that have been conditioned into apathy and hostility by a well-funded deluge of propaganda. I could feel the rage building into a desire to scream some simple magic words that would get the point across, but those words don’t exist. They don’t exist because the truth is complicated. Being transgender is complicated. 

And while that long battle to explain this complexity is waged, transgender inmates will continue to suffer sexual violence at rates far exceeding those of general prison populations. Transgender people will continue to experience unemployment at nearly twice the rate of their cisgender counterparts, and they will continue to be overrepresented in the homeless population. Trans youth will continue to suffer under gender affirming care bans, sports bans and bathroom bans. They will still face higher rates of bullying than their cisgender peers, and they will still have higher rates of anxiety, depression, low self esteem and suicidal ideation. All while one of Alabama’s U.S. senators says that parents who affirm their trans children are child abusers, and that these children should fear their parents. 

And this will all occur, as Baldwin said, “in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference.” This will all occur in the presence of propaganda that tries to convince people that, somehow, trans people deserve this. Trans youth with no support will continue to take their own lives, trans women forced into men’s prisons will continue to be raped, and the rich will get richer. The rich will get richer while rubbing elbows with the president, destroying labor protections and environmental regulations, and spending millions of dollars trying to make people inconsolably angry about a volleyball team with a trans woman on it. 

Estimates put trans people at approximately 1 percent of the population, which means most people have never had an earnest interaction with a trans person before. Because of this lack of visibility, most people hold onto stereotypes and misunderstandings about trans people, many of which are boosted by groups like the Heritage Foundation and the ironically named Alliance Defending Freedom. People believe in a caricature of what a trans person is and see that instead of the person behind it. 

I have seen this caricature take hold in real time in circumstances where I choose to divulge that I am a trans woman. People who originally perceived me as they would perceive any other woman will begin struggling to gender me correctly where they previously succeeded, and some will ask me inappropriate questions like “have you had the surgery?” I’ve found that most people are grossly uneducated when it comes to gender affirming care, thinking that one surgical procedure is the end all be all of transition. Many people do not know the difference between a trans man and a trans woman. But perhaps the most poisonous misunderstanding is the belief that trans people are choosing a particular path or lifestyle, as if gender is a thing we wear for fun or frivolity and we can simply remove it as if it’s a costume. 

If there is one thing to remember from this article, it is this: We cannot stop being trans. Gender affirming care saved my life and it has saved the lives of millions of other trans people. Becoming myself after years of struggle and repression has changed virtually every facet of my life for the better. The proposition that we could simply “go back” is as ludicrous as it is heartless, but there aren’t enough trans people to stand up to government abuse. We need cisgender people on our side, just as Baldwin needed white people on his side. 

The question is, are you going to care?