This Is What We Face

The headline reads “South Dakota Stands Up To The Transgender Mafia” and it sets the tone of the article in The Federalist.

One of the unique and wonderful things about the United States is that small states, ignored most of the time, can now and again set the big, important states on the straight and narrow path. South Dakota this week sent a bill to its governor that would require students to use the bathrooms and showers assigned to their birth genders.

While the coastal class clobbers bigoted South Dakota on social media, the parents of that state have spoken. Their representatives have accepted the time-honored definition of gender and defied the transgender mafia. That choice must be celebrated and defended.

I have another take on what is happening in South Dakota, what I see is a an oppressed community that is tired of second class citizenship standing up to the bullying, to the discrimination, and to the harassment that they face every day.

This is typically of the way that the privilege fight against those that they oppress… these upstarts who are demanding we treat equally are infringing upon our rights to discriminate.

Recently New York Magazine published a very long story about a respected sex researcher who had been fired for holding and practicing theories about gender dysphoria that may not be spoken anymore. In short, a kangaroo court “independent” investigation found Dr. Kenneth Zucker guilty. His crime was approaching childhood gender dysphoria as a condition most children overcome and urging parents to push their children toward their determined sex.

And it is a kangaroo court because they didn’t the way that the conservatives wanted or when we criticize the validity of the research because the research didn’t have proper controls. As science is cutback in schools one of the results is that people do not understand research methods. They don’t question how the subjects in a study are chosen can affect the outcome of the research.  There is no definitive long term research on trans children, but one thing that we do know is that forcing trans students to use the birth gender or that they use the nurse’s bathroom increases bullying and harassment and also the number of suicides by trans students.

Our children are not social experiments. And they certainly must never be so for radical activists obviously willing to undermine science. Like it or not, this is a fight that can no longer be ignored. A good place to start is by standing with South Dakota.

One of the things that I have noticed is that children do not have a problem with trans students until adults step in.

A Tacoma City councilman put it this way in The News Tribune,

Re: “Protect women, girls and rewrite dangerous rule” (Your Voice, 2-22).

The author makes the case for “respectful dialogue.” However, there is nothing respectful about implying that transgender adults and children are inherently suspicious or dangerous.

Want to discuss danger and violence? More than 20 transgender Americans were murdered last year because of their gender identity. Many more have been beaten, bullied, fired from their jobs, disowned by their families or driven to suicide.

Divisive, inaccurate and fear-based rhetoric only fuels the fires of this violence. We’re better than that as a community.

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This morning I am at a meeting of the Safe School Coalition, which is a coalition of state agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Right now we are working on a model safe climate policy based on Westport’s plan.