Transgender community in Trump’s crosshairs

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/01/2025 (235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What do you think members of the transgender community actually want?

You’d be surprised. It’s shocking.

They want jobs they value and enjoy, and that pay enough for them to live. They want a home. Loving relationships. The ability to take part in society, just like everyone else.

They want to feel safe while they are out in the world — to be as public or private about their own lives as they choose to be. They want the opportunity to be happy. The opportunity to be left alone to live their lives. In other words, they want what most people want.

Right now, we’re seeing an ever-growing public backlash from people who have probably not spent any appreciable time with a member of the trans community — maybe have never knowingly met a trans person — but who accept the fear mongering of politicians who stoke that fear to get votes.

The trans community is the ultimate “other” to be singled out and attacked — small enough and misunderstood enough to be built into a scary stalking horse by politicians who don’t care about putting lives at risk.

It’s being done in Britain, and most recently, in U.S. President Donald Trump’s Monday raft of executive orders.

Trump’s executive order about transgender Americans? “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The American Civil Liberties Union was blunt: “On his first day back in office, President Trump signed a far-reaching executive order requiring federal agencies to discriminate against transgender people by denying who they are and threatening the freedom of self-determination and self-expression for all.”

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sort of discrimination was a civil rights violation: “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” the majority verdict read.

Former president Joe Biden said during his term that the U.S. federal government had to respect that decision: Trump — riding public sentiment tied particularly to the threat of sexual assaults because of transgender bathroom use and participation in women’s sports — chose otherwise.

But so much of the “threat” is fiction.

Bathrooms or not, there may be some small fraction of trans people who commit sexual assaults — just as there are a small fraction of coaches, clergy and teachers, for example, who work with children to get access to children.

And if you really want to stop the majority of sexual assaults, don’t look at the transgender population. As Statistics Canada points out, “Two fifths of all victims (41 per cent) were assaulted by an acquaintance, 10 per cent by a friend, 28 per cent by a family member, and the remaining 20 per cent were victimized by a stranger.”

The truth is that the vast majority of people who are in any bathroom, transgender or not, are there to go to the bathroom.

The simplest way to deal with bathroom concerns is already in place in European countries like Belgium — bathrooms are often unisex, with individual, completely private stalls.

Then, look at the sports portion of the equation.

At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December, NCAA president Charlie Baker said there were 510,000 college athletes. Asked how many trans athletes he was aware of in that number, he answered “Less than 10.” Yet it’s classed as a crisis.

The trans community is a small and easy target.

Make no mistake: these sorts of changes are putting lives in danger — both by suicides by desperate trans individuals, and by violence from people who think they’ve somehow been given a political licence to attack trans individuals.

Let others live their lives in safety, not in fear.

» Winnipeg Free Press