Editorial

Think about how many times you have used a piece of paper or a card to “prove” to others who you are. Look at the people you love; can you imagine being told you cannot be with your significant other, or that you cannot build a family in the way you most feel is appropriate? Can you picture needing a surgery and being turned away because insurance does not deem it “medically necessary”? You may have some ideas about how you might feel in one of these situations, and you may have even had a similar experience, but do these factors rule your life? For transgender individuals, this is life, every day. Very little has been done to protect them from discrimination in all areas of life. While significant progress has been made regarding sexual orientation and the rights of same-sex couples, progress for transgender individuals, the “T” in the LGBT acronym, has not kept up, but because they are all grouped into the same category, less attention is paid to the struggles transgender individuals face on a daily basis. Even the LGBT community as a whole still lacks protections guaranteed to heterosexual, cisgender people. There is no federal legislation that explicitly protects LGBT people from discrimination. This responsibility is left to states, many of which, frankly, fail to protect even members of society who do have a federal legislative right to non-discrimination. Transgender individuals must be afforded these rights.

Though it is not possible to know the precise number of people in the United States who identify as transgender, estimates of transgender adults are at about 1.4 million. This is an underrepresentation, as many transgender individuals are not yet adults, do not identify with their assigned gender but also do not identify as transgender, or are simply not comfortable responding affirmatively to surveys. While 1.4 million people is a very small percentage of the U.S. population, the reality of being transgender in this country affects those individuals in significant, striking ways. According to the United States Transgender Survey (USTS) from 2015, which had nearly 28,000 respondents, 29 percent of respondents were living in poverty, compared to 14 percent of the general US population at the time, and 15 percent experienced unemployment, compared with five percent of the general US population at the time. The number of respondents who have attempted suicide in their lifetime was nine times higher than the US rate, and the number who had attempted just in the previous year was 12 times higher. The debate over public restrooms causes more than half of the respondents to avoid using them altogether. A third of respondents reported limiting their food and drink intake so they would not be tempted to use a public restroom, and eight percent reported getting urinary tract and kidney infections in the previous year because they were too uncomfortable or afraid to go. These are just a few examples of the disproportionate ways the relatively small number of transgender people in this country are affected because they do not have rights and acceptance.

This is more than a fight for equality; this is about the responsibility of the US government and of US citizens to uphold our Constitutional values. Discrimination against transgender individuals is unconstitutional because the classification is groundless and because it subordinates a specific group. Rather than focusing on the lack of rights of transgender individuals, perhaps we should question the rights of state and federal governments to decide what gender someone is. If we, as a society, or members of legislative and judicial systems, are not willing to recognize the inalienable rights transgender individuals have to not be discriminated against, we must push back against the notion that anyone has a right to police someone else’s identity. We cannot have it both ways. We must either recognize transgender people and their rights, or we must let them live their lives, without interference.