One year ago, the New York Times published Jamelle Bouie's opinion column There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America (Feb. 10, 2023). Though the newspaper has been generally unhelpful to trans people, this publication was a happy exception.
Bouie points out that Trump, if elected, will "target transgender adults as well" as transgender youth. How do we know? Because Trump explicitly said he he would. The overall political attack is "a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people," and it's "no accident."
Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.
In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.
In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.
Bouie also gives us this important commentary, which I happily receive as a book recommendation:
"Douglass observed 'that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it,' the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in 'The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,' 'and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.'"
* * *
'A democracy,' Douglass’s work suggests, 'is a polity that prizes human dignity,' Bromell writes. 'It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.' All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, 'are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.'"
By the way, I wrote on dignity, on humility, and on decency for JewishBoston in the context of transgender rights. That's one specific connection with my own thinking on this topic.
Bouie concludes: "And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained."
Bonus
Hil Malatino (Trans Care, 2020) might have "critiques of identity and the institutional regulation of gender," yet doesn't believe that any opinion they might hold personally would make it OK to disrespect trans people. That's because Malatino won't "prioritize theoretical rightness over the well-being of actually existing human beings." Regarding university students: "I won't misgender them, at least not consistently or intentionally. I certainly won't wield the rhetoric of 'free speech' and 'reasoned debate' as a justification for doing so. I won't attribute the insistence of students to be referred to by the correct gendered pronouns as an example of 'toxic call-out culture.'"
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