I was in high school when I knowingly met the first transgender person in my life.
I worked at the Plaza movie theater in Orlando, located where The Plaza Live is now. It was a second-run Cineplex Odeon movie house known locally as the rocking-chair theater.
I don’t remember much about the brave young woman who lived authentically in the early 90s, just that she was somewhat unkempt, struggled financially and spoke openly about her drug use. I wish now that I had taken the opportunity then to hear her story and offer her the friendship and comfort the world had not yet begun to offer transgender people.
At the time, I couldn’t connect the dots. A trans woman living openly in the early 90s struggled to find a job that would accept her. She struggled to make her outside match what she knew to be true inside. She was out there largely on her own, waiting for the world to catch up.
I wonder what her life might have been like if she were young and transitioning today.
We can certainly say progress has been made in the acceptance of the transgender community, hard-fought progress won largely by people living the experience. Clearly, it hasn’t been enough. Worse, the pendulum is swinging in the wrong direction.
And the call is coming from inside the house.
One alarm bell sounded when Matthew Vines wrote a New York Times opinion piece titled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” I had plenty of opinions about his commentary and said my piece in an interview for a newsletter dedicated to LGBTQ+ media. So I let it stand there.
Then the Log Cabin Republicans decided to remove transgender rights from their mission and rebrand themselves as an “LGB” organization.
Its president, Ross Hemminger, seemed to borrow from the same argument Vines made. “Gay men and women are losing public support across the country, and support for gay marriage and other once-widely accepted rights is eroding,” he wrote. Why? According to Hemminger, young voters’ impression of gay people is shaped by “today’s radical transgender activists with their unnecessary and discomfiting focus on America’s youth.”
The argument from both men rests on an inherent falsehood: that gay describes something innate while queer or transgender describes something chosen.
Vines worries that the word “queer” makes being gay appear “less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.” But queer is no more a costume, political ideology or fashionable rebellion than gay is.
The label someone uses may be chosen. The identity and lived experience behind it are not.
There is something especially painful in Vines’ description of what acceptance gave him. He writes that he “found freedom,” that marriage equality “transformed my sense of self-worth” and allowed him to imagine “a dignified future” rather than being “shunted to the margins of society.”
Those words beautifully describe the power of acceptance. Why, then, shouldn’t transgender, nonbinary and queer people be entitled to that same freedom, dignity and sense of belonging? Why respond to their search for acceptance by portraying their identities as threats to ours?
Vines also lost me when he framed marriage as a covenant designed to reflect God’s love. That belief may give profound meaning to his marriage, and he is entitled to it. But marriage equality is a civil right, not a theological reward. My marriage does not require the approval of a church, adherence to a biblical model or proof that it strengthens a traditional institution. The government must protect it because my husband and I are equal citizens.
Most troubling is the decision by Vines and the Log Cabin Republicans to blame the people being targeted for the targeting.
The erosion of support for LGBTQ+ rights is not happening because too many people identify as queer or because transgender people have become too visible. It is the intended result of a well-funded political movement that has made hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, a central organizing strategy.
That campaign now reaches from conservative activists and state legislatures to the highest levels of the federal government. The Trump administration has used official government language to describe transgender identity and equality as a dangerous ideology. MAGA politicians routinely present transgender people as threats to children, families, faith, women and the nation itself.
When political leaders repeat those messages relentlessly, it should surprise no one that public opinion moves. Blaming transgender people for that erosion reverses cause and effect. It accepts the attackers’ framing and asks the most vulnerable members of our community to become smaller, quieter and less visible so the rest of us might remain acceptable.
The lesson of marriage equality should not be that gay people earned rights by appearing conventional enough. It should be that civil rights cannot depend on how respectable, familiar or nonthreatening the majority finds us.
The forces trying to overturn marriage equality will not stop because we abandon the word queer or distance ourselves from transgender people. They will simply have succeeded in dividing us before coming for the rest of us.
I don’t know what became of the woman I met at the Plaza all those years ago. But I know she deserved better from the world then. Transgender people deserve better from us now.
Stay visible. Stay Strong. Support each other.
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