American Athens

During the last couple of months, through both academic work and personal exploration, I have become interested in gender identity discrimination as a human rights and social justice issue. I felt that since the local blogging community and in particular the straight, white, male, liberal blogging community has not yet taken very much interest in the topic that I would use AA as starting point for this much needed dialogue.

Right here in the Commonwealth, legislation to outlaw discrimination on the basis of “gender identity or expression” was introduced Jan 10, 2007, by lead sponsors Representative Carl Sciortino and Represenative Byron Rushing (This is another of the many issues where Rep. Rushing has been the first of his colleagues to take a stand on, I love this man). House Bill #1722, “An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes,” sends a clear message that transgender and gender non-conforming people in our communities should be able to work, go to school, and live without fear. This bill will add Massachusetts to 9 other states, Washington D.C., and 81 counties and cities including Boston, Cambridge, and Northampton that protect transgender people. This bill will make the protection of transgender people explicit, uniform, and visible to the general public. It will provide them with equal protection under the law, and the opportunity to contribute to their communities and economy. Also, it will include gender identity and expression in the state’s non-discrimination statute and will amend existing hate crime laws to explicitly protect people targeted for violence and harassment.

What a crazy idea huh? It is scary to think that discrimination of persons based on their trans or perceived gender is legal in this state or any other. OK, well maybe it is easy to believe this occurs in some states. So where is the problem? Well, beyond the fact that most people are scared of anything that is perceived as different or straying from the norm, the conflict with this bill will most likely come from parents who don’t want one of “them” working with their children. Or, parents who are afraid that someone will go through a gender transformation while they are working with their child and a confusing conversation will be forced to commence.

Here is the scenario that we as defenders of human rights and social justice need to consider: An elementary school music teacher named Ms. Jones has worked in the school system for 3-4 years. She offers music classes to every student of a small 600 pupil elementary school (K-6) in rural Massachusetts. Ms. Jones is loved by her students and respected by her colleagues.

Little to everyone’s knowledge, Ms. Jones has been struggling for years with her gender role and has long believed that she was truly meant to live life as a man. At the end of one school year, with support from a few close friends and a couple of colleagues, Ms. Jones decides to undergo a gender transformation and begin to live both her personal and professional life as a man.

After taking off the majority of the summer and a bit of the fall Mr. Jones is now ready to come back to teaching the children that he loves. But there is a problem. A vocal group of parents who have become aware of Mr. Jones transformation asked the principal not to allow Mr. Jones back and demanded that if Mr. Jones does come back to teach that their children be pulled from the class. Many complaints come from the parents of younger children who have no idea how to explain this to their children and are afraid their children will become confused or scared and begin to believe this is “normal” behavior.

In many states, the school could fire Mr. Jones on the spot, and in many states they would. This scenario begs many questions: Is this something that we need to shield children from? Why? What are we protecting them from? How do we work with parents around issues like these? How do we begin to engage families who struggle with these issues? No one deserves to be fired, refused work, denied housing, education or credit, or face harassment or violence simply because of bias against their gender identity or expression, right? Yet transgender and gender non-conforming people routinely face all of these without laws to protect them.

I encourage my fellow bloggers, friends and community members to seize this moment- contact your representative, blog about this issue and most importantly, talk to your friends and families about House Bill #1722 and other gender issues.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 20:34 and is filed under lecollye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.