Transgender Awareness Week

It’s transgender awareness week. A lot of my trans friends are afraid right now: it’s not just that Trump is in the White House, but that the Republicans achieved an overwhelming political victory across the board this election season. Under the Obama administration trans people saw improvements in their legal status and rights – but under state-level Republican governments they’ve faced harmful legislation.

Unfortunately, trans people are kind of low-hanging fruit in the Culture Wars. Gender minorities are a very small segment of the population, and they are doubly vulnerable because proposals that curtail the rights of the trans minority tend to be popular with the “moral majority.”

So I want to talk about why Christians should not support initiatives that effectively marginalize or punish trans people, and why we should support legislation that protects trans people’s rights.

1. Bathroom Laws – You can’t talk about trans rights without talking about bathrooms. Yesterday, I wrote about the need for rational engagement in the political sphere, and about the danger of pure emotional appeal. The trans bathroom thing is a perfect illustration of this: the response of the right to trans women using their preferred bathroom facilities is a classic case of irrational fear-mongering.

Pictures of large, bearded men following small, frightened girls into bathroom stalls are pretty much par for the course when it comes to conservative rhetoric about the need to police trans women’s bathroom use. These images are definitely terrifying, and there’s the fear that good Christian parents feel when they imagine their innocent little children being preyed on by strange men in dresses is real fear. But it’s not a fear that is grounded in fact.

The fact is there is no evidence to support the contention that allowing trans women to use women’s facilities places actual women at increased risk of sexual predation. Yes, there are anecdotal stories of women being preyed on by men in women’s washrooms in areas without trans bathroom laws – but there are anecdotal stories of women being preyed on by men in women’s washrooms going back for as long as there have been women’s washrooms. The fact is that if you have a publicly accessible private space in which women are sometimes in a state of undress, and where they might sometimes be alone and vulnerable, sexual predators will take advantage of that. Anti-trans bathroom laws will not prevent this.

But anti-trans bathroom laws do make life substantially more difficult for gender minorities – not just trans women, but also gender non-conforming women. In fact, there is some reason to believe that women who don’t look sufficiently “feminine” are more likely to be clocked as “men” by would-be bathroom police than trans women are.

Unlike the transgender bogeyman in the ladies’ room, the fears of trans women are not factitious. Trans women actually are bullied, harassed, and sexually assaulted in male-only spaces. Trans women really do face higher rates of sexual assault than cisgender women. Forcing them to use men’s bathrooms is actually unsafe.

As Christians, this should matter to us because we believe that trans women are human beings created in God’s “image and likeness,” beloved children for whom Christ shed His blood. There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that He would approve of forcing marginalized people into unsafe situations in an attempt to strong-arm them into accepting Christian sexual ethics. Christianity is not moralism. Far from drawing souls to Christ, punitive bathroom laws actually have the opposite effect: instead of persuading trans people of the truth of the Gospel, they persuade them of the vicious pettiness of Christians.

(I might add, here, that when Republican voters have just elected a man who has openly bragged about sexually assaulting women, the claim that Republican legislatures need to pass anti-trans laws to “protect women” from sexual predators really comes off as hypocritical and insulting.)

2. Housing and Workplace Legal Protections – The right to shelter, and the right to work are basic human rights. “All people have the right to work, to a chance to develop their qualities and their personalities in the exercise of their professions, to equitable remuneration which will enable them and their families “to lead a worthy life on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level”,” (Otogesima Adveniens, Paul VI)

Our right to access basic goods is not contingent on outward conformity with Christian norms. The only time that it’s justifiable to deny someone’s basic rights is if the person has committed a crime, and if revoking the exercise of that particular right is the only way to protect the safety of others. Even prisoners have the right to shelter, and just laws provide all but the most dangerous with the right to gainful and dignified employment during their incarceration. It’s both insane and insulting to suggest that trans people deserve less than this.

Identifying as trans does not make a person a hazard to the community. But lack of access to adequate housing and employment does present a considerable hazard to the safety of trans people. Christians who oppose workplace protections often don’t seem to have thought through the implications of this for trans people who still need to pay their rent and eat.

If workplace discrimination prevents trans people from finding legal employment they are forced either to seek welfare or to seek illegal work, such as prostitution. Indeed, one of the only existing Catholic ministries that specifically serves trans women is focused on helping them to find dignified employment so that they will not end up selling sex or drugs on the black market.

Our commitment to justice for the marginalized, the poor, the outcast, and the rejected really should provide Christians with more than enough reason to try to ensure that trans people do not face unjust discrimination when they are seeking a place to live, or a decent job. Increasing the number of homeless and unemployed trans people does not improve public morality, it doesn’t safeguard Christian society, it doesn’t make communities safer, but it does undermine the gospel’s promise that “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)

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