Tag: LGBT

TRUMP: A GROWING GOITER ON THE BODY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

In case anyone was wondering why President Trump broke with White House tradition by not officially recognizing June as LGBT Pride Month, we got the answer this week: he didn’t fly the rainbow flag in June because he was planning to burn it in July. It apparently wasn’t enough for our bully-in-chief to take cruel, cheap Twitter shots at individual citizens. Insulting Meryl Streep, Snoop Dog, his own attorney general and the Broadway cast of “Hamilton” might give him a quick morning buzz, but the Donald’s real highs come from decimating human rights for large groups of Americans. Like the thousands of patriotic transgender soldiers serving in the armed forces.

In a series of three early Wednesday morning tweets, the president said the government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military”. That was just the opening act in his anti-LGBT crusade. Later that day, the Trump administration intervened in a major court case for the sole purpose of arguing that gays and lesbians should have no legal protection against employment discrimination. Apparently, that means this 2016 Trump tweet is no longer operative: “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you . . .”

Depending on who is doing the counting, there are currently between 4,000 and 15,000 transgender troops in the country’s military. Most were closeted until June 30 of 2016, when Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, announced that they could all serve openly. Trump’s Twitter reversal seemed, on its face, to be breathtakingly cruel, even for a president who has made cruelty an art form. These soldiers were told, at long last, they could be who they are and go right on serving their country, only to have the rug yanked out from under them by a tweet. It’s hard to think of any historic parallel where human rights, once granted, were taken away. It would be like Andrew Johnson rescinding the Emancipation Proclamation after he succeeded Abraham Lincoln. Coincidentally, Wednesday’s transgender ban tweet was issued on the 69th anniversary of President Truman’s order abolishing racial discrimination in the armed forces. The question is whether that will withstand another three-and-half years of this president.

The tweeted trans ban has so far produced little beyond anger, confusion and pandemonium. The military brass were stunned and said there will be no immediate changes until the White House clarifies the policy with something other than a tweet. Defense Secretary James Mattis was reportedly caught off guard by the announcement and was said to have been “appalled” by it.

Although some suggested that Trump’s move was a ploy to shore up his base, the immediate reaction from most Congressional conservatives was highly critical. (Here, here and here.) There’s another theory: the transgender ban is all about building the Mexican wall. Trump’s cherished wall project is part of an overall defense spending bill. That legislation has stalled temporarily due to a behind-the-scenes squabble over funding for gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment. Some Republicans want to exclude such coverage from the bill. Others, including most military leaders, have opposed reducing medical benefits for transgender troops. (The estimated price tag for these services is $8.4 million a year, less than 1% of active duty health care spending.) So the speculation, advanced Friday by Politico, is that an impatient Trump grew tired of waiting for a resolution on the medical costs, and simply gave transgender soldiers the boot so he could get a vote on his wall. Only in a bizarre, two-for-one Trumpian kind of way, does this makes sense: persecute one marginalized group in order to build a wall around an even larger one.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department intervened in a federal lawsuit brought by another agency – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – to argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. For years, it had been the position of both the Justice Department and the EEOC that the law’s prohibition against sex discrimination included sexual orientation. The EEOC’s case, now before a federal appellate court in New York, involves a sky diving company that supposedly fired an employee because he is gay. Although this story took a back seat to other Trump atrocities of the day, it was a highly significant reversal. The federal government is now officially on record supporting the right of private employers to fire lesbians and gays for being . . .well, for being lesbian and gay. Courts have issued conflicting interpretations and the matter is undoubtedly headed to the Supreme Court. Until Wednesday, it was going there with the U.S. government fully backing the view that the law’s ban on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identification. In one 24-hour period, this administration not only threw transgender individuals under the bus, it gave every private employer the green light to discriminate against them and lesbians and gays.

With respect to U.S. presidents and presidential aspirants, the story of LGBT rights is not exactly one of profiles in courage. Ronald Reagan turned his back on the AIDS epidemic. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. George Bush used antigay animus to capture a second term. Barack Obama didn’t “evolve” into a marriage equality supporter until the fourth year of his presidency. Hillary Clinton didn’t get there publicly until 2013. But Donald Trump has achieved a level of human rights shame that soars past all of them. He boasts about not being an antigay ideologue. Yet, he is so much worse than that. Trump’s singular ideological commitment is to himself. Everybody else is expendable and irrelevant. He thinks nothing of crushing the hopes, dreams and esteem of transgender soldiers, or putting this country’s official stamp of approval on homophobic and transphobic discrimination, just to assuage whatever momentary mood may pass through him. When it comes to human rights, it just doesn’t get much worse than that.

LET’S BUILD A WALL AROUND NORTH CAROLINA TO PROTECT THE REST OF US

True to my stereotypical Minnesota-Scandinavian roots, I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t spend much time wallowing in anger. But North Carolina is really pissing me off. (Stop now, sports trolls; I’m not talking about the Final Four). This is about the Final One Hundred and Seventy, the idiots who make up the state’s general assembly. Wait, my math is wrong. Make it 171 Tar Heel bozos, 170 in the general assembly, and the poorest excuse for a “reform” governor since the likes of George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

There are, to be sure, some kind, intelligent, even wonderful people in North Carolina. They just don’t get elected to public office. The result is a disastrous déjà vu of barbarically fascist legislation and a human rights record that rivals Syria’s.

Just a year ago, then-Governor Pat McCrory courageously ventured out on a political limb in order to strip away the dignity and basic rights of LGBT people. The general assembly passed, and a smiling governor signed, what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The law’s original intent was to make transgender folks use a public restroom based on their birth certificates. That meant, for example, that a 35-year-old buxom woman with long flowing blond hair, in a clinging dress and stiletto heels, must hobble into a men’s room if she was identified as a male at birth. Stunned commentators at the time envisioned a genitalia monitor for every stall. But the law was even more abhorrent. Fully transitioned lady and man parts didn’t matter; toilet venue was based solely on whether the M or F box was checked at birth.

Of course, North Carolina lawmakers never think small when it comes to obnoxiousness. Disgusted with renegade liberals on the Charlotte City Council, and their audacity to pass an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification, the legislation expanded to retroactively revoke the authority of cities to ban discrimination. It was much more than a bathroom bill. It was a mandate to discriminate against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

The rest of the world reacted in horror, spurring economic boycotts by corporations, entertainers and athletic groups. According to one estimate, good old North Carolina homophobia and transphobia were on track to cost the state $3.7 billion over a span of 12 years. That quickly translated into political problems. Most of the state’s voters could have lived with the discrimination, but they had no hankering to pay that kind of money for it. McCrory, the Republican governor who championed the law, was defeated in November by Democrat Roy Cooper, who promised to get the measure repealed.

In a hyper-technical sense, Cooper, and a new session of the state’s general assembly, pulled off that repeal last week. And then simultaneously replaced it with an equally atrocious law. Up against a NCAA deadline to either dump the law or face a continued boycott, the state’s lawmakers pulled a quick sleight of hand by ditching one bad law and adopting another. As a result, there is now a moratorium on any anti-discrimination protections for LGBT folks through 2020. The new law prohibits cities and counties from banning such discrimination.

Governor Cooper, the Democrat elected on the promise of cleaning this mess up, sheepishly issued this baffling understatement: the “compromise was not a perfect deal or my preferred solution.” No shit, Sherlock. He runs for governor as a savior for human rights and then signs a bill banning them for more than three years. That’s no compromise. It’s a complete capitulation to right wing nut jobs who want it all: an end to the boycotts and continued discrimination.

It obviously never occurred to the governor that he was bargaining from a position of strength. He didn’t win the election because of his opponent’s anti-gay-and-trans views. He won because the state got hit hard economically over the legislation. The NBA pulled its all-star game out of Charlotte. The NCAA canceled games and threatened to withhold years of events from the state. Numerous corporations pulled back on plans to build or expand in North Carolina. Hundreds of entertainers refused to perform there, including: Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Cyndi Lauper, Maroon 5 and Itzhak Perlman. This was a fight, brilliantly guided by the Human Rights Campaign, that cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars and greatly diminished the quality of North Carolina life.

A governor committed to human rights for all would have vetoed the sham repeal and, if overridden, let the boycott continue. Obviously, the majority of assembly members need to feel more heat before they can see the wisdom in doing the right thing. Hopefully, the NCAA, the NBA and other corporate and entertainment forces will continue to stay clear of this state until that happens.

This is what it is like in Donald Trump’s America where the federal government leaves human rights up to the states. Protection from discrimination should not be legislated by zip code. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of Trump putting state’s rights above human rights. Just this year, legislators in 16 states have filed two dozen bills to scale back legal protections for transgender people. Nonsense has a way of spreading, making the continued boycott even more essential.

North Carolina lawmakers are not apt to see the error of their ways without pressure. After all, this is the only state in the country with a law that prohibits cotton growers from using elephants to plow their fields. Of course, the state was fine with purchased black people doing the same thing, and even fought a war to keep those slaves in the cotton fields. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of elephants’ rights, but humans need them too.

THE NEW JOURNALISM: ONE STEP OVER THE LINE OF DETACHMENT

The country’s new political climate has jarred some journalists into rethinking the whole ethical construct of impartiality. This introspection is long overdue. For many years, most media organizations have insisted that newsroom employees refrain from any political activity beyond private thoughts in order to guard against even an appearance of bias.

That meant, of course, that news staffers could not publicly voice political opinions, attend protest marches or campaign for candidates. Many news managements were such strict constructionists on this rule that they, in effect, demanded their charges take a vow of intellectual celibacy. If you think that is an exaggeration, I’d be glad to introduce you to two reporters who were once suspended for attending a Bruce Springsteen concert.

The principle behind this non-involvement ethic is rational and understandable. It’s execution, however, has been the subject of intense debate among journalists since the days of the linotype machine. There is general agreement that reporters need psychic and emotional distance between themselves and their scope of coverage. If you report on city hall, you can’t manage the mayor’s re-election campaign. Such a conflict skews interests and damages credibility. So how about a hockey writer who puts a school board candidate’s campaign sign on her lawn? No problem? Believe me, journalists have been disciplined for far less. It’s always been a question of where to draw the line. Thanks to the politics of Donald Trump, that line seems to be moving a bit.

Helene Cooper covers the Pentagon for the New York Times. She had an intensely personal reaction to Trump’s executive order banning refugees from certain countries. When Helene was a 13-year-old girl in Liberia, a military coup took over the government. One soldier shot her father. Another raped her mother. Over the next frantic weeks, Cooper’s mother did everything she could to get her family out of the country. Eventually, they found safety and a better life in America. The only reason I know that is because Cooper wrote about it in a first-person New York Times account. Days earlier, she wrote the Times’ initial report of Trump’s refugee ban. To be sure, Cooper’s moving, poignant personal story was no partisan political act. Yet, it offered compelling testimony in opposition to the president’s immigration position by a reporter who continues to be able to craft excellent news reports from Washington. The Times moved the line by running Cooper’s personal essay.

Jim Schachter is vice president for news at New York’s public radio station, WYNC. In a recent “On the Media” segment, he described his reaction when he learned his wife and daughters were going to participate in last month’s Women’s March. He told them he would not share their tweets or post their pictures on social media because “. . .you’re going to engage in an act of politics. . .that is anathema to me as a journalist.” The line seemed pretty clear to him. Then, a few days later, Trump issued his restrictions on refugee resettlement. Schachter said his “head was a mess” because his mother and mother-in-law were refugees from Nazi Germany. This wasn’t a “political matter,” he said, “this was a human rights matter.” Then he remembered that his wife and daughters had argued that the Women’s March was also a human right matter. Schachter moved the line.

That line between human involvement and journalistic detachment is apt to keep on moving throughout the Trump years because we are no longer dealing with arcane political issues. It’s one thing to keep your opinions to yourself on tax reform. It’s something else when basic human rights are being shredded.

Another force helping to move the line comes from the newsroom presence of millennials, people of color and those with an LGBT orientation. Many young reporters seem more capable than their elders of elegantly balancing a strong set of beliefs with their journalistic skillsets. They, along with those from marginalized groups, see the fight for equality with the same passion they have for pursuing truth through their journalism.

Shaya Tayefe Mohajer is a former Associated Press reporter and an Iranian-American. She recently wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review criticizing newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, for prohibiting reporters from participating in the Women’s March. While working for the AP, Mohajer said she followed the news service’s edict insisting that reporters “refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in a public forum . . .and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.” Those rules, she noted, were originally written by white men who handed them down to the generations of white men who replaced them, and none of them ever had to worry about the lack of equality. No longer bound by AP’s rule, Mohajer said she went to the Women’s March “not just because I understand inequality to be real and would like to live to see its end, but also because I’m deeply grateful for my right as an American to peaceful protest, and I intend to use it to call for a basic tenet of journalism: fairness.”

The line between advocacy and news reporting should not be removed. A Washington Post political reporter is never going to circle the White House on a lunch break with a sign that says “Trump Sucks”, and then replace it with a notebook and attend the afternoon press briefing. Yet, it’s well past time to modify the line, to relax its rigidity. There has been talk of replacing reporters with robots, but it hasn’t happened yet. Until it does, they need to be treated like real people, complete with real beliefs. And, absent a direct conflict with their job, they should be allowed to stand up for those beliefs. With a government poised for an assault on human rights, speaking truth to power is everyone’s job, even if it means an end to the illusion of journalism’s intellectual celibacy.

FINDING OUR WAY FROM THE ASHES OF DEFEAT

The defeat this week of a right wing Republican governor in North Carolina was much more than just a consolation prize for progressives. It was a well-timed reminder of how movement power can withstand severe electoral setbacks, particularly when it comes to matters of justice and human rights. While Republicans won every other contest in the Tar Heel State, Gov. Pat McCrory bit the dust largely because of what was seen as his unyielding opposition to LGBT rights.

McCrory conceded Monday to his Democratic opponent in an election that had been too close to call. In the end, he lost by 10,000 votes (out of 6.8 million), while Donald Trump carried the state by four percentage points and the incumbent Republican senator won reelection by six points.

The general consensus among political observers is that the governor was done in by what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The legislation, signed by McCrory in March, was about much more than bathrooms. It initially targeted the transgender community by allowing public restroom use only in accordance with a person’s birth gender. In its final form however, it prohibited cities from enforcing discrimination bans on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Flash back now, for just a moment, to those dark, gloomy, I’m-moving-to-Canada days of 2004. Not only did an unpopular George W. Bush manage to win reelection, Republicans picked up seats in both the House and Senate. But wait, there’s more. Constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage were on the ballot in 11 states, and they all passed overwhelmingly. Bush’s political strategist, Karl Rove, was credited with the wildly successful plan of pushing the anti-marriage amendments as a turnout lure for social conservatives, many of whom might not have made the trip to the polls just to vote for Bush. I still remember that deep feeling of hopelessness and angst after the election. Not only did we have four more years of George W., the notion of marriage equality appeared to be dead and buried. Gallop validated the malaise a few months later with a poll showing that only 37 percent of the country supported same sex marriage.

Yet, something altogether different was happening. Thanks to the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT groups, not only did the movement never stop, it picked up momentum and steam. They won marriage equality laws in key states like New York and Maryland. Men married men. Women married women. The sun came up the next day, and attitudes quickly changed, with a speed unparalleled in the history of civil rights. Other states followed suit. By 2012, Gallop’s annual tracking showed for the first time that a majority of Americans supported gay marriage. In large part, those rapidly changing views fueled the 2015 Supreme Court decision that declared marriage equality as the law of the land.

That very same LGBT movement was responsible for the defeat of North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Governor. The well-oiled and brilliantly strategic Human Rights Campaign has had staff on the ground in North Carolina all year. Having already succeeded at planting the notion of gay and transgender rights as a basic fairness issue in the country’s psyche, they moved quickly to convert it into a business issue. Entertainers and professional sports teams canceled events because of the law. Business decided against relocating to North Carolina. Top corporate giants like Pepsi, Google, Apple and American Airlines all put the heat on the state over this discriminatory law. Although McCrory didn’t initiate the legislation, he made the political miscalculation to support it in order to curry favor with social conservatives. It became the albatross that ended his career.

The moral of the story should be clear. Despite how it felt at the time, all was not lost in the 2004 election. If the Human Rights Campaign had cashed in the chips on election night 12 years ago, several hundred thousand marriages would never have happened and a homophobic governor would have had four more years to wreak havoc in North Carolina. To be sure, movements have their ups and downs. But the quest for justice, fairness and equality never ends. It’s not the destination that changes, it’s the roadmap. It is up to us to find the right route and follow it, with our eyes always fixed on the prize.

NO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY FOR A HUNGRY CHILD

There was an amazing piece of news out of western Pennsylvania this week. You may have missed it because it happened the same day Angelina and Brad told us it was over; we process grief at different speeds. To fill you in: a school cafeteria worker quit her job when she had to deny a young boy a hot lunch because of a balance due on his account.

As reported by the Washington Post, Stacy Koltiska said she was working the cafeteria register at Wylandville Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Eighty Four, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. She said she will never forget the little boy’s eyes as he stood there with a tray of hot food. Due to a new school policy, the lunchroom staff is prohibited from giving hot lunches to anyone whose parents owed $25 of more for past meals. Because of the balance owed, Koltiska was duty bound by her work rules to deny him the hot lunch.

Under the policy, the parents will be charged $2.05 for their son’s meal, the one that Koltiska had to dump into the garbage. In lieu of hot food, the debtors’ child was handed a cold sandwich consisting of two slices of wheat bread and a single piece of what Koltiska called “government cheese.” So she quit, right then and there. She told the Post that her religious faith does not allow her to deny a hot meal to a hungry child. “As a Christian, I have an issue with this,” she explained. “It’s sinful and shameful is what it is.” She said she resigned out of a moral obligation. “God is love, and we should love one another and be kind,” Koltiska said. “There’s enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong.”

Shockingly, there has been radio silence over Koltiska’s plight on the part of the evangelical right and its “religious liberty movement”. I fully expected Kim Davis to show up with a picket sign. She’s the clerk of court in Rowan County Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because her religious beliefs outranked the law, or so she said. Davis did a few days in jail while relishing the martyr role and the army of Republican politicians who scrambled to her side for a photo op. This was the seminal event in a nation-wide push for legislation establishing the right to discriminate against the LGBT community on the basis of religious belief.

The argument is that people who sincerely hold religious convictions should get a pass whenever there is a conflict between the law and their faith. This has resulted in the passage of legislation in some states allowing florists, caterers and others to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding based on a religious opposition to same sex marriage. It also produced the Supreme Court decision in “Hobby Lobby”, where the justices said a business owner with a theological objection to birth control is free to remove contraception coverage from the company medical plan.

So why aren’t the religious liberty zealots expressing outrage over the school lunch dilemma? Granted, taking hot food away from a hungry child has nothing to do with birth control or the anti-gay agenda, but the religious principle could not be more directly applicable. Kim Davis became an overnight folk hero in some quarters when, as an elected official, she refused to issue gay couples the marriage licenses they were legally entitled to. Poor Stacy Koltiska, following a school board rule she abhorred, dumped the little boy’s lunch into the garbage, handed him a pathetic cheese sandwich and quit her job. Two women; the same God; two different conflicts between their faith and the law. One of them followed the law she disagreed with and then walked away, never to deny another child a hot meal. The other never followed the law, kept her job and went on a speaking tour with a hostile rant about “religious liberty”. Which of them went to a better place is unknown to all but God. But it’s a pretty easy guess.

PUBLIC RESTROOMS: PHONES, NO; TRANS, YES

I’ve had it with cell phones in public restrooms.  I nearly lost control at the urinal the other day when a ringtone version of the Marines’ Hymn started blaring next to me. Frantically searching for his phone, my urinal neighbor’s hands were flailing all over the place at a very inopportune moment, another reminder that men were not built to multitask. Then comes the Busy Executive who commandeers a stall as a second office.  I encountered one recently who sat on the throne, barking commands into his phone and punctuating them with intestinal sounds only a gastroenterologist could appreciate.  The kicker of the month, however, was a young male millennial shooting a selfie in the mirror above a communal sink.  There’s a chance I may have accidentally photobombed him.  If so, it may be my unauthorized debut on Tinder.

This is all so annoying.  Can’t we make public restrooms a cell-phone-free zone?  How about having a separate facility for people with electronic devices?  It will never happen.  It’s just not in the cards.  Instead, there is a full court press to bar Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school in Gloucester, VA.  Gavin never caused the slightest restroom disruption.  He just did his business and went back to class, like everyone else.

Yet, there are those in Gloucester who insist that Gavin is not at all like everyone else.  You wouldn’t know that from his pictures in the Washington Post.  He looks pretty much like a central casting version of a high school boy: short curly hair, chubby cheeks, wire rimmed glasses and a slightly bored expression.  All of the commotion is over the fact that Gavin was identified as a girl at birth, an identity that has been forever foreign to him.

According to the Post, Gavin never thought of himself as anything but a boy.  He refused to wear dresses and didn’t understand why he couldn’t join his twin brother on the football field.  He started transitioning in middle school with the full support of his parents who helped him obtain a legal name change.  As a sophomore in 2014, Gavin used the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School without incident and with the full blessing of the principal.

Unfortunately, the kid ran smack into the last gasp of a bruised, beaten and frustrated religious right.  Adults who don’t know Gavin have taken out after him with a fevered pitch as part of their campaign against transgender rights.  As a result, he is spending his senior year banned from the boys’ restroom while the U.S. Supreme Court decides which bathroom he can use.

Sadly, we seem incapable in this county of having a meaningful conversation about human rights without inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the children forced to serve as pawns in a battle they never asked for.  Kids Gavin’s age just want to be who they are; they yearn to fit in and belong.  Unfortunately, the historical path to securing a more just and equitable country is one of making unwitting trailblazers out of youngsters like Gavin.

That’s why many schools looked like war zones in the 1960s. Armed federal troops held back segregationists determined to keep black children from entering all-white schools. Ruby Bridges was all of six when she became the first black student in a New Orleans elementary school.  I was in the fifth grade then and dealing with my own angst of having just transferred to a new school where I didn’t know anybody.  That’s one reason the pictures of little Ruby, school bag in hand, walking up the steps of an all-white school while surrounded by federal marshals, was forever seared into my memory.  I can’t begin to imagine the trauma, the fear, the trepidation she must have felt.  No child should have to face that kind of abuse.  But because Ruby and countless others did, – The Little Rock Nine at Little Rock’s Central High School, Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, to name but a few – the Jim Crow notion of “separate but equal” was finally laid to rest.

Or was it?  Gavin Grimm was offered a small, single-user toilet, along with the stigma of being the only student in his school prohibited from using a regular bathroom. Separate, we learned more than 50 years ago, is inherently unequal.  I totally get that the LGBT movement is moving too fast for some people who aren’t gay or transgender.  Folks were just starting to accept the notion that same sex marriage is the law of the land when along came the T’s insisting that they, too are entitled to equal rights under the law. And so, in this volatile summer of 2016, we are fighting over the use of a bathroom, the last stand in the culture wars being waged by those who would like life to go back to the way it was during the days of “Father Knows Best”.

There are those in Gloucester who say it is not natural to change your gender.  Of course, the people in New Orleans who tried to keep Ruby out of the whites-only school said it was not natural for the races to mix.  There are an estimated 1.4 million people in America who identify with a gender that is opposite of their birth sex.  To them, the most unnatural thing in the world is being forced to be something they aren’t.

If your cousin Henry suddenly transitions to Helen, you don’t have to understand everything about her metamorphic journey.  It’s okay not to get it right away; change is hard for everyone.  Yet, you can still accept Helen’s decision on the basis that it is something she needs to do, something that is essential to her well-being, because that’s exactly what it is.  One recent study showed that 41 percent of the transgender population has attempted  suicide, compared to 4.6 percent of the general populace.  This is about so much more than bathroom use.  It’s about each of us having the right to authentically own our identity.  It’s also about supporting people in our lives who had the courage to break away from a gender assignment that never fit.

Just in case the Supreme Court is reading this, I would, without the slightest hesitation, share a men’s room with Gavin Grimm any time, as long as he turns his cell phone off at the door.