It’s no secret that anti-trans bills are cropping up across U.S. state legislatures, most of which are targeting transgender youth. And when Republican lawmakers aren’t going after trans kids, it’s governors and state agencies setting them in their sights. No better example exists than Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s recent directive investigating families with trans children.
For many transgender kids and adults alike, this is a confusing, frustrating, and scary assault on our basic civil rights. But why are Republicans so caught up with legislative measures attacking trans youth, and how is it part of a much larger plan to strip away trans Americans’ basic human rights?
Let’s be frank, the number of anti-trans legislative proposals expected this year is shocking. USA Today reports approximately 280 are projected for this year, up from 147 in 2021, per the Human Rights Campaign. Over 125 anti-trans bills have been recently active across dozens of state legislatures, according to the ACLU. States with active anti-trans legislation include Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, and Hawaii, among others, and many are Republican States.
Why are they doing this? They believe transgender folks must be repressed and annihilated because it threatens the very way we think about gender and sex in the first place. A Trans person, destabilizes how they think of terms like “sex” and “gender,” and trans bodies challenge society’s preconceived notions about gender and sex. This is why so many Republican politicians want to force young trans people to live their lives in the wrong gender.
Gender is not determined by sex; it is not a synonym for sex. Gender is a physiological trait based on our genetic makeup. Male or female simply identifies our genetic makeup, and how one is going to reproduce, nothing more. Yes, there are Males and Females, but that is not who we are it is what we are, a human is also masculine and feminine. We should be looking at a woman as someone who is feminine not female, and a man someone who is masculine not male.
Think of gender like height. You can be 6'5" or 5'6" regardless of whether you are a male or female. Science and genetic research are telling us we may be wrong, and it is gender that determines if someone is masculine or feminine, man or woman, not simply being male or female. Like height, gender is fluent. In height you can be tall, short or somewhere in between, with gender it can be masculine or feminine or somewhere in between.
Being a man or a woman should be determined by our gender, not our sex. Men and Woman are masculine and feminine, not male and female. Some men may be more masculine than others, some men may be female. The sooner we get to this point the better off we will be.
Granted, it’s true that some trans women may have certain advantages over cisgender women in sports, trans women are on average taller, so shouldn't tall cis woman be banned from woman sports too???