President Steenkamp: On this TDOV, we stand with you and for you

An op-ed in the Times Colonist from President Philip Steenkamp on Transgender Day of Visibility.

In past years, the International Transgender Day of Visibility has been an occasion balancing celebration with recognition of how far we still have to go to end discrimination, fear and hatred.

This year, though, feels far more like a state of emergency than anything else. And it’s vitally important that we respond.

The second incarnation of the Trump presidency is proving to be every bit as repressive as feared, if not more so. On his first day in office, Trump moved immediately to attack the transgender community with a sweeping executive order with such measures as ending the recognition of any gender other than the binary biological sex assigned “at conception;” ceasing all funding for gender-affirming care; and transferring imprisoned trans women into men’s prisons, and trans men into women’s prisons.

This was just the start. Further measures followed, including bans on transgender individuals serving in the military and institutions providing gender-affirming care to minors.

(There have also been fiascos where, in the rush to eliminate all things 2SLGBTQIA+ from government, items like a photograph of the World War II bomber Enola Gay have been deleted from web servers.)

Nobody thinks this is the end of it — far from it.

The cruelty of the measures themselves is compounded by the dehumanizing rhetoric his administration and party have used to describe transgender people. And Trump’s followers in state legislatures are going further: witness the bill introduced by a Texas state representative that would make it a state felony to identify as transgender.

This didn’t come out of the blue, of course. The American alt-right — from politicians to influencers to mass media — has learned they can get tremendous political mileage from attacking specific groups, with transgender people and undocumented immigrants among their favourite targets. Misinformation and fear help drive fundraising, polarize the public, galvanize online support and get their voters to the polls.

But it’s startling, and terrifying, to see how quickly things have moved from concern-trolling over bathrooms to revoking a wide range of the rights and protections transgender people have only recently managed to win.

And it’s a stark warning to us here in Canada that we are anything but immune from something similar happening in our country.

Many of the same sentiments of the American alt-right have worked their way here, stirring ill-informed fear about everything from school curriculums to gender-affirming care. The reasoning behind it is clear: if it works in the U.S., it can work here. Canada is not the only nation seeing a rise in these spurious, dangerous and hateful claims.

For transgender people, this is a fundamental question of identity. For trans kids, it’s the ability to recognize, explore and affirm something in themselves without the threat of bullying, punishment or violence. And for all of us, it’s a question of the kind of society we want to be.

It's up to us to point out that what is being said (and repeated) is wrong.

To respect the rights of these members of our community requires nothing of us but simple decency. You don’t have to call yourself “woke” to treat people with dignity, and — when others don’t — to speak up.

Speaking up is especially urgent in this moment. For one thing, these repressive measures are causing real suffering right now, with strong evidence showing that anti-transgender laws cause a significant increase in suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary people.

And the campaign of fear and oppression being directed against transgender people will not stay limited to them for long.

You can think of what we are seeing today as a pilot project: The lessons that authoritarians learn from attacking the transgender community can be applied to target other groups they hate — or that might oppose them.

It wasn’t that long ago that living as an out gay man, as I do, was extraordinarily fraught. I can remember very easily what it was like to have that kind of toxic hatred and fear regularly directed our way — and to have that be the rule, not the exception.

It took courage for allies to speak up then, but thankfully they did. And it’s time for allies to speak up now.

I feel a deep sense of duty to the transgender students, staff and faculty at Royal Roads University. They deserve to know this: that their university community stands with them and for them.

Our society faces the same peril Martin Niemöller describing life under Nazi rule in Germany in the 1930s — the one that ends: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

They are coming for our transgender neighbours, friends, and family. It’s time for us to speak for them.