The Transgender Day of Visibility Challenge for Health Care for the LGBTQ Population in the 21st Century: Share Hope’s Voice and Implications for the Future
Allison Hope is a writer and her work has been featured in numerous publications. The author has opinions that are not reflected here. CNN has an opinion on it.
It isn’t enough to tell me you love me in private. A lack of anything is detrimental to my survival. Your silence is just another nail,” said J.D. Melendez, a friend who is transgender, on social media recently.
Take the time to speak up around Transgender Day of Visibility, which falls on March 31 each year, a time when we acknowledge and honor the rich lives and experiences of trans and nonbinary people.
The designation was created by trans advocate Rachel Crandall of Michigan in 2010, to highlight the limited coverage of trans people in the media, and stories that focused on violence trans people faced. We must take the vision that Crandall started and help amplify it across our channels, normalizing trans lives and experiences through our cisgender networks.
And it’s not just young people. Our trans kids need us. They are being forced to use bathrooms that don’t match their identities and getting banned from sports. It is not possible for them to get mental health counseling or hormone blockers because of their gender.
There is plenty of work to be done: In the first three months of 2023, state governments have introduced more than 400 bills that target the LGBTQ community, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. These include measures removing and threatening to block access to livesaving health care for trans people, cutting off their ability to use restrooms and facilities safely, play sports, have identity documents that match their gender, and even in some cases the right to say that they exist.
What is Yours? What Has Yours Don’t You Know About Transgenders? How Transsexuals Have Been Left Behind
“I feel more hurt by the silence of my loved ones and the people who claim to support us than I am about them coming for us. I expect the same from them. I didn’t expect this from y’all. Y’all broke my heart,” Melendez said. “It broke my heart.”
The percentage of people who know someone who is trans has increased over the last five years, but still lags behind the number of Americans who know someone who is gay or lesbian.
How would that make you feel as a parent of a trans kid whose sole job is to put your child’s well-being before all else? How might you feel that elected officials are making the rules without input from or thought given to how this impacts the people they purport to say they are protecting? Imagine if your school banned all references to gender identity and then forced you to change the name of the student because they were not allowed to mention it. We don’t know what type of world we want to live in.
One doesn’t need to look any further than US school history books to see the disingenuity of these efforts to squash gender diversity. In ancient Rome, men wore togas, dresses, wigs and makeup for centuries, including nobility and government leaders. Drag as a form of entertainment has been in existence as early as Shakespeare’s actors cross-dressing when they played female roles because women weren’t allowed to act.
They tend to not distinguish between two dads or a teenager that is not straight and a teacher that wants to hang a rainbow flag in the classroom. At their most extreme, people who want to restrict trans rights want all of us LGBTQ folks gone. All people in the gay and lesbian community are being erased in minuscule ways by the detractors of trans people, who are in power in greater numbers and are taking bolder actions.
What is the best medical decision for transgender people? The case of the West Bronx and the era of the Transgender Diabetic Association
There are worthwhile questions about what can be done to address gender diversity, adolescent mental health and teens’ expectations. Legislation that will harm, not protect, children, families, and their health care providers aren’t the answers to them. We must ask ourselves: Why are legislators and politicians making medical decisions for patients and families instead of doctors?
The development of treatment for gender dysphoria is related to the increasing visibility of transgender people in the late 20th century. Standards were set for the health care needs of trans patients by a group of professionals in 1979. The standards provided order, objectivity and science to a process that was then poorly understood by the medical community. The authors of these guidelines founded an organization that would later become known as WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which I now lead.