Up till now, I’ve pretty much been restricting my blogging only to matters on which I have something original to say. Today, however, I have come to accept that you can’t always do this – because sometimes, something in which I have little more to say than mere parrottings of what others have already said still need to be blogged about because they’re just that important.
What brought on this acceptance? It is a petition out there that you can sign, pledging your support to Target and other businesses that respectfully and gender-affirmingly accomodate their transgender customers and staff.
As you may know, on April 19, Target reiterated it’s policy affirming that it’s transgender employees and customers are welcome to use gender-specific facilities in their stores consistent with their gender-identity. Unfortunately, yet predictably, this was followed by a backlash from social antiprogressives who launched a petition whose signatories pledged to boycott Target for daring to stand up for it’s transgender patrons and staff and their right to fulfil the most basic function of bodily waste-disposal in peace.
It is in response to that that a counter-petition to the offending petition is now being circulated through MoveOn.Org. Signatories to this petition pledge to not only support Target, but to support all businesses that similarly have stood up for the safety and dignity of their transgender customers and employees. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, Starbucks (which was my regular hangout back when I lived in the South and few other places were safe for me to go) Barnes & Noble, and even Kroger which installed unisex single-stall restrooms in it’s store in response to the rising tide of trans-discriminatory bathroom bills.
Of those in the backlash against stores with such anti-discrimination policies there are some who are openly and overtly transphobic – people who have no scruples about describing transgender people as “gender confused”, as well as in a number of other disparaging ways. However, also among them are those who claim that they are not against transgender people, but are concerned that sexual predators might take advantage of non-discriminatory policies to infiltrate women’s bathrooms and take advantage of the women and girls there.
My answer to those people is to point out the reality that they are treating the dignity, as well as the very safety of transgender people attempting to access public accommodations that everyone else takes for granted, as being extremely expendable. You are treating our safety as so expendable that you don’t even have scruples about pawning it without first checking to see whether or not doing so would in reality do a thing to help against the predators that you claim this is all about. If you had bothered to check your facts, you’d find that jurisdictions and establishments that have such non-discrimination policies have been around long enough, and observed closely enough, to confirm that treating transgender people with dignity and respect with regards to restroom access in no way increases any of these risks.
Transgender people, on the other hand, are well documented as being already subject to plenty of harassment and discrimination. It is also well-documented that denying transgender people gender-respecting restroom access has extremely detrimental effects on this already-marginalized group. With all due honesty and respect, pawning very real dignity-and-safety concerns of a marginalized group to address concerns that have no statistical basis at all is not something that you do to that group if you do not hold an animus to that group. Likewise, victims of abuse and sexual assault deserve better than to have their plight used as cannon-fodder to support measures that in no way protect anyone against the kind of crimes that have devastated, and punish a class of people that are in no way responsible for the terrible things that happened to them. (And I’m not even going to go into the additional point that many of those who have suffered abuse and sexual assault are themselves transgender because that’s another discussion for another time.)
Unfortunately, I have heard some reports that the transphobic reaction to Target’s courageous policy is adversely affecting Target’s business. For this reason, it is important for every person who cares at all about the dignity and safety of transgender people to sign the petition pledging to support Target as well as other business that take a stand in favor of the dignity and safety of transgender people that they are involved with.
