Last week I had the honour of participating in an event in support of transgender people. You are probably aware that the rights of trans people, both youth and adults, are under severe attack in many places south of the border. While the situation is not as dire in Canada, we should not be complacent – what works for reactionary forces in the US often ends up being attempted, at least, around here. 

Transgender people are a tiny minority – between 0.5% and 0.7% of the United States population, according to the latest estimates, and those numbers are probably similar in Canada. One might be justified in wondering why anyone should be concerned about such a small number of people, and certainly why there is such a moral panic going on right now, with state after state in the US passing draconian laws against them. Why are they so scary that they must be legislated out of existence, and why should we care?

Trans people represent the ultimate in bodily autonomy – the freedom to express one’s own felt gender, whether in the traditional binary or in some other way, is a direct threat to those who would control and legislate the bodies of others, especially those who are coded as women. This is why you are likely to find the most oppressive anti-trans laws in the same places that have the most extreme anti-abortion legislation, as well as other forms of discrimination against minorities. As someone said, scratch a transphobe and you are likely to find an antisemite, and quite possibly a white supremacist as well.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about trans people – in particular, some people view trans women as a threat to those who were assigned female at birth. Statistics suggest that the overwhelming majority of violence against women, both cis and trans, is carried out by cisgender men, and that trans women are much more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators thereof. 

Another fascinating aspect of the current moral panic regarding trans people is that there has been an increase in young teen girls identifying as trans men or as nonbinary. For those who view women primarily as a means of producing babies, especially white ones, this is of course very bad news, and it’s not surprising that they are moving to prevent it. In particular, they seem to view it as some kind of social contagion – note the tiny numbers I mentioned above. Nonbinary people and trans men are not going to have a significant effect on the overall birth rate, but clearly some people think that alternative gender identities might be catching – why are they so worried that people won’t want to be women in their communities, if they are allowed to opt out?

With all this having been said, the overwhelming majority of people in North America, and indeed in the world, are cisgender, which means they are comfortable with their gender coinciding with the sex they were assigned at birth. Why should they be concerned about the rights of a tiny minority who feel otherwise?

The answer is that a society that oppresses its minorities will end up being undemocratic and oppressive to the majority as well. While kindness and empathy to those who are different is a good thing in itself, even just pure self-interest would dictate that people of good will should defend and support their minorities – whether ethnic, religious, or sexual or in gender expression. If they don’t, in the words of the famous poem, when the fascists come for them, there will be nobody left to speak up.