When an ultra-conservative family member awkwardly breaks the news of a major progressive legal advancement, I know something has gone awry.
On Aug. 7, in my home state of California, Gov. Jerry Brown signed our nation’s most advanced legal protections for transgender students. The state law ensures that K-12 students may choose to participate in school activities, including sports, as well as access locker and restroom facilities, based on the gender identity they choose, regardless of the biological sex assigned at birth. The Los Angeles Public School District has successfully implemented similar district wide regulations for the past 10 years. My relative was concerned that a trans woman would break the previously held girls sporting records. As I learned to say in the South, “Bless your heart.”
In additional good news, and probably the reason transgender politics are on the conservative radar, another California law was signed by Gov. Brown on Tuesday to make it easier for transgender adults to legally change their sex designation on their birth certificates, thus also, their drivers licenses and other legal documents.
The combination of these laws places California as the state leading the nation in protection for transgender individuals.
In September, at a high school in Southern California ,a self-identified trans woman, Cassidy Lynn Campbell, was crowned homecoming queen by popular election of her fellow students. The young woman made a statement at the high school football game that she was full of the “ultimate joy.” Her mother made a statement to the press that she never thought she would “experience an event like this,”and that she is “so proud of her and not just because she’s my daughter – she could be anybody’s daughter today. I look at a lot of things differently now.”
Only a day later, Campbell posted a tearful YouTube video after being insulted and bullied by conservative pundits and online voices.
I can only guess that for the same reason a professional adult radio commentator felt the need to call this young woman’s moment of joy a violation of “every known standard of decency and normality in America,” my relative insisted that should his infant daughter grow up with the wish to be identified as a man, he would not support it or allow it in his household.
These responses can be classified as nothing but egregious moments of hate bound by a stubbornness to consider the world, and all its people, outside of strictly defined roles. There is no excuse for repeatedly investing in and preserving such a loveless worldview.
And, for all of us, what a loss. What a loss in the talent, abilities and brilliance of these young men and women whose voices are and will continue to be bullied into silence if this law is overturned as California GOP members are working to do. Further, it is time to insist on similar laws and protections for all other states and to work toward radical social change to promote understanding gender outside of it’s previously constructed dark and gloomy binary.
But, before we take to the streets, right now is a moment to celebrate. We can, and must, celebrate Campbell’s crowning, the maturity of her classmates, the good work of the California legislature and the California students who, starting in January, will have a resource to make the very difficult time of adolescence just the smallest degree less difficult.
Michelle Fuentes is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory.
