Gay Today: People

Why Support the Rights
of the Transgendered?

By Bob Minor
Minor Details

There is something extremely important for gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people in the fight for the rights of the transgendered. Yet it has taken a long time for some of us to see this.

Transgendered people embody the real issue behind the oppression of sexual minorities. To miss this point is actually to buy into the excuses the system itself gives for discriminating against and abusing non-heterosexual people. The dominant excuse is that l/g/b/t people are erotically attracted to the same sex. So, the system teaches that all of this has to do with who is having sex with whom or who is in love with whom.

Activist Sylvia Rivera (right), here with GayToday editor Jack Nichols, has championed the rights of the transgendered for more than 30 years

We might agree, but that's not really the case. One of the common dynamics of any oppression is that lies are convincingly repeated about the reasons for oppressing a victimized group.

White racism claims that the reason for the oppression of people of color is something inherent in "them" - their skin color, culture, or natural abilities. In reality racism functions to keep working-class people apart, blaming and scapegoating each other so they'll never unite to end what is collectively hurting them in the culture and its institutions. It is a way of protecting the system itself. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this and that's why he turned to challenging the whole system, not just personal prejudices.

Yet it's easy for a victimized group to believe those lies consciously or unconsciously and to think that on that basis they can correct something they're doing in order to end the oppression. In l/g/b/t communities this means that we should try to look and act straight, particularly in public. We should never do anything to show that we are attracted to the same sex unless it is part of excusing ourselves with, "We're just like you, except...." That means we should treat our sexuality in the same sick manner straight people do.

When we recognize what is really going on when l/g/b/t people are victimized and encouraged to think of themselves as second-class citizens, we'll see that we need a different strategy for our own liberation which includes and highlights the transgendered. But it's a strategy far from that of many of us who think that straight people are healthy, and that how they live their lives and what they possess will be our salvation.

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
What Makes a Man a Man?

A Man Who Follows Jesus and Sometimes Wears a Dress

Review: Rebels, Rubyfruit & Rhinestones

Related Sites:
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy

Press for Change: United Kingdom

Fairness Project
GayToday does not endorse related sites.

The real reason l/g/b/t people are targeted for discrimination is that the oppression is the major means our society uses to keep men and women in their place, to keep them in strictly defined and "opposite" gender roles. It ensures that men will be "masculine" and women will be "feminine."

If any two self-identified heterosexual males walk down a street in the U.S. and hold hands or put their arms around each other, they will be treated the way gay men are with violence, threats, ridicule, and rejection. That's because by doing so they have defied the male role. They have stepped out of the straight jacket of masculinity. They have transcended the limits of their culturally-defined gender.

If a self-identified heterosexual woman refuses to follow male concepts of female beauty, refuses to find her worth in approval and acceptance by men, stands up with her sisters for equal pay for equal work, and decides to live her life in her own self-interest (as men are supposed to), she will be accused of being a lesbian. She too has transcended the stifling gender role society has for her.

As long as we have gender defined as we do, men will be stuck in their place, out of touch with their feelings of hurt, fear, and confusion, and living the "beat or be beaten" mentality with other men they learned in childhood. It's a role enforced with the "privilege" men are taught they have of defending this system by being willing to kill other men and be killed by them in the name of manliness. If they don't they will be treated as "non-masculine" males, as gay men.

Gender-rebel-artist Logan Carter in New York City, 1977. His passionate life story is told in James T. Sears' history, Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones (Rutgers University Press, 2001)

As long as we have gender defined the way we do, the limitations on women will remain. They will be suspect for acting powerful, assertive, decisive, and feminist. They will be put down for showing anger, reason, and clarity of thought and goals, for finding fulfillment in their own wholeness, for deciding how they want to look and act, and for no longer believing that "getting a man" is the key measure of their worth.

As long as gender is strictly defined and enforced with little if any fluidity, gay men and lesbians will be attacked, demeaned, and thought of as second class citizens because the oppression has nothing to do with them and everything to do with gender roles -- roles that are not human, freely chosen, or healthy. These roles result in inhuman relationships: one role relating to another rather than one human being relating to another.

Transgendered people embody our real issue. Their "coming out" threatens the entire system of gender identity and gender roles. Their presence announces boldly that none of us "has to be" either of these roles. And that's a major threat to everything that oppresses us. Suzanne Pharr was absolutely right when she wrote Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, now in its second edition (Chardon, 1997). And I would put it, "Homophobia: A Weapon of Gender Rigidity."

Society's fear is that if we take away the two gender roles we will not know who we are. In reality, we'll get in touch with our unconditioned humanity by rejecting externally imposed, dysfunctional, and inhuman, definitions of what it its to be human, male and female. That fear - that I won't know who I am -- might be the scariest of all while it opens us up to one of the most exciting frontiers of exploration in the universe.

We will not be free until transgendered people of all types can define who they are and how they want to express their self-chosen identities. It's not really about sexual orientation. It's not really about us. It's a system that can't stand the idea that people can be free of the limitations of gender roles. Championing this will free gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. And transgendered people will also benefit.

Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas and author of the new book Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human. He may reached at or www.fairnessproject.org.