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No matter your gender identification, I respect your right to find transphobic language in any venue, including the internet, hurtful, offensive, triggering, and many more gnarly things. Transphobia is hardcore scary shit. People get brutally killed and beaten within an inch of their lives for just being -- or being seen as -- trans*. Transphobic violence doesn't only affect actual trans* people, it also affects anybody who gets perceived as trans*, and the whole community of friends, family, and allies.
I respect your right to say, when you have found some transphobic shit on the internet, that it is indeed some transphobic shit, and to ask that it should be taken down, and to tell the person who put it up that they should be ashamed of themselves. I respect the hell out of your right to go into incredibly fine detail about exactly how it was transphobic, because by detailed analysis we learn.
I respect your right to avoid the hell out of the person who put it up, even if they express remorse at having done it, no matter how far in the past the incident happened. Caution, in general, is often a sensible reaction, and tends to help keep people alive; see above about how transphobia is some fucking scary shit and people die because of it. I respect your right to tell other people about what went down.
I do not support death threats. Death threats are not protected speech in the US. They are illegal. I don't mean "die in a fire" even though I side-eye at that one too, I mean scarily specific shit including information on people's actual location. That shit is not cool. It is possible for multiple things to be true at the same time without being in conflict, and transphobic shit and death threats are both simultaneously immensely uncool. Someone saying transphobic shit does not make death threats cool. Death threats do not magically make transphobic shit cool. I am very glad that I am mostly getting summaries of what is going down in other parts of the internet right now from friends, because me adding my voice to the complete zoo of fucknuttery over there would be the opposite of helpful.
Right now at work, one of my colleagues is doing something incredibly brave. Over the past month, she has gone from talking privately with HR, asking them to consider including transition/gender affirmative medical expenses under the workplace health care plan, to speaking about the topic in the workplace LGBTQ* forum, to bringing the topic up in another internal forum with even more company-wide attention.
All she knows about the people who are reading her plea for better trans*-specific health coverage is that they work with her. She has been supported by her immediate co-workers over the course of her transition so far, which has given her the courage to speak up about the need for more comprehensive health coverage more widely. She's still taking a risk, and there's no guarantee that she'll get the coverage. There have been a few co-workers chiming in that this is the right thing to do and the company should include that coverage, but nothing like the universal support she should be getting.
Lamda Legal runs down some of the myths; pdf is mirrored elsewhere as the original seems to have vanished. One of the big myths is cost. It costs a lot for any individual to fund their own transition-related medical expenses. In a health care plan the size of work's, my colleague estimated it would not add more than a dollar to everyone's plan. The city of San Francisco originally had a surcharge, but dropped it after four years, because it just wasn't costing that much.
I think that it would probably improve my workplace's chances of having transition-related medical care covered if there was clear and overwhelming support for it. Is there? Well. A couple of the most active threads in the forum got over a hundred comments over the course of a day. (That's nothing on the busy parts of the Wider Internet, but this is an internal forum where people are ostensibly working.) Even in the larger forum, comments are only coming in at a rate of about one per day, and the majority of them are coming from people already in the LGBTQ* interest group. I would not actually describe that as overwhelming support.
My colleague is, without a doubt, brave and exceptional in many ways. She is also not some kind of metahuman superhero. She is a relatively ordinary person doing what she feels it necessary to do. She felt it necessary to speak out and ask for what she needed from work. I felt it necessary to add my voice as a genderqueer person and an ally in support of her: at work, and on the wider internet.
Does your country support the legal right for a transgender person to exist? Does your country offer access to gender identity/transition-related medical services to anyone with need for them? How easy are those services to get access to, and what steps are necessary to demonstrate need? Does your country support a trans* person's choices about what level of medical services to use? Is access to transition-related medical care controlled by private medical providers in your area? If you work, and your workplace has health care, does your workplace offer transition-related medical care through their health plan?
Would asking HR about whether your workplace's health plan includes transition-related care put you in danger for your physical safety or your job?
If you would be safe asking in your workplace, please consider it. It's awkward and possibly scary, and changes aren't likely to happen until a whole train of corporate decision-makers get on board (months, years, decades), but it's real and it's helpful. AND BETTER THAN DEATH THREATS, JESUS SPITTING COBRA.
I respect your right to say, when you have found some transphobic shit on the internet, that it is indeed some transphobic shit, and to ask that it should be taken down, and to tell the person who put it up that they should be ashamed of themselves. I respect the hell out of your right to go into incredibly fine detail about exactly how it was transphobic, because by detailed analysis we learn.
I respect your right to avoid the hell out of the person who put it up, even if they express remorse at having done it, no matter how far in the past the incident happened. Caution, in general, is often a sensible reaction, and tends to help keep people alive; see above about how transphobia is some fucking scary shit and people die because of it. I respect your right to tell other people about what went down.
I do not support death threats. Death threats are not protected speech in the US. They are illegal. I don't mean "die in a fire" even though I side-eye at that one too, I mean scarily specific shit including information on people's actual location. That shit is not cool. It is possible for multiple things to be true at the same time without being in conflict, and transphobic shit and death threats are both simultaneously immensely uncool. Someone saying transphobic shit does not make death threats cool. Death threats do not magically make transphobic shit cool. I am very glad that I am mostly getting summaries of what is going down in other parts of the internet right now from friends, because me adding my voice to the complete zoo of fucknuttery over there would be the opposite of helpful.
Right now at work, one of my colleagues is doing something incredibly brave. Over the past month, she has gone from talking privately with HR, asking them to consider including transition/gender affirmative medical expenses under the workplace health care plan, to speaking about the topic in the workplace LGBTQ* forum, to bringing the topic up in another internal forum with even more company-wide attention.
All she knows about the people who are reading her plea for better trans*-specific health coverage is that they work with her. She has been supported by her immediate co-workers over the course of her transition so far, which has given her the courage to speak up about the need for more comprehensive health coverage more widely. She's still taking a risk, and there's no guarantee that she'll get the coverage. There have been a few co-workers chiming in that this is the right thing to do and the company should include that coverage, but nothing like the universal support she should be getting.
Lamda Legal runs down some of the myths; pdf is mirrored elsewhere as the original seems to have vanished. One of the big myths is cost. It costs a lot for any individual to fund their own transition-related medical expenses. In a health care plan the size of work's, my colleague estimated it would not add more than a dollar to everyone's plan. The city of San Francisco originally had a surcharge, but dropped it after four years, because it just wasn't costing that much.
I think that it would probably improve my workplace's chances of having transition-related medical care covered if there was clear and overwhelming support for it. Is there? Well. A couple of the most active threads in the forum got over a hundred comments over the course of a day. (That's nothing on the busy parts of the Wider Internet, but this is an internal forum where people are ostensibly working.) Even in the larger forum, comments are only coming in at a rate of about one per day, and the majority of them are coming from people already in the LGBTQ* interest group. I would not actually describe that as overwhelming support.
My colleague is, without a doubt, brave and exceptional in many ways. She is also not some kind of metahuman superhero. She is a relatively ordinary person doing what she feels it necessary to do. She felt it necessary to speak out and ask for what she needed from work. I felt it necessary to add my voice as a genderqueer person and an ally in support of her: at work, and on the wider internet.
Does your country support the legal right for a transgender person to exist? Does your country offer access to gender identity/transition-related medical services to anyone with need for them? How easy are those services to get access to, and what steps are necessary to demonstrate need? Does your country support a trans* person's choices about what level of medical services to use? Is access to transition-related medical care controlled by private medical providers in your area? If you work, and your workplace has health care, does your workplace offer transition-related medical care through their health plan?
Would asking HR about whether your workplace's health plan includes transition-related care put you in danger for your physical safety or your job?
If you would be safe asking in your workplace, please consider it. It's awkward and possibly scary, and changes aren't likely to happen until a whole train of corporate decision-makers get on board (months, years, decades), but it's real and it's helpful. AND BETTER THAN DEATH THREATS, JESUS SPITTING COBRA.
