Standing Up For Others

2017.07.29 Stop Transgender Military Ban, Washington, DC USA 7734 (36262659735)
Trump's executive orders targeting transgender individuals are cruel, petty, and harm our country.
Image from Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA

I'm not going to remain silent in the face of injustice

While I generally try to avoid talking about politics in public (including the web, which is VERY public), I can't in good conscience stay silent about Trump's executive orders that target trans people. These executive orders serve no purpose but to make life harder for trans people and to cast them as the "other" and dehumanize them. We have seen this happen before, and it never ends well. So, I must speak up, for as Elie Wiesel said, We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. I will not apologize for standing up in the face of injustice. And if the far-right wants to cast me as an extremist for doing so, so be it.

An Executive Order based on faulty science

The ACLU wrote a great article on this executive order. This executive order is based on bad science, it ignores the complicated reality of biological development and leaves out (or erases) intersex individuals. It stems from a middle-school level of understanding. While it fortunately avoids defining sex based on chromosomes (XX for female and XY for male - which ignores other karyotypes such as X, XXY, or XYY), the definition has a host of other problems.

According to the executive order: “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. ... “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell. Of course, at conception, the zygote is just a single cell and does not produce any reproductive cells. Further, all embryos begin phenotypically female, leading some to note that based on this definition, everyone is female or possibly non-binary (neither).

Now, some people will argue that this is not relevant. That intersex is a separate issue, unrelated to transgender individuals. This is incorrect. While intersex is distinct from transgender, both groups are harmed by adherents of a rigid gender binary, especially one enforced by the government. Both are small minority groups (each only 1 - 2% of the population) that have been targeted by these right-wing extremists. Intersex advocacy and trans advocacy go hand in hand.

As someone who majored in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology in college, I find the complexity of human development fascinating. I really don't understand what compells some people to have a knee-jerk reaction to learning that the world doesn't fit nicely into the categories that we once thought it did. Back in the 18th century, Linnaeus thought all the natural world fit into three categories: animal, plant, or mineral (hence the expression "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"). We later discovered that life is far more diverse than that, with Fungi and whole domains of unicellular life.

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