Meanwhile, Republicans in state legislatures have made transgender people their latest target of choice

By Herbert Rothschild

For those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, I suspect that the first time we ever heard of a transgender individual was when an American whose birth name was George Williams had gender reassignment surgeries in Denmark in 1951 and 1952. She then took the name Christine Jorgensen. Her transition became public when a letter she wrote to her parents after the second surgery asking for their acceptance somehow was leaked to the New York Daily News. Consequently, it seemed that every stand-up comedian in the U.S. added Christine Jorgensen jokes to their routine.

That was the first and last time the topic of transgender individuals entered my consciousness until 1967, shortly after I had founded an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A man named Reed Erickson introduced himself to me as an ACLU supporter. Reed, who I soon learned lived around the corner from me, was a remarkable person. He was a successful businessman who had transitioned from female to male. I didn’t learn that until a couple of years later. At the time I knew him he was married with a small daughter.

Reed wanted to let me know about the work of his Erickson Educational Foundation, which primarily focused on helping transgender people and educating the general public about their reality. As Aaron H. Devor, chair of transgender studies at the University of Victoria, wrote, “The present widespread recognition of transsexualism as a human condition can be partially attributed to the activities of the Erickson Educational Foundation. Under the auspices of the EEF, Erickson made tremendous contributions to the understanding of transsexualism. The EEF helped to support, both through direct financial contributions and through contributions of human and material resources, almost every aspect of work being done in the 1960s and 1970s in the field of transsexualism in the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, in other countries.”

Sometime in the later 1970s, Reed dissolved the foundation and left Baton Rouge. He believed that he had achieved his goals of public understanding and acceptance. He died in 1992, unaware, I hope, of the outpouring of bigotry and persecution that was to come.

I’m hard pressed to understand why Republican politicians, especially at the state level, recently decided to beat up on transgender people. Perhaps it’s because they’ve made political hay out of mustering prejudice against one marginalized group after another and it’s no longer legally and (to a lesser extent) socially acceptable to openly target women, people of color and homosexuals. Perhaps it’s because the fundamentalist Christians who constitute the largest segment of the Republican base and for whom sexuality has long occupied a disproportionately large place in their moral universe, have been shaken by the enormous changes in sexual mores since the 1960s.

Republican legislators who are introducing and passing hundreds of bills targeting transgender people would probably say they are addressing legitimate concerns. I will concede two such concerns. One is an unfair advantage that those who transition after puberty from male to female may have in women’s sports. The case of Lia Thomas brought widespread attention to the problem. Thomas swam competitively as a male for the University of Pennsylvania with some success and then, while still in college, transitioned and did considerably better in women’s meets, despite having lost muscle mass with hormone treatment. The other concern is the possibility that minors struggling with their sexual identities might make irrevocable choices without sufficient adult guidance.

Neither of these concerns, I think, are all that difficult to address and hardly require the plethora and scope of legislation we are witnessing. For example, denying any recognition in public schools of the reality of gender fluidity and prohibiting any sympathetic health care whatsoever cannot be defended as proper responses to protecting minors from making decisions they may later regret.

Legislation requiring that transgender people maintain for legal purposes the gender recorded on their birth certificates is more revelatory of political motive. It encodes the belief that each of us is born into the gender decreed for us by God and/or nature. Familiarity with obstetric wards or even animal husbandry would quickly disabuse people of a belief founded on the fear that yet another cherished certainty will prove problematic.

Intersex traits take several forms: physical, chromosomal, endocrinal and even indeterminate. When external genital ambiguity presents in a delivery, commonly a surgical decision is made on the spot or shortly thereafter, and thus gender is arbitrarily assigned. Ending that practice is one focus of the work of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth.

Internal forms of intersex are complicated. Persons with Swyer Syndrome, for example, have the X and Y (male) chromosomes but female genitalia. In persons with androgen insensitivity syndrome, the class of hormones named androgens, which include testosterone, don’t bind to androgen receptors. These and many other conditions affect physical and psychological development. So, when someone says s/he has always felt s/he inhabited the wrong body, very often there’s a somatic basis for the assertion.

How common is intersex? Partly the answer depends on what conditions are counted. Dr. Anne-Fausto-Sterling, who reviewed medical literature from 1955-1998 and wrote “Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality” (2000), arrived at 1.7% of births. Other researchers claim her estimate is high, but reporting and recordkeeping in the U.S. and worldwide are too irregular to settle the matter.

What we do know is that the troika of pride, fear and ignorance, steered by self-serving politicians, continues to wreak harm on one marginalized group after another.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views and may or may not reflect those of Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.

June 1: Outdated terms changed, with the exception of a quoted passage.