*this is the one from last week that I couldn't do*
Summary: On Sept. 12, a young transgender student took stand by delivering a speech to the school board after one of his classmates said that she "would rather fail gym class than change with transgender students in the locker room". The student told his mom that he had to stand up against what he called "hateful and ignorant rhetoric against trans students". The students mother, Alisa Bowman, told news reporters that it was "very important" for him to tell people the truth and "set the record straight". Bowman recorded the video and uploaded it on to Facebook, where the video has garnered more than 400,000 views. East Penn School District declined an interview.
Analysis: Our modern day America was built on a system of injustice. Whenever people oppose that, their source material is always the Constitution, and how it addresses the freedom of men - but what these people don't realize is that these words were not meant for oppressed people. These oppressed people include people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and people of different creeds and religions, and even in modern day America, we still have trouble addressing the problems that these people face in their everyday life and how that affects the American experience as a whole. As a young black Christian woman I am afraid to step out of my house everyday and I am even more afraid when my brother and my father drive somewhere, and that is heightened by the fact that we live in Texas. I have people in my family who are apart of the LGBTQIA+ community, and it makes me very sad to see the everyday struggles that they have to through with being black on top of being gay, and it makes me worried for the future and it also emphasizes my point even more - that we have to really work to care for this future generation because we want to leave something good for them. We have a lot of work to do.
Synthesis: This event reminds me of the 1978 California government race in which Harvey Milk, an openly gay man and gay rights activist, told The New York Times that "we don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays".
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ReplyDeleteYES!!! This is wonderful, I'm so glad he stood up for himself instead of backing down out of fear like many LGBTQIA+ youth do. It makes me so sad to know that everywhere there are still people struggling for who they are. I hope we get to see the world change for the better.
ReplyDelete-Linnea Soderlund
This is great. I hope this garners more support for the LGBTQ+ community, and that many others gain some perspective on the kinds of obstacles some of us face daily.
ReplyDeleteThis rhetoric against transgender people is everywhere. One of my (cisgender male) friends saw me enter the women's restroom, and told me that that was "interesting" and that he "would be disgusted if [he] saw [me] in the men's room" shortly after (I am a transmasculine individual who uses male pronouns). I have been the target of trans jokes without actually coming out to people (i.e. "I'm BATMAN!" "Wait so ur trans now?") which is slightly amusing, but mostly just irritating. Trans people are not the butt-end of jokes. They are not there to be used only when deemed amusing and invalidated otherwise. The mainstream representation for transgender individuals seems to consist of androgynous drag queens and "gender-nonconforming artists" (which can be great in real life) used as villains and negative stereotypes (see "Zoolander 2" and "How I met Your Mother"). This rhetoric is so ingrained that every time I bring up negative representation with my cisgender friends, I am told that I am overreacting and that it's "just one character." The issue is not that there is one negatively portrayed character, but rather that there are no positively portrayed ones, or that positive portrayals are nearly-nonexistent (although I do recommend the first season of the Youtube series "Her Story," which features the developing relationship between a lesbian and a transgender woman, showcasing the humanity and struggles of trans women as well as the prejudices against them even within the LGBTQ+ community). I've rambled enough, I suppose. I'm very glad that this boy spoke up against discrimination against transgender individuals, and the girl who threw a fit can go right ahead and fail gm if that's what she wants.
ReplyDelete-Cal Thompson, your friendly angry trans who just wants everyone to calm down and eat cookies that he made but also wants to yell at everyone about negative stereotyping and lack of representation and ingrained prejudices and tasteless trans jokes and seriously why is the world like this imagine all the people living for today