here was a time when men in dresses and women in suits were classified as criminals in this country because of their clothing. Back in those days, I've been told, there wasn't any word "transgender." But there were "crossdressers," who toyed with the dressings of their sex, and there were "transsexuals," who hid and lived in the shadow of the nation, invisible to the public. In the 21st century, we have the Transgender Day of Visibility, a modern effort to illuminate one of America's most oppressed minority populations.
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Today, cities and townships across the United States have found the issue of trans rights suddenly hoisted into public discourse. The trans movement made unprecedented legal achievements under the Obama Administration. To conservative and ignorant people in states like Texas, the equal rights of transgender Americans have been resisted with retaliatory legislation. The federal guidance that the Obama administration issued to protect trans Americans has been viewed as intrusive and unlawful. Of course, one of the first things that the Department of Justice did under the authority of Donald Trump was to revoke that guidance.Transgender Americans and our allies want to amplify stories of transgender people so that families, school systems, and local governments from rural America to our country's greatest cities begin to perceive us as human. Unfortunately, many people in this country casually disregard the humanity of transgender people. There are plenty of examples of this, but you only have to look at the way that men continue to literally destroy transgender women or the astronomical suicide rate among trans people. These are ugly and tragic examples—but there are far more deceptively civil ways that our humanity is denied.Read the full article on Broadly.