Today is the International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV). It is observed every year on March 31, and aims to increase the visibility of transgender persons and communities. You might see organizations putting out statements about TDOV and individuals acknowledging it in various ways. This isn’t going to be one of those. Instead, I’d like to talk about the concept of transgender visibility.
To be visible, in this sense, is to be fully acknowledged. There are several ways that transgender people are frequently only partially acknowledged. There are people who reduce transgender people to a pity story, a minority victimized. There are people who reduce transgender people to just being transgender, and not the full persons that they are. Then there are people who do the opposite, who aren’t interested in the problems transgender people face or try to hand-wave away their transgender identity as unimportant. Of course, there are also those who demonize transgender people, but I assume the people reading this are aware of why that’s bad.
A lot of well-meaning people, on the other hand, do one of the four mistakes listed above: Reducing transgender people to victims, refusing to acknowledge the victimization of transgender people, reducing transgender people to transgenderness, or refusing to acknowledge their transgenderness as substantial. So let’s talk about those.
Victimization
Transgender people face a lot of discrimination, and right now, it’s getting worse. There are so many bills being put forward and voted on and debated in committee that aim to restrict the rights and freedoms of transgender people that I can’t even begin to list all of them. I’ve never found a single source that has kept track of them all, even those whose jobs involve keeping track of precisely that. It’s a lot, and it’s too much to stop. Arkansas passed a bill that will most definitely kill transgender youth. Several states have passed trans sports bans, with many others trying. This is on top of the already extreme marginalization transgender people face, with sky-high rates of violence and discrimination combined with a society that isn’t built with them in mind. To be frank, it’s pretty ass. To ignore this is to abandon transgender people.
On the flip-side, transgender people are not only victims. Finding the balance between acknowledging and addressing victimization without overdoing it is not always easy, but it is essential, or else you are not treating the victims with respect. We have stories, lives, hopes, dreams, ideas, and challenges that may be touched by our troubles as transgender people, but cannot be reduced to them. To be visible requires that transgender people are visible not just as transgender, but also as people.
Identity
Which leads us to the other pair of mistakes. There are some who will hyper-focus upon a transgender person’s gender modality (PDF) to the exclusion of all other characteristics. This is a common problem for women and minorities. Women being given “women’s issues” matters while men sit it out, Black journalists being expected to disproportionately cover race issues with little regard to what they are actually interested in, and the general application of group stereotypes on one individual, for example. Being reduced to one “unusual” aspect is a hurtful experience. It’s like you are treated as a tool to be utilized by the “usual” people, or that they feel they know all they need to know about you, and you have no real independent personality.
On the other hand, trying to erase transgender people’s identity as transgender by default is a mistake. Many transgender people take some interest or pride in their identity as such. I know I do. Why else would I call my blog Transliberalism if I wasn’t somewhat invested in that identity? This erasure is often attempted with normalization in mind, trying to make transgender people equivalent to cisgender people by refusing to acknowledge those categories. I feel this is disrespectful. Transgender people qua transgender people have something to offer: Living examples of a robust, independent sense of self and an assertion of one’s right to determine the course of their own gendered life above and beyond what is typically seen in cisgender people.
The Bottom Line
All of these examples come down to a failure to see transgender people as caught up in the same colorful world of differences and similarities that we all experience. Transgender visibility is about rectifying those failures and fully embracing transgender people into the fold. We all benefit that way.