Chase Strangio is an American lawyer and transgender rights activist. He is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.
On Friday, I spent the day reading lawsuits filed by parents of non-transgender students alleging that the specter of trans bodies in spaces shared with their children infringed their parenting rights as well as the privacy rights of their children. In what can only be described as a cruel set of legal filings, parent groups represented by anti-LGBT legal organization, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), have escalated their strategic assault on trans existence.
These cases deliberately identify transgender individuals by their sex assigned at birth and use scare quotes to describe our “gender identity” and the fact that we are “transgender.” Demonizing their trans peers and community members, non-transgender students and their parents claim in one lawsuit that the non-transgender “Girl Plaintiffs experience anxiety, stress, humiliation, embarrassment, intimidation, fear, apprehension and distress throughout their day knowing that to obtain an education they must attend to their most personal needs in private facilities unprotected from the entrance, presence, or exposure of a male.”
It is a remarkable and devastating allegation — that somehow by existing and using spaces designated for girls, girls who are transgender disrupt the safety and education of non-transgender girls. This insidious claim is animating lawsuits across the country as anti-LGBT advocates seek to systemically erode the legal protections that trans individuals have gained over the past decade.
But what about our bodies is so scary? That we may have some physical features that differ from others? Read more via Medium