Eric Anthony Grollman

The South Dakota legislature’s failure to override a gubernatorial veto killed, once and for all, a bill that would have banned transgender students from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity. This hot-button political issue is cropping up in states and workplaces all over the country, a symptom of broader and sometimes more dangerous discrimination against a minority that only recently started making its voice heard.

Just last month, a transgender woman named Georgia Carter was hired at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Richmond, Va., only to be denied the job an hour later because the manager was unsure which restroom she would use at work. The manager was fired a few days later for violating KFC’s nondiscrimination policy, which includes gender identity and expression.

The “politics of peeing,” or being denied access to the sex-segregated restroom that corresponds to one’s gender identity, is just one of the many types of discrimination experienced by the approximately 700,000 Americans who identify as transgender. Last year, a record number of transgender people were murdered, almost all of them trans women of color. At least 23 trans people were killed last year in the United States and at least 81 were killed worldwide.

Monica Loera, a 43-year-old Latina trans woman in Texas, became the first reported transgender person murdered in 2016, shot and killed outside of her Austin home in late January. One month later came the murder of two black trans women, Veronica Banks Cano in San Antonio and Maya Young in Philadelphia. Less than three months into 2016, the year is already off to a grim start for transgender Americans.

Research on violence and discrimination against transgender people provides evidence that these stories are not isolated incidents. Lisa R. Miller and I recently published an article in Sociological Forum about transgender Americans’ experiences of transphobic (i.e., anti-transgender) discrimination. Our analysis was based on the first-of-its-kind National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which included data from over 6,400 trans respondents. The results offer a bleak picture of the way transgender people are treated in the United States.

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We found that 70% of trans people reported experiencing major events of discrimination, such as unfairly being denied a job, having to hide that they are transgender at work in order to keep their jobs or being denied medical care because of one’s gender identity. In addition, 70% reported facing more subtle, everyday forms of discrimination, like harassment at work, being referred to with the wrong pronoun or having private information shared without their consent. Discrimination against trans people is widespread, occurring at work, hospitals, restaurants and stores, hotels, courtrooms, in interactions with the police, at airports, and on buses and trains.

Such discrimination has consequences that range from minor discomfort or inconvenience to unemployment, poverty and wrongful incarceration. My co-author and I also found that these experiences compromise the health of transgender people. Trans people who experience discrimination are more likely to smoke cigarettes, use drugs and alcohol, and attempt suicide.

We found that the more frequently trans people are recognized by others as transgender, the more discrimination they face — and, the more discrimination trans people face, the more likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs, and to have attempted suicide. The message from our transphobic society is that transgender people should hide, blend in, or “convert.” The nation offered former Olympian and television star Caitlyn Jenner a warm welcome when she publicly announced that she is a trans woman. But for the majority, the everyday reality of being transgender in America is filled with discrimination and violence that seem like punishment for being different.

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Most Americans tend to conflate sex (the gender a person is assigned at birth) with gender identity (which is based on internal sense of self). They often struggle to understand how someone who looks like one sex would identify as the other, and even in some cases transition surgically from one sex to another.

This helps explain some of the intense resistance to transgender people and their rising activism. Backlash is fairly common when minority groups become more visible, more vocal and more powerful, especially if they are not well understood. We are perhaps witnessing that in America right now — for example, a spike in hate-motivated violence against trans people, discrimination in the workplace and a slew of proposed state and local laws to ban trans people from using the bathroom appropriate for their gender.

This is unacceptable. As a nation, more and more of us have come to recognize and oppose discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, socioeconomic status or age. It is time to raise the country’s consciousness on gender identity and expression and add them to the list of protected categories. We should be protecting transgender Americans from discrimination — not perpetuating and expanding it.

Eric Anthony Grollman is an assistant sociology professor at the University of Richmond and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.

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