Editorial: It’s time to talk equality for transgender people

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A transgender woman appears on the cover of Time magazine this week, along with a headline about “America’s next civil rights frontier.” The topic resonates in Connecticut — progressive compared to the rest of the country on this issue but fresh off a case showing the deep prejudice we still must overcome.

There has been a sea change in public opinion about discrimination against gay and lesbian people in our country. Thanks to this rapid shift and a U.S. Supreme Court decision catching up to policy states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont embraced years ago, laws prohibiting gay people from marrying are joining interracial marriage bans in the dustbin of history.

Equality for transgender people remains a frontier, however, due to fundamental and widespread ignorance about issues of gender identity. Pop culture and media reinforce the idea among people who don’t know any better that being transgender is some kind of odd hobby or choice at best and perversion at worst. Of course, we’ve been through this before, with interracial marriage, with gay rights. And when people come to understand that transgender identity is someone’s very IDENTITY — who they are — they fully and quickly embrace equality under the law and in how we talk about and treat them in day-to-day life.

But like the occasional U.S. senator who changes his position on gay marriage after finding out that his own son is gay, these kind of epiphanies don’t often come until someone encounters a friend or family member who is transgender. There are far fewer transgender people than gay, lesbian or bisexual, so the average person’s understanding is based on media and pop culture that mocks the transgender experience.

Because of this dynamic, and, frankly, because discrimintion is legal in most of the country, transgender people face daily discrimination in employment, housing and education. Understandably, they are far more likely to be unemployed, suffer from depression and attempt suicide.

There are signs of change. At least a portion of news media in the U.S. are becoming aware of how they cover the issue and the importance of the words they use in writing about transgender people. The suicide of a woman who was outed as transgender during ESPN-affiliated Grantland’s reporting of a story unrelated to her gender identity was a wake-up call. And Time’s cover story is a major sign of progress.

A federal court ruled recently that the rights of a Georgia legislative aide who was fired after her supervisor found out she was planning to come out as transgender are protected under the U.S. Constitution even though Georgia law has no specific protection for transgender people.

A handful of states, including Connecticut, have banned discrimination against transgender people, and last week President Obama’s administration eliminated a 33-year-old ban on Medicare coverage of sex-reassignment surgery. Connecticut previously announced that health insurance carriers in the state could not arbitrarily reject coverage for such treatment.

Yet even in Connecticut, and even in Connecticut’s state government, we have a long way to go.

After significant criticism, the state Department of Children and Families finally announced last week that it had found a treatment center for Jane Doe, a 16-year-old transgender girl whom it held for more than 60 days in an adult prison.

Because officials said the agency could not handle her anywhere else, DCF used an obscure state law to convince a judge to put Jane in prison even though she had not been charged with a crime. Jane is one of many, many difficult cases that DCF deals with. The only “crime” that appears to have warranted solitary confinement in an adult prison instead of intensive treatment (as a child the state is charged with protecting) appears to be that she is transgender.

When it comes to children, maybe it’s easier to empathize and recognize someone you don’t understand and don’t know as a human being, and maybe that’s why so many raised their voices in defense of Jane Doe.

It’s time we all extended that voice in support of equal treatment for a community that has suffered enough.