Providing decades of trans health care have taught me a lot

The International Day of Visibility: Transgender People, Rights, and Freedoms in the Media, on CNN and across the State and Local Scale

Editor’s Note: Allison Hope is a writer whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Slate and elsewhere. The views expressed here are the author’s. Read more opinion on CNN.

You need to let me know that you love me in public. Everything is a negative thing to my survival. Your silence is just another nail,” said J.D. Melendez, a friend who is transgender, on social media recently.

Every year on the 31st of March, there is a time when we honor and recognize the lives and experiences of trans and other people, as part of the International Day of Visibility.

The designation, created by trans advocate Rachel Crandall of Transgender Michigan in 2010, started as a clapback to the limited coverage of trans people in media, and stories that were wholly focused on the violence trans people faced. We must take the vision that Crandall started and help amplify it across our channels, normalizing trans lives and experiences through our cisgender networks.

You can not just be a bystander if you claim to be an ally. You have to speak up. It’s never a better time for trans people to be vocal and against attacks on their families, their minds, and their hearts. Allies have to combat false information around dinner tables or at water cooler conversations at work. If you care about Trans people or freedom of expression, you must contact the legislators who are making these anti-trans bills. Allies need to get their parents to love and support trans people and have a dialogue that allows for gender expansiveness and counterbalances the policing of gender.

In states where such anti-treatment bills have passed, families are already in despair. Some fear losing health care for their children or losing their children altogether. Some are simply moving. Doctors and mental health workers in some states would risk losing their licenses for providing medical care to an already chronically underserved population. And if more laws that limit or deny access to care pass, the lives of transgender and gender-diverse teenagers are likely to worsen.

I’m sorry to hear about the silence that’s happening in the U.S. Department of Civil and Criminal Justice (Judicial Instance)

My loved ones and people that claim to support them are more hurt by the silence than I am by them coming for us. I expect that from them. I was not expecting it from y’all. “Y’all stole my heart,” Melendez said. It really upset my heart.

The number of Americans who know someone who is lesbian, gay or trans have increased over the past five years, but the number of people who know someone who is trans remains low, and lags far behind.

How would that make you feel as a parent of a trans kid whose sole job is to put your child’s well-being before all else? Is it possible that elected officials are making the rules without knowing how this will affect the people they say they are protecting? Imagine being a teacher in a school where all mention of gender identity is banned and you can’t tell if the student is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. What kind of world do we want to live in?

It is not necessary to look at US school history books to see the insensitivity of the efforts to squash gender diversity. In ancient Rome, men wore togas, dresses, wigs and makeup for centuries, including nobility and government leaders. Drag as a form of entertainment has been in existence as early as Shakespeare’s actors cross-dressing when they played female roles because women weren’t allowed to act.

The haters tend not to distinguish between a trans person and a drag queen; between two dads or a nonbinary teen; between a boy who just likes to wear dresses or a teacher who wants to hang a rainbow flag to create an affirming space for students. People who want to restrict trans rights want to eliminate all of us lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer people. They are in control and are taking bolder actions, they are also slating all people in the LGBTQ community in tiny and substantive ways with every piece of legislation, every epithet, every pulpit or sound bite.

Why are legislators and politicians making decisions about gender equality more relevant for children, families and their healthcare providers? A case study of gender dysphoria in 1999 by WPATH

To be sure, worthwhile questions about how best to address gender diversity, adolescent mental health and teens’ expectations about gender remain. Legislation that will endanger children, families and their health care providers will not be found in the answers to them. We must ask ourselves: Why are legislators and politicians making medical decisions for patients and families instead of doctors?

Although gender diversity has existed for centuries, medical treatment of gender dysphoria — the diagnosis for those who experience discomfort when their gender identities do not match their sex assigned at birth — developed as transgender people became increasingly visible in the late 20th century. In 1979, a group of trans-knowledgeable professionals, surgeons and mental health experts met to establish standards for the health care needs of transgender patients. The standards provided order, objectivity and science to a process that was then poorly understood by the medical community. The WPATH organization was founded by the authors of these guidelines and is now led by me.