JUNE 21, 2020
Equality Act, J. K. Rowling and "Trans Panic"
Do you remember my post about J. K. Rowling’s opinions on using the phrase "people who menstruate" to include also transgender and non-binary people?
"Creating "objective" criteria to tell people what is womenhood and what is menhood would ever discriminated a group of people who have relevant rights that must be protected by the law: right to personal identity, right to a name, right to respect for private and family life, right to dignity, right to protection against violence."
Well, I hope that now J. K. Rowling will understand that her opinions hurt people.
I hope now she will fight for transgender and se will recognize they ARE actually being discriminated.
US Republican Senator of Kentucky, James Lankford, quoted her essay on trans people to shut down a vote on Equality Act, that would provide unequivocal nondiscrimination protections for people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity in a number of areas, including public spaces and services, housing, education, credit, jury service and federally funded programs.
Here you can find NBC's article about it: LINK
And more important US Senator uses violence against women to dimiss Equality Act: obviously we are talking about heterosexual cisgender women, because lesbian women will be protected too from homophobic violences by that Act!
Let's ask ourselves "how do Equality Act, creating an inclusive space for LGBTQ+ community, will hurt cisgender women?"
Well, those screens of Twitter replies to J. K. Rowling’s give to you the answer: "trans panic"!
Hey, people, sexual harassment online, even if it is directed against a transphobic person, will be only a confirmation of their theories!
I'm not justifying J. K. Rowling’s transphobical point of view, but you need to understand that woman's bathroom are the only safe place for women, a place where they couldn't be molested by men (cisgender and heterosexual men), so it's normal that after seeing those answers they will consider them as a confermation of their fears: being raped or molested by people with penis who - in their point of view - are only "men in drags" for shady purposes.
You can get mad, but not in that way. As I said before: harm or threatening people is not freedom of speech and will always make you look as the wrong part of the discussion.
That's not we want for the LGBTQ+ movement in general and mostly for transgender people! We want to be understanded, not feared!
In US there was a legal strategy, called "trans panic defense", which asks a jury to find that a victim’s gender identity is to blame for the defendant’s violent reaction, including murder.
When a man is charged with murdering a transgender woman, a common defense strategy is to assert what is called the "trans panic defense" . The trans panic defense is not a traditional criminal law defense. Nor, despite its name, is it recognized as a stand-alone defense. Rather, trans panic is a defense strategy associated with the provocation or heat of passion defense. A murder defendant asserting trans panic will claim that the discovery that the victim was a transgender female—an individual thought to be male when born who identifies as a woman—provoked him into a heat of passion, causing him to lose his self-control. If the jury finds that the defendant was actually and reasonably provoked into a heat of passion, it can acquit him of murder and find him guilty of a lesser offense.
As of July 1, 2019, eight states have passed legislative bans on the use of gay/trans panic as a legal defense: California, Illinois, Rhode Island, Nevada, Connecticut, Maine, Hawaii, and New York. It must be noted that gay/trans panic is not an affirmative legal defense; it is a tactic to strengthen the defense by playing on prejudice. It has, however, been used to not only explain a defendant’s actions, but to excuse them as well.
Here you can learn more about:
"Trans panic defense"
"LGBTQ+ panic defense"
However, this kind of prejudice never ended and Senator Lankford is using it in a very insidious way: he doesn't mention violence by LGBTQ + people as well, but uses the strategical defense of cisgender and heterosexual women to dimiss an important Act for LGBTQ+ rights.
The topic of "protection of (mostly white) women" is a quite common form of narration in the US history:
Protection of white women's pristinity was utilized as a reason to slaughter Native American men: the image of female vulnerability culminates in the white men's defending white women against "savages";
Similarly white women were used as a justification for killing African American men, seen as a potential threat for white women's virtue (see what Angel Davis and Hazel Cardy wrote about the "myth of the black rapist") ;
During the Second World War Japanese men were described as rapists of white women;
Nowadays when Trump (who has a public record of degrading and assaulting women) called for a wall to keep out Mexican, he had publicly referred to them as "bad hombres", "rapists" and "animals" who "slice and dice" young girls.
("Contemporary Media Culture and the Remaining of Colonial Past" by Kent A. Ono)
Now, this is happening with LGBTQ+ people: a white man claims for himself the hetero-patriarchal duty to protect (and control) women from depravity. At the end the protection of women bodies is just the protection of heterosexual supremacy and "traditional families" culture.
Like Donald Trump did, Senator Lankford demonstrates through his words, how danger narratives can be invoked not only to obscure White men’s violence and abuse against those that they claim to "protect", but also justify violence against LGBTQ + community in the holy name of (cis-hetero) women's safety.
