It’s an increasingly terrifying time to be a transgender person in the United States right now.
Over the weekend the New York Times published a leaked memo from the White House proposing that gender be defined on a national, governmental level as binary, immutable, and defined entirely by genital configuration at birth, with disputes to be settled via genetic testing to determine chromosomal configuration. There are so many things wrong with this – it conflates gender and sex, it ignores actual biology, it completely disregards the existence of intersex folks, and on and on. S. Bear Bergman wrote an excellent article about all of this and what it means, and rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m going to point you there. Please read this. The lives of your trans, non-binary, and gender expansive siblings depends on you understanding the seriousness of this.
To my cisgender friends and family: please vote. Please speak up in the face of transphobia. Trans folks can’t do this alone. Silence is complicity.
If you have the means and are looking to donate money somewhere, here are a few good organizations to support (note: I know for some people the first thought is to donate to the Human Rights Campaign, but please consider these organizations first – the HRC does not have a great track record of defending trans folks, whereas these organizations all do):
National Center for Transgender Equality
Accidental Fudge 