Learner's Full Name
Assignment Title
Targeting Transgender Children, South Dakota Passes Transphobic School Bathroom Bill
Guest Presenters: Chase Strangio, staff attorney, ACLU- LGBT & HIV Project.
The show debates a bill likely to be passed by the South Dakota that prevents transgender students in public schools from using bathrooms that do not correspond to their own gender identity. Chase Santiago, Staff attorney for American Civil Liberties Union is the guest presenter and discuss with Amy Goodman as to how the passage of the bill would mean more persecution for the transgender children.
Rationale
The discussion of this bill is important as it is only a representation of the amount of prejudice that the transgender community faces in the country. A society that ostracizes and victimizes people who are different from the ‘perceived normal’ is not a healthy society. Discussions about laws that segregates and penalizes freedom of choice (biological, sexual and thought) is important to bring out the hidden prejudices of the society and also help the minorities live their lives without fearing for their safety. A state passing a bill that ostracizes kids based on their sexual leanings and sexual identity causes serious social concern as this could be the starting point of many more laws that could penalize any position that goes against the requisite belief system.
Issue and Social System
Differences have always been shunned at first and people are slow to accept change when they have been conditioned to a certain belief system for ages. In the case of transgenders and their choice to change into the gender they are comfortable with, the society, immediate family, peers and law are loathe to accept change. “Social order is possible if social actors share a culture of common values, which unites them together to share and perform cooperative activities. It is these general values which determined the ultimate goals of action and which structure the norms by which the means of action are selected (Parsons,1991).” When the greater community does not share the same needs and value systems of the minority, it is cause for social concern. Chase Strangio is well qualified to discuss these issues as apart from a lawyer, he is a transgender himself.
A potential challenge to the accepted “sex/gender/sexuality system” are people who live their lives in a social gender that is not the gender they were assigned at birth. (Seidman 1995). When they choose to change their gender they were born with, they disrupt societal expectations that consider gender identity to have been derived from biology. The feature is about how the state, being conservative does not give importance to the needs of transgender people as choosing a gender that was not what they were born with goes against accepted cultural and sexual norms. Strangio says that the state trying to pass a bill that would deny the transgender students from freely living their chosen gender would result in a future where they might not get into adulthood. It is true that transgender people are made fun of and made to feel different because of their decision and the segregation which would start right from the school would only make matters worse for them. The bill goes against their constitutional rights and freedom of expression. Strangio and Goodman do justice to the topic by not only talking about it from a personal standpoint but also pitting the reality against a system that has little or no idea about the transgender community. As seen by the admission of the governor, the lawmakers are often people who have not come to contact with or have any personal knowledge of what it is to be a transgender person. In assigning an uniform identity to confirm, the lawmakers are only putting the future of these kids at jeopardy as the presenters say.
Works Cited
Seidman, Steven. (1995). Deconstructing queer theory or the under-theorization of the social and the ethical. In Social postmodernism: Beyond identity politics, edited by Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parsons, Talcott. (1991). The Social System. London: Routledge.
“Targeting Transgender Children, South Dakota Passes Transphobic School Bathroom Bill.” Retrievedfrom:http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/18/targeting_transgender_children_south_dakota_passes.
