Articles selected for today's review come from Boulder County, Colorado and Salt Lake City.
The Salt Lake City Tribune posted an op-ed by Megan Thomas, who lives in SLC but studies social work at Southern Cal, where she also advocates for social justice.
Social norms in Utah are immensely impacted by its conservative religious culture that insists upon strict adherence to binary gender roles, sex-segregated groups, anti-LGBQTI precepts and a sexist organizational hierarchy.
Despite the family-centered values of our community, these conservative ideals have historically oppressed and suppressed its transgender children, resulting in death, neglect, or chronic gender identity dysphoria. A medically treatable condition, gender identity dysphoria is characterized by hopeless, lonely, obsessive reconciling of one’s inner self and one’s public self, often leading to depression and suicide. It should come as no surprise, then, that Utah’s teen suicide rate is among the highest in the country.
Unfortunately, Utah legislators have refused to offer any protection to the transgender population. The effects of this failure on the state’s gender nonconforming community include doubled unemployment rates, quadrupled poverty rates, unlawful arrests, extended sentences, and collective distrust in law enforcement.
Read the rest here:
Utah’s transgender youth need our protection
The Daily Camera offers Living transgender in Boulder County: Self-love is the easy part, but true alliance can be hard to find in its Boulder County News section.
Written by Alex Burgess, the article focuses on 14-year-old trans girl Shannon Axe, an 8th grader at Boulder's Horizons charter school, Kyl Caragol, a transman who recently moved from San Francisco to Longmont and transitioned 17 years ago, and newly transitioned Sara Connell, 24.
Also mentioned in the article is a recent Colorado-focused study by the One Colorado Education fund which revealed that although transgender Coloradans are twice as likely to hold a college degree than other Colorado adults, half have a yearly income below $25,000 and they are 25% more likely to be uninsured.
These numbers become clear when you're talking about people who come out when they're older. If you have lived as your parents and society expected you to be, you are not male or female on the inside, and let's say you're in your 40s, you decide, 'I can't live this way anymore.' You come out, and it's unrelentingly harsh.
It's very, very common that, even if people have had very professional competency, when they come out, they can lose everything — their job, their family, their friends. It can be a really huge loss on many levels. And, yet, if you talk to them, they say, 'I couldn't do anything else. It was either that or I lose my own life.'
--Boulder resident Jean Hodges, new national president of PFLAG
Nobody wants to feel sad. Every trans person wants to feel proud, and I know that. It's feeling supported — that's what a lot of trans people don't get.
In sixth grade, I was trying to fit into a group of people and being someone I wasn't. That was a mistake because I was stealth, and it was the worst decision of my whole entire life. I knew I was trans, and I knew I should be proud, and at the end of sixth grade I came out to the eighth-graders. I said, 'I'm Shannon, and I'm proud to be transgender.
It was the best experience of my life. I always felt it was awesome for me to be trans, but when I told those people, it was letting them know I can be who I am, and I can be authentic.
--Shannon Axe
A lot of people still don't really understand. They tolerate it and are accepting, but many people just don't really understand.
--Nicholas Bell, 13-year-old trans boy
When I talk about issues with people of color, I have to think, 'I can never understand exactly where you're coming from, but I'll stand behind you and I'll support you. Even a straight person who can't understand what we go through, it doesn't mean they can't be an ally.
--Caragol
Caragol says he still finds using public bathrooms to be "terrifying."
Every time. Particularly in bars, where the men's room doesn't have stalls. Then I'm with a bunch of dudes, some drunk, and I'm just trying to pee. I think there's still this perception that we're in there to be up to some kind of mischief. I've gone through changing all of my birth and name and gender markers, gone through two surgeries, and I stick a needle in my leg every week to get my hormones, and I'm doing all that just to sneak into the men's room?
And it creates barriers to people like us accessing things,. Even if it wouldn't normally be an issue. Like airports — a lot of trans people will think twice about traveling by plane if they don't need to.
When people think about what oppression looks like, they go to the violent places of the KKK burning a cross or a lynching. I think what it can look like if you're trans, especially in Boulder, is just so much discomfort in people's faces and so many people who just look flabbergasted. They don't know how to deal with me, or how to talk to me.
--Connell