Transgender rights are consistently being threatened, with a record number of anti-trans bill being filed in just the first few months of this year alone. According to NBC News, nearly 240 such pieces of legislation have been filed, ranging from bills that target trans athletes and youth to restricting health care access and barring students from learning about LGBTQ issues. As part of Daily Kos’ commitment to better covering trans issues and uplifting the trans experience, the Daily Kos Equity Council on Thursday facilitated a discussion with three panelists about trans rights. Hosted by Trending News writer Marissa Higgins (she/her), staff heard from KB Brookins (they/them), Holiday Simmons (he/him), and S. Leigh Thompson (he/they).
Brookins, whose book of poetry How to Identify Yourself With a Wound delves into intersectional inquiry, expertly answered questions about the trans experience and offered fantastic advice for those looking to be better allies. When the subject of health care arose, Brookins was able to connect the medical system that fails us all with trans-specific issues in that space. Brookins discussed a piece they wrote for the Huffington Post about their experience seeking care from a gynecologist as a Black trans man in Texas and the power imbalance between providers and patients. “If you have someone in front of you who has the power to alter the experience of your body or your mind, that is a large responsibility and I think it's super important that people are competent around giving health care to trans folks,” Brookins said. “This is a thing that absolutely everybody should care about, because having legislation that hinders how you can support your child is an issue that everyone should care about. And the misconception is, I think, that people think it's a trans issue. I think it's a human rights issue.”
RELATED STORY: Daily Kos Equity Council presents a panel on trans rights
Thompson, a consultant and facilitator whose creative work offers an inspiring chance for intersectional dialog, was well-equipped to provide a thoughtful answer about trans health care issues. They briefly brought up the trauma of their first OB/GYN visit, further highlighting the fact that seeking out gender-affirming care should only strengthen the argument that trans rights are human rights. “This just underpins that health care for anybody is hard in the United States, right? It's already hard,” Thompson said. “So, like, who actively desires to engage more in the health care system just for funsies? It's so, so rare that that happens. People are struggling to actually get any care whatsoever, and so for trans people to take the extra effort to seek out actual care [...] to affirm and to support their experience and their identity in the world, that's not something that just happens on accident. It's through great consideration and great deliberation.”
That certainty is something cisgender folks rarely are forced to reckon with, even when those folks choose to seek care that is itself gender-affirming. Both Brookins and Simmons brought up the fact that hormones are prescribed for a variety of reasons for folks across the gender spectrum. “We're all transitioning, throughout life,” Simmons explained. “A personal story is when I was earlier on in my medical transition, I was not seeing some of the physical changes that I wanted and I asked my doctor, ‘Should I get a higher dose?’ And I go to a queer medical place,” Simmons said. “He's like, ‘I got big burly bears who have low testosterone levels and little skinny twinks with testosterone through the roof.’ It's really not correlated, and also, maybe let's interrogate this.”
Simmons’ work as the Resident in Resilience and Healing at the Campaign for Southern Equality is pivotal in helping LGBTQ+ folks get the medical care they need. The Campaign for Southern Equality maintains a provider directory so those seeking care can do so in a respectful environment that doesn’t pose a danger to them—a very pressing concern Simmons noted in his experience of, say, simply going to urgent care for a COVID test. “Even if it's the most affirming urgent care place, I still have to do that work to figure out if it's safe to [out myself] and if I want to do that labor,” Simmons said. “Even if we create the best systems, this is still something trans people have to navigate.”
An unwelcoming environment isn’t just at the doctor’s office, unfortunately, but rather can be felt across many interactions. Panelists provided tips for those who may struggle with misgendering trans and nonbinary folks. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to get better with using different pronouns is a tool any language learner is familiar with: practice. Brookins describes giving one of their plants ze/hir pronouns, while Thompson gave their cat they/them pronouns to not only help them practice but teach their child about pronoun usage. Brookins also brought up mypronouns.org, which offers a collection of resources in one place.
Perhaps the best tools for honoring trans folks and combatting transphobia are cold, hard facts. All three panelists easily tore apart made-up scenarios about one of the most pressing issues trans folks face today: discrimination in sports and through legislative actions. Thompson suggested that, for those who engage in a lot of “what if” questions, it’s about finding out what information that person is truly seeking and helping them get to the heart of why they may have some confusion around trans athlete issues.
“We can ‘what if’ any scenario,” Thompson said. “And, for some people, it's a helpful thing for them to start to learn the boundaries of an idea or of an issue, and so they're trying to figure out, ‘What are the edges of this conversation?’ As a person who trains on these issues, I approach it a little bit differently at times. Which is just to remind people, to really help folks understand that, often if people are trying to ‘what if,’ they really are trying to learn where the extremities are of this thing.” Thompson continued:
“Some people are literally trying to ‘what if’ in order to tank the issue. And so trying to lean into the ally space of people who actually really want to support and health. And if that's really what you want to do, I try to get to what's at the core of the ‘what if.’ Like, are you really trying to understand this issue more? Because we can come up with a scenario, anybody can actually pretend to be anyone else in order to defraud a sports team. Anybody can pretend to be somebody else in order to do harm, or because they have a whim, or because they have an issue and they really hate all girls in sports and want to screw them over. There are so many possibilities. Those are possible. They're not likely. We don't have any experiences of them actually happening. Let's actually instead of focusing on the one maybe, let's focus on all of the thousands and thousands of trans young people who are trying to engage in sports and need to do so in a supportive way. [...] And so really supporting people and saying, ‘This is the pathway that can actually get to the place that we want to go.’”
A helpful list of resources is below for those interested in learning more about accessible health care for trans folks, pronouns, and more about the panelists themselves.
