On February 21st, a good friend of mine was jumped by three men—one armed and wearing a mask—for being transgender. This woman attended my wedding back in 2009 because she’s a close friend of my wife’s. (Sorry, but I’m withholding her name for her safety, in case the assailants or their friends manage to discover this diary, or the GoFundMe, though the likelihood is pretty minimal.) The attack was the result of her daring to speak to a couple of children in a mall who’d been harassing her. She never approached the kids, only asked them to stop being rude and asked where their parents were, and these kids turned around and told some adults they knew that she was a paedophile who tried to go after them.
These three men followed her in their car, then attacked her on a footpath as she was walking home (which is close by), beating her and breaking her hand. She now has scars on her hand and forehead, where the masked man hit her with his weapon. My friend had to have surgery on her hand twice to remove fluid building up in her knuckles and she was off work for three months while her hand healed.
Further, a neighbour has been going about telling their friends that she’s a paedo, like the children had. This jerk wasn’t involved with the assault and I don’t think they know the people who attacked her. Rumours and false accusations were bruited about on social media, too, and the harassment there has been incredibly ugly.
The Garda (Ireland’s police) have been very helpful in investigating this assault and have arrested two of the men and impounded their car as evidence (my friend’s blood was on it). Sadly, my friend had to stay with a buddy for three weeks while the police were working on the case due it not being safe for her to go home, as the men knew which block she lived on and they were worried these people could come after her again, or send more of their friends to harass her if they learned her address. So, for her safety, she stayed with friends until the perps were arrested.
Because she had to be off work, she’s had only the small disability benefit from the government to tide her over. But, she’s back at work on a limited amount of hours and she won’t get paid until the end of the month. I asked her permission to post this, and to post the GoFundMe a friend set up for her to make ends meet for the next couple of weeks. The goal is modest, only 2500 Euro, and if it’s allowed here to ask for a wee bit of help for her, please donate, if you can.
I don’t know if doing this is OK on Daily Kos, though I’ve seen other needs diaries in the past, but because she’s in another country, I’m not sure of DK’s policy on this. If I have to, I’ll take out the link to the GoFundMe and just leave the diary as is without it, but maybe, if a needs diary for a foreign friend is OK, here it is.
Anti-trans rhetoric is actively hurting people, and those I blame the most for this are right-wing assholes who don’t see a problem with scapegoating innocent people. Only the other day, I read a diary about a nine year old girl in Kelowna, British Columbia (coincidentally, the same town my Mum lived in until she passed from cancer in early Feb), being harassed by a transphobe because she had a Pixie cut hairstyle. A fucking PIXIE CUT. She was participating in a sports meet as a shot-putter, and the grandfather of one of the other competitors started berating her, asking if she was a boy because of her hair.
The girl is cis-gender, apparently, and happy with her gender as it stands. But, some ignorant twat-waffle browbeat her to tears right as she was to compete in the meet. A grandfather of another child did this, all because the cockwombling git assumed she’d been a surgically altered boy (despite no doctor doing transgender surgeries on minors), as if getting a bloody haircut is some massive “tell” for being trans. Incidentally, her parents are a pair of gay women, and I speculate that this jerkoff harassed the kid because he knew the girl had two Mums, and knew belittling the child would throw her game, maybe increasing the chances their grandkid would do better in the rankings. I honestly don’t know if that’s the case, but I doubt it would be beyond a turd like this. The meet ended up being cancelled (and moved to a different date, I believe), the jerk grandparents had to be escorted off the field, and now they’re banned from ever going onto that school’s property for life. These pricks didn’t even live in Kelowna—they were from Saskatchewan.
Then there was the young Democratic representative from Montana who was silenced in chambers because she opposed an anti-trans law that would ban trans-affirming medical care for younger trans people (not hormones, but simple medical care such as counselling or puberty blockers). Zooey Zephyr (D, MT) had her mic cut off to prevent her from speaking and doing her job by the Republican side of their legislature because she told them they “would have blood on their hands” if they passed this bill.
In the UK, JK Rowling has been supporting TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists: there’s nothing ‘radical” about their viewpoints, unless you care to label it radical bigotry, which it is) and anti-trans crap with bad-faith arguments, attending anti-trans luncheons, writing essays and Twitter posts, claiming she’s only supporting women and that somehow a trans-woman is taking something away from cis-women. She doesn’t seem to realize that more rights for us doesn’t mean fewer rights for her: it’s not pie.
But, because Rowling has money and a wide platform, her bigotry is really affecting the situation for trans people in the UK in a negative way. She’s lost a ton of respect from her fans (others wholly support her, which is sad), and at least one of the future Potterverse movies has been cancelled from being made. Even a number of the stars from the Harry Potter films have denounced Rowling’s views. As for me, I refuse to buy any of her writing ever again.
In 41 states here in the US, close to 500 anti-trans bills have been posed in Congress at the state and federal level. That number is repulsive, and so many states are enacting garbage laws to feed the damned trolls on the GQP side. Some actually passed, though various courts are currently overturning and blocking many of them.
We’re being used as a scapegoat in the GQP’s culture wars because they don’t have anything to actually offer their constituents except hate for the different. We trans folk are roughly .001% (if I recall correctly) of the population, yet the GQP is painting us as a massive threat. It’s fucking ridiculous. Any distraction they can bring forward so the rubes in their base won’t notice them picking their pockets and taking their rights away, such as attempting to kill Medicare, Social Security and veteran’s benefits. They’re using genocidal language to “other” us and using their brain-dead, Evangelical religion as an excuse to brutalize us for no reason.
I’m both trans and gay, and this stuff makes me grind my teeth in rage that people can’t just leave us alone. We aren’t hurting anyone, nor are we attacking children or women in bathrooms. But, these morans refuse to understand that. To them, because the right-wing propaganda and the ignorant, bigoted pastor at the pulpit says so, we’re evil.
Anyways, I hope posting the GoFundMe for my friend is OK. Thanks for hearing me out.