By Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Gwendolyn Ann SmithOn the 27th of November, as many hit the stores looking for "black Friday" deals, a gunman walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In the course of his rampage, three people were killed, while several others were injured.
The alleged killer, Robert Lewis Dear, a 59-year-old white male, was taken into custody alive, and will stand trial for his crimes. While the media was lax on citing possible reasons for his spree of domestic terrorism, a law enforcement official did say that Dear told investigators, "No more baby parts."
Dear identifies as a Christian Evangelical and is staunchly anti-abortion. While I am purely speculating, I have to assume that the recent attacks by conservatives, spurred on by a series of videos created by David Daleiden that claim to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue, could have played a role in this case.
This is not a column about abortion rights, however, but transgender rights.
After Dear was taken into custody, an error was found on his voter registration: it listed him as female. It was a data entry error from the El Paso County Department of Motor Vehicles. Dear had the same error on his driver's license, but had gotten that corrected. The voter registration still had the mistake. This did not stop gatewaypundit.com from reporting that Dear "identifies as woman." They also included that he had been charged in 2002 for being a "peeping tom."
In spite of every other shred of evidence pointing to Dear not being transgender, conservatives went into high gear. The Liberty Counsel, a right-wing group focused on religious freedom, tweeted, "Obvious, only a confused man would think he was a woman." They did not feel that his taking of three lives mattered in that particular Tweet.
Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz went further. During a campaign stop in Iowa, Cruz labeled Dear as a "transgendered leftist activist." None of those three words seems to apply to Dear. He further stated, "We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman."
Over the last few years, we have seen an increasing drumbeat from the right in opposition to LGBT rights. The fight against marriage rights has failed, tossed onto the dustbin of Bryant and Briggs. In seeking a new group to demonize, they have happened upon transgender people, or more specifically transgender women.
Twenty-four days before Dear opened fire, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance was defeated. The bill had added sexual orientation and gender identity to the city's anti-discrimination laws. It also made explicit protections based on sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, genetic information and pregnancy.
The bill was defeated by anti-equality foes who successfully cast the bill as a "bathroom bill" that would let males into the women's room to harm your wives and daughters.
Buoyed by this, fights are now heating up across the country, including a brand-new initiative effort in California designed to prevent the government from mandating "co-ed facilities." Note that language, which is deceptive: it is not about "co-ed" facilities, but about allowing transgender people to use facilities that match their gender identity or expression. It is not about "protecting privacy," nor is it about "keeping predators out of women's rooms." It is about discrimination, and will be used to strip not just transgender protections, but also anything that opponents can muster. Consider again that long list that was stripped away in Houston.
There's one thing standing in the way of these laws, and that's facts: nondiscrimination ordinances do not remove laws against rape and sexual assault. Crimes remain crimes, no matter if someone had a right to a given restroom. More importantly, there's no increase to risk when these nondiscrimination ordinances are on the books.
From research provided by Brynn Tannehill of SPARTA, encompassing over 35 years of such ordinances covering transgender people worldwide, there has been only one single case of these laws being manipulated in a fashion close to what opponents want to claim. That's out of a countless number of people using public restrooms around the world.
Let me get back to Robert Lewis Dear. Let's take a moment and look at his moment of domestic terrorism through the fun house mirror of Cruz and others. Let's say that we do call Dear a "transgendered leftist activist" for a moment, and consider that Dear forced his way into a women's space, using his — or hers, if we continue to assume the voter identification is correct with Dear's identity — purported rights to public accommodations in the state of Colorado to allow him to enter without repercussion. In doing so, he killed three people, and would be a model candidate for the repeal of anti-discrimination laws.
Except, of course, Dear is not transgender, and none of the above even makes sense.
For decades — and especially this year — the right has been attacking Planned Parenthood. Yet this time, they were more than happy to demonize a person who was literally doing their dirty work at a Planned Parenthood clinic because it would fit an anti-transgender narrative. It would see that there is no step that is too far for them to go, and no level they won't stoop to in order to strip away our rights.
So the question is this. With foes who will try to paint a killer like Dear as a "transgendered leftist activist" in order to demonize transgender people, and in a time when more transgender people have been reportedly murdered in the United States than ever before, how far will we have to go to defend our rights?
