From The Association For Transgender Professionals: http://www.transgenderprofessionals.org/2013/03/25/new-lamps-for-old/
by Denise Norris
March 25, 2013
The Arizona State Legislature has been kicking around a bill to make it a misdemeanor for anyone to use a gender-specific public facility that was not aligned with the sex on the user’s birth certificate. The sponsor of the bill announced recently that he was delaying a debate over it after dozens of transgender people flooded the State House of Representatives.
Lots of people have written about the silliness of the bill, which would de facto require anyone with the slightest non-conforming gender expression to carry around their birth certificate simply to use a public toilet. Even more silly is that to identify who is who when taking a quick pee, the police would have to use some sort of profiling to guess at who was born with what. Oddly that will fail pretty quickly since a number of States correct birth-certificates back to the time of birth, so that even a birth-certificate that says MALE, does not mean that the bearer was assigned that way at birth.
I want to veer away from the stupidity of Rep. John Kavanagh’s bill and look at the historical issue of discrimination toward people with non-conforming gender expression and the struggle between gender expression diversity and gender expression homogeneity.
This struggle is ultimately a clash of cultures extending back nearly 2500 years. A tiny kingdom was struggling to keep its cultural identity while surrounded by powerful multicultural enemies. Its sister kingdom in the north had just been overrun by a powerful nation and its own citizens were increasingly turning to worshiping the old gods at home and in the temple. The old multicultural king was killed in palace coup and his 8-year old son was placed on the throne by the monotheistic (and wealthy) land owners. Under the guidance of the people of the land, the boy grew into a man who believed the ills of his kingdom were the result of the worship of foreign gods and idols (who really weren’t foreign but certainly were older). The king became a reformer who banished the idols and old gods from the temple. To distract the people from the loss of their gods, the king restored the temple which was originally dedicated to the one true god hundreds of years earlier, before the old kingdom was split in two, north and south. During the restoration of the temple of the one true god, the chief priest discovered a text which he attributed to the one god’s first law giver. It was, not surprisingly, a book of laws for the kingdom’s chosen people to protect them from cultures of the surrounding heathens.
Continue reading at: http://www.transgenderprofessionals.org/2013/03/25/new-lamps-for-old/
