By Sikivu Hutchinson
At a recent elementary school
training I conducted on creating safe spaces for LGBTQI youth, the
predominantly black faculty spoke candidly about the scorn little black boys
get when they want to play with dolls and the backlash little black girls get
when they step out of their “gender place” to “experiment” with boy clothes, short hair
and action figures. Though their world
views varied, their observations were nearly unanimous—students are presenting
as non-binary at earlier ages and even the most “liberal” school districts here
in California are failing them in a climate where black gender non-conformity is
already criminalized, othered, and erased.
For scores of very young non-binary children,
the ability to define themselves for themselves is a radical rebuke of Western Eurocentric
power structures that say biology is destiny and queer sexuality should be on
lockdown. In this regard, the Trump
administration’s potential recission of Obama-era provisions for inclusive and
non-binary gender categories is a fascist, Orwellian assault on the gender
identities of all Americans who defy the rigid hetero-norms of Christian
fundamentalist America. As reported Sunday by the New York Times, “The Department of Health and Human Services
is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX.
The new definition would define sex as
either male or female, unchangeable and determined by the genitals a person is
born with. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic
testing.”
A recission would fatally undermine
the inroads trans and non-binary folks have made in education, health care, cultural
awareness, and the creation of safe LGBTQI public spaces. Under Betsey DeVos, the U.S. Department of Education
has already rescinded
Obama-era recommendations for protecting trans students experiencing harassment
and “reportedly refused” to file administrative claims on their behalf.
The GOP’s policing of gender identity as a biological,
medically determined and “scientifically” delineated “fact” is one of the most
dangerous and potentially criminalizing directives that the Trump
administration has manufactured. If the
Trump administration succeeds in this assault, discrimination against the trans
community would be even more deeply enshrined in U.S. public policy and
practice than before, and scores of trans and non-binary children would be at
greater risk of state-sanctioned discrimination in their schools. To date, only
thirteen states, along with the District of Columbia, have implemented
non-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQI youth. Non-binary children are more
likely to experience sexual harassment, sexual assault and bullying than their
non-binary peers. In California, nearly
27% of youth identify as gender non-conforming.
According to UCLA’s Williams
Institute, these youth were more likely to experience “psychological distress”
than “conforming” youth. Black non-binary
children are especially at risk of being assigned to foster care, becoming
homeless and/or incarcerated due to these interlocking systems of
oppression.
In many instances, the spiral of homelessness and
incarceration are put in motion because of the absence of culturally responsive
resources for queer students of color. A
limited number of resource providers and teacher allies provide the care that
queer youth of color need to survive hostile, violent environments where they
are being pushed out in disproportionate numbers. Yet, some perceive adult providers on campus,
including counselors, as “dangerous” because, as one respondent in a 2018 Human
Rights Campaign survey
commented, “they can get you killed by outing you without your permission”. LGBTQI youth of color in predominantly religious communities
are especially vulnerable because they are often subject to ostracism, shaming
and harassment due to the perception that their sexuality is “sinful”, deviant
or “against god”. As a result, African American trans young women are more
likely to experience hostility from school administrators and faculty and to be
prevented from claiming their gender identity—a precursor to the
disproportionate levels of violence black trans women face.
It is a brutally profound irony that an administration
notorious for trashing the scientific evidence on climate change and fetal
viability has suddenly become a champion of “immutable” scientific categories on
sex and gender. The Trump
administration’s cynical deference to science is steeped in medical apartheid-based
policies that disenfranchised people of color, queer folks, disabled folks and
women of all classes (whether it be Eugenics “science” that was used under
slavery and Jim Crow to determine racial categories or white nationalist “science”
marshalled to validate sterilization policies targeting women of color).
In their recent Colorlines piece,
“Practical Tips for Fighting the Trump Administration’s Latest Assault on Trans
People,” Key Jackson and Malcolm Shanks provide a list of trans and gender
non-conforming activist organizations of color spearheading leadership on queer
and trans resiliency, public policy, and education. But non-queer “allies” and
accomplices, as well as parents, caregivers and resource providers, must
actively step up to disrupt this latest anti-human rights offense; demanding more training, curricula, counselors, affinity groups and mental health services in K-12 schools. The Trump-Pence regime banks on the silence and
complicity of straight, cis folks to steamroll its destructive crusade over
black queer and trans bodies of color.
