TWIBS: Come Hell or High Water I Will Find Trans Joy
Forget the Cass Review for five minutes! I don’t care how bleak the week is, I’ll find something we can all be happy about.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Oh, jeez… okay, uh…
It’s been a rough week. Like, a really rough week.
Listen, a lot of people are going to be talking about the Cass Review. I mean, they’ve already been talking about it for days now, and frankly, they’re a lot more qualified than me to weigh in on it. I talk about transphobia in the UK sometimes, but I don’t have enough space here to discuss a 388 page document. This is, after all, This Week in Barrel Scraping.
Instead of scraping the barrel for goofy, obtuse transphobic buffoonery, let’s scrape the barrel for a touch of trans positivity this week!
I should be able to find something strong right out of the gate. I’m sure of it. Absolutely certain. I just, uh…
Don’t mind me, just awkwardly shuffling some papers…
Aha! Yes, of course. Some good news from Florida. No, don’t click away, I promise I’m being serious!
So, in March of last year—despite some serious backlash from LGBTQ+ Floridians—the Florida state legislature passed an expansion bill, HB1069, which prohibited teachers from asking students for their preferred pronouns, and from telling students their own preferred pronouns if they did not “correspond to [their] sex.” Representative Angie Nixon said, at the time, “Trans people aren’t going away. What has gone away, that I pray comes back, is human decency.”
Seeing this as an obvious violation of their civil liberties, and not wanting to have their teaching certificates suspended, trans teachers sued the state in December. Named plaintiffs included Hillsborough County high school teacher Katie Wood, an anonymous Lee County teacher, and a former Florida Virtual School teacher, AV Schwandes, who had already been fired for using gender neutral pronouns.
Now, for the good news! On Tuesday, Obama-appointed federal judge Mark Walker granted Wood’s request for injunctive relief regarding the pronouns ban, which means that she’s allowed to introduce herself as Miss Wood and use she/her pronouns in the classroom. The caveat here, unfortunately, is that the motion only applies to Wood, and not other teachers throughout Florida. It is, however, an excellent first step towards hopefully overturning these disgusting compelled speech laws passed by supposed champions of free speech.
Besides that, Judge Walker had a lot to say about the Floridian Department of Education’s bullshit in his sixty-page ruling.
“Once again, the state of Florida has a First Amendment problem. Of late, it has happened so frequently, some might say you can set your clock by it,” Walker said. “This time, the state of Florida declares that it has the absolute authority to redefine your identity if you choose to teach in a public school. So, the question before this court is whether the First Amendment permits the state to dictate, without limitation, how public-school teachers refer to themselves when communicating to students. The answer is a thunderous ‘no.’”
That sounds great, doesn’t it? I mean, sure, the injunction only applies to Katie Wood… and we can’t really be sure the end result of the case will be in her favor… so maybe it isn’t as joyful as I had hoped?
What about… uh… okay, you know how transphobes are always insisting we have a “biological advantage” when it comes to sports? Researchers at the University of Brighton say otherwise, chumps! That’s right, “physically active” transgender women perform worse in certain cardiovascular tests and have less lower-body strength than cisgender female athletes! The research even suggests we have equivalent bone density, which everybody knows is the most important measure of athletic skill!
Well, maybe… maybe “trans women are worse at sports” isn’t actually the slam dunk trans joy news I thought it might be…
Okay, no worries, I’m sure there’s something else here! I can find something else… let me just shuffle some more papers… oh, yes, I’ve got it! Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s middle child came out as… Fin!
Garner’s father unfortunately passed on the 30th and, at his funeral, one of her three children introduced themself as Fin. While wearing a very dashing suit and sporting a buzzed head. And that’s it… for now.
Listen, far be it from me to presume anybody’s identity, but uh… come on. You know? Come on. I’ve seen the internet accuse somebody of being transgender for far less. And whether or not Fin is expressly transgender, it always makes me deeply happy to see a kid telling you who they are in a way that we just couldn’t when I was that age.
Fin is fifteen. When I was fifteen, all I knew about transgender people was Boys Don’t Cry, Ace Ventura and Chaz Bono. I had no personal concept of transition, and I had never really seen anybody express their identity in the way that kids can now.
In spite of the transphobic nastiness circulating this week—and, seemingly, every week since 2016—this sort of gender nonconformity in our young ones gives me hope. It gives me hope that, no matter how they denigrate us and deny us our humanity, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. We’re here and we’re out and we have role models in mass media like we’ve never had before.
We’re here to stay.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in South Dakota.
