Ten years ago if you told me I’d believe in a cause and be wearing rubber from my sneakers going door to door promoting it I would have said you were crazy. It wasn’t so much that I believed in nothing, it was more a lack of energy combined with a feeling of what can one little person do to affect change. I watched others commit to social action with a sense of bemusement and often with mixed emotions about the causes. I still do.
But I watch our rights erode and in particular as a card carrying member of the LGBT community I don’t feel I can sit back quietly while evil groups like the Family Research Counsel and the American College of Pediatricians spread falsehoods and seek to destroy what little gains the community has gained toward legal protections for equal treatment and protection against discrimination.
With this in mind I got involved with Freedom for all Massachusetts, a group currently working to defeat a ballot referendum that would strip public access protections in Massachusetts for transgender individuals in venues ranging from restaurants and hospitals to bathrooms and locker rooms. Unbelievably only 35,000 signatures are required to bring a referendum to the ballot.
The opposition advertisement is a professionally done tangle of near falsehoods woven into an abhorrent false implication that the law allows men entry into women’s bathrooms (it explicitly makes it illegal to claim to be transgender to gain entry). It implies transgender women are men by misgendering the individuals cited for breaking the law and conveniently ignores that existing laws did a fine job of prosecuting inappropriate behavior. Nobody is saying a transgender individual is incapable of breaking the law.
What people should know is that in eighteen states, including Massachusetts, there has been no change in sex crimes in bathrooms and locker rooms. Such crimes are awful but transgender rights bills do not affect them in either direction.
I hope if you read this and live in Massachusetts that you will vote yes on Measure 1 to maintain our states protections. Don’t let a hospital turn away someone because they’re transgender, or a restaurant throw someone out because of it. Please do also remember that we are human beings and have the same physical needs as everyone else.
Thank you.
My Gifted Life 