Transgender Day of Visibility is a chance to recognise the courage of gender diverse people living as their authentic selves.
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But it is also an opportunity to condemn the discrimination to which many of their community are subjected.
These are the crimes that take place on our streets, the type of offence punishable by law.
The indignity of verbal abuse and scars from unprovoked attacks remind transgender people that some in the world still view them as an oddity or, worse, an obscenity.
That a young, transgender member of the Bendigo community should grow up not only to fear, but to expect, physical violence is nothing short of abominable.
There are also moral crimes that herald from our highest offices, the type of acts to which police cannot respond.
When the Victorian opposition last year objected to transgender people changing the sex inscribed on their birth certificates, they perpetuated the type of dysphoria one suffers when the outside world imposes itself on the individual’s innermost identity.
When Federal Court approval is required before stage two hormone treatment can be administered to transgender teens, the system is actively denying those people the chance to get on with the business of living, learning, loving and working.
Then there are the crimes that happen in the hearts and minds of a community.
The reason someone lashes out violently, the reason elected officials cannot bring themselves to legislate change is because they are somehow scared or threatened by another person’s differences.
The transgender community endures ongoing derision and the erosion of self-worth because of cisgendered people’s discomfort with diversity.
It is the same, hateful pattern perpetuated on so-called subordinate sexes, races and sexualities throughout history.
Those bastions of bigotry are crumbling – slowly – and this one must too, because the human cost of doing otherwise is too high.
Half of all transgender people have attempted to take their own life. Four in five have contemplated suicide.
The statistics might be hackneyed, but they remain despairing. And they should be the stuff of national shame.
It is a duty, not a choice, to improve those statistics by quelling violence and quashing fear.
Anything less would be criminal.
- Mark Kearney, journalist