FIRST LGBT+ (A blog by and about LGBT+ people in FIRST)

[Madison]

Originally Posted by anonymous123

I'm not sure that I understand how this question is pertinent to the conversation, Madison. The skin color you are born with is not a choice, and the law does not prevent students of different skin colors from sharing a hotel room. The law does prevent students of different sexes from sharing a hotel room.

I do not know how you categorize students who choose to identify with the opposite sex of the body they were born with. Maybe you should go by what their government-issued ID says, or their birth certificate, or what the records kept by the school district indicate. The last thing you want is a student with a male body, but who identifies as a female, sharing a room with female students. This is a recipe for disaster, and, as a parent I would not be comfortable putting my daughter in this situation.

The scenario I laid out purposefully draws a comparison between a person's skin color and their sexuality or gender identity. I believe, unequivocally, that those characteristics are as immutable as one's skin color. Further, I believe that a trans person should be treated as one would anyone else who shares the same gender identity (and, more generally, that treating people differently based on gender is an absurd concept on its face).

I don't agree with the supposition that the scenario you describe above is a recipe for disaster. You are valuing the discomfort you feel about placing your daughter in that situation above the discomfort the trans person feels when they are treated as something different than they are. I don't think that's fair and that was the point I was trying to make with my initial comparison. Too often, we consider the experiences of LGBTQ people to be something other than normal and we inconvenience them, to put it mildly, in service of allaying our own misgivings.