It’s Not About the Bathroom - Trans Families - Melissa Ballard -Transgender bathroom - Transgender Universe

When you have a cold or the flu people say, “go see your doctor” and when you have a toothache they say, “go see your dentist”. When you need a haircut they say, “go see your hairdresser”, but when you are a transgender person they say, “you need God” or “you need a shrink”.

“Why is it that when a transgender person feels the need to get on medication to help their problems people are suddenly in disagreement?”

When you have depression you get medicine to help improve and when you have a tooth problem you have it removed or take pain killers for it. If your hair color or length changes you color or cut it and if it starts to fall out you can get medicine or special products to help the problem. No one questions these things and it all seems so normal to most. Why is it that when a transgender person feels the need to get on medication to help their problems people are suddenly in disagreement? How about when a straight, cisgender person has plastic surgery to enhance or change their body? People tend to compliment on the end results. Women have breast implants, men and women both have nose jobs and plenty of people use Botox or other similar treatments. That is all in keeping up with good and youthful appearances.

It’s Not About the Bathroom - Transgender bathroom - Trans Families - Melissa Ballard - Target - Transgender Universe When a transgender person takes hormones and begins to change their body to match how they feel inside, they are looked at as wrong or horrible people for doing so. Plenty think they have a mental illness or that they are depraved sexual predators. Much like having a right to make the decision to abort a birth, augment the breasts or reconstruct the face, transgender people should have the same rights as cisgender people. The issues around this very concept have been fought on many levels for many years. This is the new civil rights movement, much like Martin Luther King Jr. once fought – a fight for basic human rights. All people deserve these rights and all people deserve respect. You do not have to agree with or like what another person is doing in order to give them the basic courtesy and freedoms given to others.

“We live in a democratic society that is feeling more and more like an oligarchy.”

We live in a democratic society that is feeling more and more like an oligarchy. A small group trying to control another is not my idea of freedom or equality! Just this week I was part of a group opposing the proposed anti-transgender city ordinance in Rockwall, Texas. Thankfully, the councilmen (minus the author and also the Mayor) voted down the proposed measure and the potential ordinance as it was written is now dead. In this proposal, transgender people would have been fined $500 for using the bathroom of the gender in which they identify and any local business allowing them to do so would be fined as well. This was a knee-jerk reaction and hurried proposal with no supporting data, written by the Mayor in response to last week’s policy reiteration by Target (this policy has actually been in place since in Target since September 2015).

The focus has largely been on “keeping women and children safe”, but the group they need to be kept safe from, predatory criminals, has not been who the ordinances are written against. Fortunately the majority in Rockwall killed this bill, but this is only the beginning of a long fight in Texas. We will continue to fight for transgender rights in the upcoming legislature in 2017 and in any other municipality trying to ban transgender rights within their city.