Executive Summary:The State of Transgender Rights in the United States  

We begin the international dialog by answering the question: “What do we mean when we say “transgender”? “Transgender” is a category which emerged in the late 1960s in resistance to the medical, psychiatric or sexological labels of transvestite and transsexual, and was invigorated in the 1990s in pursuit of a more just social order. In spite of broad theoretical origins, however, “transgender” functions in the vernacular as a minoritizing identity label. Within and beyond U.S. borders, it threatens to subsume non-Western configurations of self, sexuality, and gender within a newly imposed category of social deviance, while remaining deaf to local cultural, political, or socio-economic differences. In bringing the United States to the table for a global conversation about “transgender rights,” our goal is not to impose a U.S.-centric model of gender variance on the rest of the world. It is, rather, to resist the reductive use of the “transgender” label to create a new minority class. We seek instead to preserve and amplify the political and analytical dimensions of the term’s history of use in the United States. Our goal is to use “transgender” as a lens for examining the relationship between specific forms of oppression experienced by particular kinds of “transgendered” people.

The answer to our second question: “What do we mean by ‘transgender rights’ in the United States?” reflects on the specific legal constructs delimiting transgender lives, including the major civil rights legislation that hostile courts claim does not apply to transgender people. In the United States municipalities began passing ordinances prohibiting cross-gender dressing in the 1840s, suggesting that the coercive regulation of dissident gender expression has been a concern of government for more than a hundred and fifty years. By the 1960s transgender people were active in civil rights protests. But articulating transgender grievances against social oppression in terms of a minority discourse, which has been a viable strategy for other groups whose difference from the norm is based on religion, race, disability, ethnicity, and (non-transgender) gender has not proven fruitful beyond the local level, although thirteen states now include some protections in statutory law against discrimination based on gender identity or expression. Trans people still suffer very high levels of adverse discrimination in employment, housing, and access to medical care, including basic health care. And they often face horrific difficulties engaging in activities as basic as buying groceries without confronting bias and even violence.

We also ask, “What specific issues should a transgender civil rights movement address?” and respond by listing twenty-nine policy, legal, and medical issues that constitute the most fundamental problems that commonly affect the majority of trans people, noting that anti-trans discrimination forces trans people into poverty, unemployment, illegal trade, and drug abuse, while subjecting them to hate violence. We contend that a human rights framework should be more successful than a “minority status” framework in achieving social safety and equality for transgender people.

We then examine the tactics and strategies that have worked to achieve the rights we’ve won so far. These include litigating in the courts, passing laws, policy advocacy, direct service provision, and organizing for social justice in coalition with other constituencies. We also list the most active organizations working on transgender rights in the United States, and explore what we believe remains to be done, which, in spite of astounding progress over the past fifteen-plus years, remains a tremendous amount of work. We believe that transgender rights advocacy in the United States must move beyond an identity politics model and that our cause is most productively grounded in a human rights framework.  Further, participatory policy research and advocacy is of vital importance to move trans issues forward, particularly with respect to the most vulnerable transgender communities—youth, people of color, and low-income populations. Transgender activists and advocates must also engage with ethicists, artists, historians, rhetoricians, cultural theorists, and others who can help reframe what counts as evidence, or expand the range of who can be considered an expert when describing or defining transgender experience, or who can demonstrate how a hostile or disengaged audience can be moved toward transgender justice, in ways that are not subject to empirical falsification. Activists must work to understand the impact of gender-rigid policies and practices and repair the injustices such policies and practices have imposed. Thus, the state of transgender rights in the United States fundamentally remains in a formative stage, developing with relentless energy, but far less advanced than our theory or our capacity to dream. Our movement is far less monolithic than the notion of “America” that reverberates—for good or ill—beyond our shores. We welcome a global dialog and the deeper human understanding we believe transgender people from all cultures can actualize together.