What Ignorance Does: Transgender Visibility

On December 7, 2016 Danica Roem became the first ever transgender person elected to state legislature. A few weeks later the Virginia GOP announced that they wanted to begin using non gendered titles when addressing delegates. While House Leader Kirk Cox, a republican, said that this move was being thought about for a long time and that it was time for this to occur. Interpreted by many to be an attempt to invalidates Roem's womanhood and to specifically allow them to not call her a woman. However, the GOP failed to realize that a non gendered title is beneficial to non binary people, since it removes the awkwardness of having to correct people or having to challenge people who purposely misgender.

Why were these law makers so uneducated about a subject that they want to fight against? This question comes up again and again when discussing transgender rights.  Although this topic may seem fairly new and foreign to some transgender people have been around for as long as people themselves. For most of recorded European history individuals who did not adhere to the gender binary were ridiculed or shunned from society. As time went on these people kept on being pushed down by European society until it seemed as though they no longer existed.

So this prompts the question of why are we seeing transgender people now in everyday society. Why is Danica Roem winning elections, why is The Switch, a sit com about transgender people living in Vancouver, becoming popular? One option is just time. The collective rebellion over thousands of years finally coming out and triumphing. Another is changing perspective on gender with cisgender people. Judith Lorber writes in “Night to his Day”:The Social Construction of Gender, "gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly 'doing gender'". This ideology has become more pervasive with time resulting in the world we have now. In my opinion the most logical option is the slow disassembly of imperialist Western culture. When Europe, and later on America, began colonizing the world the invaders destroyed and ripped apart the native cultures. In what would become California, Spanish missionaries killed any Native Americans who did not do the work that was associated with their sex. This created a world in which the only ideology was the Western one. As time went on ideology, and more importantly what was societally acceptable, changed. It was no longer allowed, in the classic sense, to kill anyone who did not follow the same mindset as you. Now rights for marginalized groups could explode outward and create a society in which these people were not murdered everyday. This made certain parts of what was considered normal to collapse, but only in certain locations were laws actually changed and these people congregated. When transgender people grouped together they forced people to learn and acknowledge them. However, in places like Virginia, where Danica Roem is from, the past societal constructs were still in place due to a lack of knowledge on these people. This resulted in a dichotomy in which transgender individuals were hidden in the eyes of the media and the everyday, but were living their lives in cities. As time progressed trans people gradually became more public as they became involved in ads, writing, and just life. Thus we have the society were we live now were Roem can go to the American Music Awards with Demi Lovato, and yet still be attacked and pushed down by her political adversaries.