Hooray—the obligatory end/beginning-of-year blog post!
2009 was pretty big for the trans community, I think—maybe not the biggest ever, but still pretty substantial. A bunch of employment and health care cases reached various courts and gained various publicity; some rights were earned, while others are closer than ever to being obtained. ENDA is becoming a reality; affordable transitions are becoming a possibility; murders and assaults committed because of transphobic bigotry are now considered federal hate crimes. Things are changing state-by-state, too. For example, New York just became the seventh state in America to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in state employment. And come on. Chaz Bono came out!
2010 *should* be a good one too, right? We’re still working towards a lot of things, and the progress may be slow, but we’re closer now than ever before. We need better laws surrounding employment, housing, and education, sure, and maybe even access to public bathrooms; we need to ensure that people are taking ENDA and the hate crimes law seriously; we need better health care; we need to work hard to ensure that gender variance is “normalized” in our society.
The great news is, it’s not just the trans-specific groups working to get us there. For example, GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) published a “wish list for the coming year” that includes a bullet point that says, “a win in our challenge to the IRS's refusal to allow a transgender woman a tax deduction for her medical care.” We’re getting there—together.
What do YOU think the best part of 2009 was for the transgender community? What are you looking forward to THIS year?
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