“Misgendering a transgendered person is an act of violence.” – Laverne Cox, addressing North Carolina’s HB2 bill.
“There is no question that United Methodist Church’s policy is violence and has done violence.” – Kristin Stoneking, a clergy member addressing the UMC’s refusal to recognise same-sex partnerships and LGBTQ identities as legitimate and not inherently sinful.
A lot of the time when we think and speak about violence, we think of direct physical violence. A bully pushes a younger kid into a locker and steals his lunch money. An abusive person batters their romantic partner. We don’t pay enough attention to the emotional or indirect violence. Violence rooted in institutions built upon discrimination, segregation and dehumanisation.
Cox and Stoneking are right. These policies are acts of violence – great destructive forces – in their own right. Discriminatory bathroom laws disrupt the day to day lives of trans people, who already have a heightened risk of being targets of physical assault in bathrooms. Even before North Carolina’s law was passed, up to 70% of trans individuals reported being assaulted or harrassed in a bathroom. How much worse will the fear associated with that get for trans people in a state that encourages people to take pictures and call a hotline to report people they think they see in the wrong bathroom? Even if there isn’t a further increase in physical violence against trans people in bathrooms, there’s no denying that cis people hardly ever have to worry about whether they ‘pass’ enough to get into the bathroom unimpeded.
The United Methodist Church’s policies, which deny out LGBTQ people the ability to get married or be ordained, are also harmful. Children grow up hearing that they’re not accepted even in church, where ostensibly they should feel most loved and accepted. Talented, passionate individuals are held back from serving to their full capacity, or are forced to hide important parts of themselves in order to avoid losing their jobs. Not being allowed to express yourself fully in that way takes a toll on your emotions. It’s not something you can easily ignore or ‘get over’.
Apart from the emotional turmoil these policies can create, they do also help contribute to physical violence against LGBTQ people. People take discriminatory bathroom laws to mean they can bodily drag trans women out of female bathrooms if they don’t think they belong there. Laws and policies of institutions like schools and churches all impact the wide-scale treatment of LGBTQ individuals in an area. Dominant cultural attitudes reproduce themselves as young people are raised to believe “that’s how we’ve always done it” and therefore “this must be right”. And in a society where those in power have always used violence to maintain that power, labelling LGBTQ people as ‘the other’ can only ever lead to increased physical violence against them, whether in bathrooms or on playgrounds.
This is why 50% of trans youth in the US will attempt suicide by their 20th birthday, and why bisexual teenage girls have higher risks of depression than young people of any other sexual identity. We set them up for this. They are confronted with violence, with systems that invalidate their feelings every day of their lives. But we underestimate the seriousness of the impact these systems can have. Just as society is more prone to take physical health more seriously than mental health, we sometimes ignore systematic emotional violence in an effort to eradicate physical violence. The two can’t be fully separated. They need to be viewed and addressed as related issues, because they are, and they both pose serious threats to the wellbeing of a significant portion of the population.
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