Dignity: Back on the Agenda

On Day One, the public policy script in America suddenly tilted toward human dignity. After four very dark years, abruptly within the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. and specifically in the new Biden White House, the light of acceptance, inclusion, caring, and solidarity once again started shining brightly. For those like me within the American LGBTQ+ community, the policy changes at the top are both welcome and breathtaking, especially given the high priority that President Biden has assigned to these changes.

To be fair, President Biden’s remarkable executive order on his first full day in office to protect American LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in many of our most vulnerable places – on the job, at school, in healthcare facilities, at homeless shelters, and in so many other settings – is simply Joe Biden being Joe Biden. He has been a staunch champion for the human rights and dignity of my community for many years, as was made emphatically clear when six international LGBTQ+ advocates and I had the privilege directly to experience his unqualified welcome and support in a West Wing meeting in the Roosevelt Room on March 22, 2014. Re-engaging his support now is both reinvigorating and uplifting, especially after the trauma and exasperation of years of enduring increasing discrimination from his immediate Oval Office predecessor, from 16 state legislatures around this country, and from virulently homophobic and transphobic (and very well-funded) conservative and religious organizations.

We will sorely need that reinvigoration in the months and years ahead. Many Americans, and indeed much of the world's population, still takes a contrary view on the worthiness for human rights protection of LGBTQ+ persons. On the other side, strenuous and often courageous efforts persist to ameliorate the attitudes, convictions, and beliefs of so many people and institutions who currently readily deny the full humanity and dignity of LGBTQ+ people. In many places and in many ways, such efforts have only just begun to show positive results – yet such progress often has been constrained by pushback from fiercely oppositional forces.

As an openly transgender American woman, I have faced many incidents of discrimination, job losses based on transphobia, and bouts of humiliation, intentional misgendering, and outright rejection. I have become weary as people continue to assault my fundamental humanity by seeing me not as Chloe, but only as a pernicious and threatening stereotype. For too many people, my transgender sisters and I are deemed to have adopted our gender identity as women simply as a convenient means to prey upon vulnerable cisgender women and girls in bathrooms, locker rooms, or other venues – despite the complete lack of any credible evidence that any genuine transgender woman has ever adopted her gender identity for such a nefarious purpose. We do not transition gender to pursue ulterior and harmful goals. We transition gender to survive. No one should feel harmed or threatened by that.

Still, for others based on their theologically misinformed map of the world, transgender persons are considered as a form of abomination; to them we simply ought to be cast out and not tolerated. Even some radical feminists and “influencers” in America and Europe take offence at our existence, and they would happily (and self-righteously) deny us the identity and dignity that we have risked everything to claim. And to many people we simply remain “gay”, lumped in (and hence made invisible) with people defined not by their gender identity but by their sexual orientation. Yes, they are often our best allies, but we are not them.

So why are we considered such a threat? Why did the previous administration seek to deny our existence, and to constrain federal agencies from even using the word “transgender”? Why do so many state legislators seek to deny transgender youth access to healthcare, or to penalize medical practitioners who assist such youth? Why are transgender girl athletes seen as an affront to fairness, when no such problems have ever been shown to exist in any significant way on any girls’ teams? Why do transgender youth still need to fight awesome battles simply to use a restroom in their school?

The answer involves a mixture of fear bred of ignorance and lies, exacerbated by the political expedience of those who benefit from exacerbating division and targeting “the other”.

Internationally, transgender people are rarely understood in the context of gender identity, and are simply deemed to be gay – which given the high levels of anti-gay persecution in the world is often a very damning categorization. For those of us who work in American government funded international relief and development activities in countries with laws and values that actively encourage the persecution (and often prosecution) of the LGBTQ+ community, the dilemma returns. When a federally funded project’s terms of reference emphasizes universal human dignity and human rights, whose values ought to prevail? Are we as Americans obliged to respect local values and social practices, laws, and religious convictions abroad that discriminate against their own LGBTQ+ people?

The answer is disarmingly simple. No. We are morally obliged to honor the “universal” in universal human dignity, and the stark clarity of "all" in the first sentence of the first Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to persuade senior political leaders in much of the Global South to follow President Biden’s example, but progress for diversity, equality, and inclusion can still be made.

In the absence of Global South top-leadership commitment to recognition of the humanity and dignity of their own LGBTQ+ citizens, who ought to take the lead as diversity and inclusion champions? Having practitioners from the Global North interjecting their views within fraught Global South environments – regardless of the moral justification and defensibility of such views – is generally neither appropriate nor effective. Local civil society leaders within the Global South know better than anyone else how to navigate the local culture and politics, how to be effective agents of changing social values, and how to elevate a local dignity discourse so that it gradually embraces all people – even LGBTQ+ people. Our obligation is to support such civil society organizations through resources and capacity building, but perhaps more importantly by engaging with them as genuine development partners in a common cause.

In the face of enormous, and often life-threatening discrimination around the world, it is now time for new paradigms of partnership to support the LGBTQ+ community – and the emerging non-binary community – wherever we are present. We’ll thankfully embrace the assistance, support, and political weight of President Biden and his administration, and from pro-dignity Congressional leaders, but changing hearts and minds of a very large number of Americans will take continuing efforts over many years to come. Doing the same at an international level requires new forms of North-South (and South-South) collaboration, over decades. It is a long and hard journey before us.

Let’s find the ways to make this happen, even if only one day at a time. If we are always moving in the direction of keeping dignity on the agenda, inclusion will ultimately prevail.