RE: What is Gender? (featuring @sykochica as author)
This is where i differ a bit on this subject. It seems that these sort of arguments call for society to change for the the one who is the victim.
This tends to lead to more laws to police these things and ultimately more tax payer funding.
I am leaning more these days towards a building of confidence in children from birth and throughout their lives, initially being reinforced by all people in the childs life, stemming from their parents and being policed by their parents.
So hopefully the end product is a child that grows into a healthy adult who will not tolerate stupid people and their stupid judgements and who will go about their life and be happy anyway. I think this would work better long term. Eventually we will have healthy adults everywhere and the world could start to be the place every person deserves it to be.
I look forward to the day that parents, families, and other social groups build the confidence in children, as you were saying. While a non-discrimination law can be helpful (as was done for native americans, women, african americans, etc,) the core of the issue is social awareness and understanding, which the law itself doesn't fully solve. As the laws currently stand, and even with same-sex marriage being recognized now, in many US states, including mine, LGBT people can be fired or evicted from homes with no legal recourse. As we've seen before the laws are a supplementary, necessary evil in my opinion.
One issue to banking on 'social and family' goodness, while ideal, isn't possible as things stand. Many who come out as LGBT are shunned, demeaned, disowned, or worse by their own family. While things have gotten a lot better in this area for the LGB with the gay awareness campaign that's run since the early 1980's, the transgender (other others) have just started gaining similar traction in the last handful of years.
My concern with leaving these issues to the 'goodness' of parents, family, and early social groups (school) will just continue with more of the insanely shocking statistics including 41%+ attempted suicide rate for the transgender community, compared to the 4.5-5% rate for the general population. Stats
I'd love to leave this issue to the 'goodness' of society, without need for tax payer money. Unfortunately, I'm not comfortable leaving these decisions to those who in reality are doing the persecuting.
However, my goal with pieces like this, to raise awareness, mutual understanding and get conversations started.