Nancy Goldstein says a new initiative provides real numbers, for the first time, on how transgendered Americans are discriminated against -- and they're startling.
Transgender people live with a bull's-eye on their backs. Anyone who denies this fact -- so hard for some to swallow in the wake of recent victories on marriage equality and "don't ask, don't tell" for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people -- is due for a wake-up call. Today, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) released "Injustice at Every Turn," a report based on the results of what is by far the country's largest transgender discrimination survey to date -- with 6,450 participants to the next largest study's 700.
This is important. Currently most surveys -- including the census and epidemiological studies -- contain zero questions about sexual orientation, never mind gender identity and expression. The consequences of not being counted, of being invisible, is that no one knows who constitutes the transgender community, what its members experience, or what their challenges or needs are. The many costs to transgender people include the fact that they are allotted little if any funding or resources on the state or federal level. That's even true of resources spread within an LGB community that often forgets the "T."
