During a visit to lobby legislators on transgender issues, Senator Carden Summers ® knelt down and told a child he would protect her. When he learned she was trans, he backed away.
On Feb. 6, a group of families met to lobby senators on issues affecting the local transgender community in Georgia. One mother, Lena Kotler, decided to take her two children with her to give the topic a human face. While waiting to meet with Democratic Sen. Kim Jackson, who they had heard was a big supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, another senator passed by — Republican Sen. Carden Summers, the primary sponsor of the state’s bathroom ban bill. Little did he know that one of the children he would be interacting with, Aleix, 8 years old, was a transgender child.
According to Kotler and other families who were present, the senator stopped to say hello. That’s when Kotler spoke to Senator Summers about how she was there with her kids to “talk to legislators about keeping her kids safe.” Although she did not mention that one of her children was trans, they were present with LGBTQ+ signage - something the Senator apparently missed when he knelt down in front of Aleix and said, according to Kotler, “Well you know, we’re working on that and I’m going to protect kids like you.”
Kotler then replied, “Yeah - Alex is trans, and she wants to be safe at school, she wants to go to the bathroom and be safe.”
That is when, according to multiple witnesses, Sen. Summers stood up and fumbled his words, repeating, “I mean, yeah, I’m going to make sure she’s safe by going to the right bathroom,” continuing to use the correct pronouns for Aleix. When asked if he would make her go to a boy’s bathroom, he then allegedly backed away, saying, “You’re attacking me,” turned around, and walked off quickly.
But it is helpful, as sometimes the pressure on someone who has “come out” is immense the other way. That if they back away from the controversial identity they declared, then they rose a fuss over nothing. It should be emphasized that people can be flexible with core pieces of their identity. Also, in my opinion, that they don’t need to pick just one or the other because of some select preferences they have that are incongruous with one choice or the other.
It’s definitely a case inside the trans community that we recognize there is a lot of external pressure from the general atmosphere of doubt regarding trans peoples convictions that incentivizes people to stick to their guns.
But that pressure ultimately doesn’t come from inside, that is a force exerted from outside. “Being bad for the movement” internal policing is a fear reaction born out of being under someone else’s heel and trying to do what you can to stop the boot coming down. Cis hegemony is lining up to use the case of detransitioners to limit everyone else’s medical and social options. Yes, there are some not particularly great trans people who look at detransitioners as essentially a threat to us all… but the general concensus of the community is that if our ethics become shit because outsider pressure destroys our culture by forcing us to eat our own then we have already failed.
The end goal inside the trans community of folks is always comfort and happiness even if that means someone walks back out the door having come to the conclusion they aren’t trans. If we have a goal it is in part we want to lower the social cost of experimentation so that identity can be freely explored regardless of what identity you find. There isn’t a lot of harm in taking a year to understand yourself a bit better. Ideally there shouldn’t be any harm in taking a gender rumspringa and figuring out if maybe you’re a little bit non-binary or something. That is real freedom. It’s all the bloody idiots who don’t get the basics who make it about there being massive stakes and a bullet dodged because they only think in terms of medical transition.
To our eyes it’s everybody else who wants to make doing that somehow “political”. It can’t just be about what makes us feel like we’re actually living at 100 percent because we have to fight tooth and nail just to exist.