#Societal issues when 69% of a countries population is male

[coochiequeens]

The UAE…. Where rape victims can jailed for having sex outside of marriage but the authorities look the way when African women are forced into prostitution. But it’s ok with authorities because as long as the foreign male population has a foreign female population to exploit the local women won’t be harassed.

African women trafficked into the UAE are forced into debt and subjected to threats and violence, as they are kept in sexual slavery. The case of Christy Gold, who has been charged with sex trafficking in Nigeria, highlights the torment endured by these women in the UAE.

By MAGGIE MICHAEL 

Filed June 12, 2023, 11 a.m. GMT

On a pleasure boat cruising Gulf waters near Dubai’s glittering skyline, a Nigerian woman in a white dress and gold jewelry nodded and swayed as a gathering sang “Happy Birthday” to her.

Videos of Christy Gold’s 45th birthday party were posted in May last year on an Instagram account that showcases her glamorous lifestyle, months after Gold fled Nigeria, where she was facing sex trafficking charges.

Gold – whose name appears in court records as Christiana Jacob Uadiale – was a ringleader in a criminal network that lured African women to Dubai and forced them into prostitution in brothels, backstreets, bars, hotels and dance clubs, according to six Nigerian government anti-trafficking officials, a British human rights activist who has tracked her operation and five women who say they were trafficked and exploited by her.

Three of the women said in interviews that Gold told them that if they didn’t do as they were told, they’d be killed and dumped in the desert. Those who didn’t make enough money for her were taken to a room in an apartment in Dubai, where Gold’s brother starved them, flogged them and shoved hot chili paste into their vaginas, according to three anti-trafficking officials and five women who provided detailed accounts in interviews and court statements.

“They beat the hell out of me,” one of the women said. “The suffering was too much.”

In a statement to the court after she was charged, Gold denied that she and her brother were sex traffickers. “I am not involved in human trafficking and I do not have any girls in Dubai working for me as a prostitute,” she said.

Gold remains a fugitive from justice – part of what anti-trafficking activists and officials say is a thriving underground of suspected Nigerian sex traffickers who have taken refuge in the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf nation known for its wealth, futuristic skyscrapers and what rights groups say is a poor record on protecting foreign workers and basic freedoms.

The UAE is a major destination for sex trafficking, where African women are forced into prostitution by illicit networks operating within the country, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Reuters has found.

Emirati authorities do little to protect these women, according to anti-trafficking activists, Nigerian authorities and interviews with trafficked women.

This story is based on interviews with 25 African women, mostly from Nigeria, who described being lured to the UAE by Gold or other alleged traffickers, as well as dozens of interviews with humanitarian workers, investigators, Nigerian government officials and others with knowledge of sex trafficking in the Emirates. Their accounts are corroborated by court records and case files from Nigeria’s anti-human trafficking agency.

Human traffickers keep African women in sexual slavery by playing on their financial desperation and creating webs of manipulation and coercion, the reporting shows. They subject them to threats and violence. They ensnare them in crushing debts, often totaling $10,000 to $15,000 – huge sums for women from poor families. And, in many cases, they exploit traditional African spiritual beliefs to make victims believe that they have no choice but to do what the traffickers tell them.

This article is part of a reporting collaboration led by ICIJ, Trafficking Inc., which is examining sex trafficking and labor trafficking in many parts of the globe. ICIJ’s media partners on the project include Reuters, NBC News, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and other news outlets in multiple countries.

Gold did not respond to questions for this story. In her statement to the court in Nigeria, Gold said she had helped Nigerian women and men move to the UAE by subletting space to them in an apartment she owned in Dubai.

“I even go as far as advising them like a mother so they too can make it in Dubai,” she said. But she told the court, “I cannot tell what these people did for a living in Dubai.”

In a written reply supplied by the Dubai government’s media affairs office, the emirate’s police agency said claims that Gold had engaged in the sex trafficking of African women in Dubai are “false and have absolutely no basis in fact.” The statement said Gold had “entered and exited Dubai legally and was not implicated in any illegal activities.”

The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said any suggestion the UAE “tolerates human trafficking or that it has little regard to the victims of this heinous crime is utterly false.” Such allegations, the ministry said in response to questions, were “baseless and without foundation.”

The ministry said the UAE’s laws on sex trafficking carry heavy fines and prison sentences. A report the ministry shared said the UAE had referred 20 “human trafficking cases” to the courts in 2021, most for “sexual exploitation.”

The UAE has been involved in international police operations against trafficking networks, the ministry said.

Human rights activists and Nigerian authorities say the UAE doesn’t live up to its anti-trafficking commitments.

Fatima Waziri-Azi, director general of Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, said there has been “no cooperation” when NAPTIP has reached out to Emirati authorities for help hunting down traffickers working out of the UAE.

Angus Thomas, a British activist who founded an anti-trafficking education organization based in Ghana, said UAE authorities, including the police, were uncooperative when he urged them to help African women get away from Gold and her associates.

“I wrote, I phoned, I emailed, asking them to help me get the girls, sending addresses of apartments,” he said. “And I heard nothing.”

In plain sight

Sex trafficking is one form of human trafficking, which is generally defined as using force, fraud or coercion to induce someone to provide a service.

Most of the 25 women interviewed for this story said they were promised other types of work but were driven into prostitution. Others said they chose to do sex work but were trapped in situations in which they were abused, their earnings were stolen and they were unable to get away.

The UAE made sex trafficking a crime in 2006 and has established an interagency anti-trafficking panel and opened shelters for survivors. The U.S. State Department said in 2022 that the UAE has made “significant efforts” to combat human trafficking but still falls short in key areas – including failing to “consistently screen vulnerable populations for trafficking indicators, which may have penalized some victims for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit, such as immigration or ‘prostitution’ violations.”

The UAE follows Islamic law, yet prostitution and sex trafficking are open secrets. Business cards with photos and WhatsApp numbers for brothels disguised as massage parlors litter many areas of Dubai. Spas, dance clubs and bars are filled with sex workers.

A hierarchy based on skin tone plays an important role in the UAE’s sex industry, according to interviews with trafficked women and visits to spots where prostitutes congregate in the UAE. Lighter-skinned women from Europe are generally trafficked into higher-end venues serving wealthier customers. Darker-skinned women are often steered to alleys and street corners, providing sex to low-income migrant workers from South Asia and Africa.

One Nigerian woman described being taken by a trafficker to an open-air brothel in the desert between Dubai and another emirate, Abu Dhabi. She said she and other women would take off their clothes and spread them on the ground, and men would come to have sex with them from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

A Nigerian mother in her 20s said a trafficker led her and two other women to a parking lot in Ajman, one of the emirates that make up the UAE, and forced them to have sex with male clients amid vehicles that were being painted and repaired. At the end of the night, she said, the traffickers took all the money, leaving them with nothing to buy food.

After she broke free of the trafficker, the woman said, she slept in the streets and begged for food. She nearly lost her mind, she said, before a nurse from Nigeria rescued her and helped her get home.

The UAE's sex industry is shaped by the country's distinctive demography and economy.

Nearly 90% of its population comes from somewhere else – mostly foreign workers employed in construction, hospitality and other industries. Most of them are men and they arrive alone. As a result, 69% of the UAE’s population is male. The government deals with these demographic realities by deploying extensive surveillance in the UAE – and by allowing a bustling sex trade as a way of pacifying male workers, according to two former diplomats who were based in the UAE and monitored sex trafficking.

Gold and Mercy

On New Year’s Eve 2019, Thomas, a photographer and anti-trafficking activist, had a one-day layover in the UAE before heading home to London. He was going into a supermarket in Dubai when a 19-year-old Nigerian woman approached him and offered him sex.

He declined, but asked her if she wanted to return to her home country.

She told him, Thomas said, that she and 22 other women were under the control of a trafficker named Christy Gold. Back in London, he sent her money to rent a safe place to stay and then arranged a flight home to Nigeria.

Thomas said he began trying to rescue other women trapped in Dubai. He started a campaign called Send Them Home, raising money to cover victims’ escape and travel costs. Over several months, Thomas said, he helped rescue eight other women who said they’d been held against their will by Gold or other traffickers operating in the UAE. Thomas’ account was confirmed by Nigerian anti-trafficking officials and women who Thomas helped escape from traffickers.

He also shared information that he had gathered about Gold with Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency NAPTIP, which can arrest and prosecute alleged traffickers. His efforts included tracking Gold’s Instagram account, where she displays hundreds of online posts featuring lion-shaped gold pendants and other jewelry she sells through a gold trading business she runs from Dubai.

In a May 2022 email to Waziri-Azi, the Nigerian anti-trafficking agency’s director, Thomas wrote that Gold was “flaunting her wealth built on the backs” of young women “she trafficks to Dubai.”

Little is known about Gold’s background. In her written statement to the Nigerian court, Gold said that she traveled to Dubai in 2009 and after that began shuttling back and forth, buying gold, shoes and handbags in the UAE and selling them in Nigeria.

According to victim statements to the court and interviews, Gold and her associates targeted Nigerian women who were desperate for work and new lives, promising them jobs in hair salons, restaurants and other retail businesses in Dubai. Gold’s associates helped them obtain Nigerian passports and tourist visas to travel to the UAE.

Descriptions of her operations come from five women who said they’d been trafficked by Gold. Three gave detailed interviews. Two of the three women interviewed for this story, along with two other women, have submitted witness statements in Gold’s criminal case.

Each of the three women interviewed for this article said she was trafficked after being approached by a recruiter, Mercy Ewere Owuzo, who worked with Gold.

One said she was working in a shop in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, in July 2019 when Owuzo told her that she could make much more money as a salesperson in a store in Dubai.

“I didn’t ask any questions because she told me she is trying to help young women and I thought, ‘She is a kind person,’” the woman, 25, recalled.

She said Owuzo paid for her passport, plane ticket and UAE tourist visa.

After arriving in Dubai, she said, she talked by phone to Owuzo, who told her there was no job for her in a store. Instead, she would be going to clubs, restaurants and hotels to sell her body. It was the only way, she said she was told, to pay down the $12,000 debt that she owed Gold for bringing her to the UAE.

The three women said Gold also controlled them by confiscating their passports. Then, they said, she created fake passports that appeared authentic enough to get them through routine police stops or past front desks at hotels – but not enough to get them out of the country.

It’s not clear from witness accounts and court documents whether Gold was the topmost leader of the alleged trafficking network. The three women interviewed for this story said she exercised a substantial level of authority and was deeply engaged in the network’s operations – personally threatening, for example, to leave their corpses in the Arabian Desert if they didn’t comply with her demands.

“Every time we don’t bring money, they would beat us, put pepper in our vagina, pepper in our eyes,” said one of the three women, who said she was working as a hairstylist in Nigeria before Owuzo promised her a better-paying job in Dubai. “Many of us had wounds, but we weren’t taken to hospitals because they don’t want people to know what they were doing to us.”

All three of these women spent time in a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai controlled by Gold. At one point, they said, Gold occupied one bedroom, while as many as 18 women were crammed into the other, with most sleeping on blankets on the floor.

It was here, according to interviews and court statements, that women marked for punishment were sent and where Gold’s enforcer – her brother Solomon – sexually assaulted them and beat their malnourished bodies with a hookah hose, broomstick or other implements.

NAPTIP officials said Solomon has not been charged with a crime. Gold said in her court statement that she never ordered Solomon to hurt anyone who stayed in her apartment in Dubai.

“I have never at any time instructed him to beat any of the girls as I have never had cause to beat any of them,” she said.

ICIJ and Reuters were unable to contact Solomon.

Victoria Oburoh, one of NAPTIP’s top prosecutors, confirmed that Gold and Owuzo worked together. In May last year, NAPTIP was able to win a conviction of Owuzo on sex trafficking charges in federal court in the Nigerian state of Delta. Oburoh said that case and the one pending against Gold are “sister cases.”

A lawyer who represented Owuzo during her trial declined to comment.

NAPTIP began an investigation of Gold after one of her alleged victims reported her to the police in Nigeria. Authorities charged Gold with six counts of violating Nigeria’s sex trafficking law.

After a judge released her on bail, she failed to show up for a scheduled court appearance on Nov. 3, 2021. Her lawyer told the judge that Gold had been “found half dead on the bed” and taken to a hospital.

The judge ordered that Gold be taken back into custody. But authorities had no luck tracking her down, NAPTIP officials say.

Christy Gold had disappeared.

Put me in prison’

Loudspeakers announced evening prayers at a mosque in Al Baraha, a working-class neighborhood in Dubai’s populous Deira district, when a reporter visited last August.

Steps away, young women in colorful wigs and low-cut evening dresses lined up in front of shabby buildings for their day’s work: providing sex to men. On the fourth and fifth floors of one building, South Asian men sat in the stairway, scrolling on their phones, sipping beer and waiting for their turns with the sex workers.

All the while police vehicles slowly navigated the district’s narrow alleys – part of the policing and surveillance apparatus that keeps UAE authorities deeply informed about what’s going on in Dubai and other emirates.

One of the sex workers was a young woman who arrived from Ghana in June 2022. She said she was promised a job as a housemaid but found herself doing an entirely different kind of work.

She rolled up her dress to show the bruises that came with the job.

“A few days ago, my eyes were swollen after being hit in the face and slapped when I failed to meet the target,” she said. “It’s my boss who did this to me.”

He told her, she said, that if she wanted to gain her freedom, she had to pay a debt of nearly $10,000.

“Where do I go? What do I do?” she asked, breaking into tears. She said her trafficker, whom she didn’t name, had taken away her phone and passport. Another way traffickers and their subordinates control African women is by using the power of juju, a traditional African spiritual belief system.

Women targeted for sex trafficking are required to take “juju oaths,” solemn vows to do the bidding of the recruiters who have promised to help them find work abroad. As part of the oath-taking ceremonies, they are told to strip naked, kneel for hours and swallow noxious drinks that can make them dizzy. They’re warned that breaking their vows of obedience could put a curse on them that could cause injury, death, even generational misfortune for their families.

Most of the women interviewed for this story said they had been required to take a juju oath, with some of the ceremonies conducted in Nigeria and others after they arrived in the UAE.

Three women said in witness statements in Gold’s criminal case that Gold’s associates required them to do oath-taking ceremonies in Nigeria before they traveled to Dubai.

“She makes us believe she has juju,” one woman who claims she’d been trafficked by Gold said in an interview. “That is, if we run away, we can become mad or die.”

In her statement to the court, Gold denied organizing such ceremonies.

When women brave the threats of real violence and otherworldly consequences to try to escape their traffickers, they say they often get little help from Emirati authorities.

A 25-year-old Ugandan said that after she fled a brothel in the Deira district of Dubai where she was forced to work, she headed to the nearest police station. She said a police officer took her back to the brothel and negotiated with the trafficker to return the passport to her. The officer left without doing anything else, and the trafficker took the passport back again, she said.

She got away for good only after she reached out to Nyondo Rozet, a Ugandan YouTube broadcaster based in the UAE. Rozet posted a video about her plight, which raised the money for a plane ticket home.

Rozet, whose videos primarily appeal to the Ugandan community in the UAE, said in an interview that a woman who called her, saying she was the trafficker, offered her money to take the video down. When she refused, Rozet said, other people contacted her to threaten harm if she didn’t delete the video, telling her: “You are not going to survive.”

The Dubai police did not respond to questions about the incident.

A 23-year-old woman from Nigeria’s northeastern farm belt said she thought UAE police would help her after she fled a brothel in Abu Dhabi where she and six other women had been locked in a room filled with steel beds separated by curtains. Every night, she had to have sex with half a dozen men.

She had slipped away when her boss got drunk and left the key in the door. But when she walked into a police station in the Khalidiya area of Abu Dhabi, she said, an officer told her, “Go to where you came from.”

She said she pleaded: “Put me in prison!” But “they turned their back to me. I was crying, but they paid no attention. They said: ‘To Hell with Africa.’”

The police station in Khalidiya did not respond to a request for comment.

Extradition request

For years, large numbers of migrants from Nigeria and other African countries have sought jobs and new lives in Europe. Migration routes have changed as European Union members have pushed migrants back to Libya, the main transit point across the Mediterranean Sea. With the way to Europe increasingly blocked, African migrants have turned, in growing numbers, to the UAE and other rich Arab nations.

Oburoh, the NAPTIP prosecutor, said that when trafficking cases have links to Europe, governments there provide information and cooperation that help the agency apprehend and prosecute traffickers. But when it comes to the UAE, official cooperation is nonexistent, Nigerian anti-trafficking investigators said.

At home, NAPTIP operates in an environment where some government officials also have been accused of engaging in human trafficking – and where, NAPTIP officials say, convicted traffickers often avoid jail terms.

The Nigerian government did not respond to a request for comment.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The Beto O’Rourke brand is a strong one right now.

Until a few months ago, no one outside of Texas really knew much about the Democratic congressman from El Paso. But recently his answer to a question about whether NFL players should kneel during the national anthem went viral. He’s gone on Ellen and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and has been compared to a Kennedy an embarrassing number of times in profiles touting his Senate bid against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. He goes on early-morning running town halls and wants you to know he doesn’t take any money from PACs. He trumpets the fact that he’s visited all 254 counties in Texas — he’s not the kind of Democrat who will write off folks who live in the country.

A candidate can only make one first impression, and we’re in the midst of that self-mythologizing, magical moment for O’Rourke. GOP attacks against him for his 1998 DWI arrest, his tendency to swear and his youthful embrace of the punk aesthetic have backfired among a younger, online set. Twitter users cooed that O’Rourke looked hot in his mugshot and that the floral dress he was ironically(?) rocking in a band photo suited him. In a defense of O’Rourke, Colbert pointed out that during Cruz’s teenage years, the senator once played Adam in a mimed version of the biblical creation story. It feels a little like the high school cool kid is running against the Latin Club’s uber nerd for U.S. Senate in Texas.

O’Rourke’s clever image-honing has brought him within striking distance of Cruz — FiveThirtyEight gives O’Rourke about a 1-in-3 chance of winning,1 roughly the same chance Democrats have of taking the Senate as a whole. If O’Rourke pulls it off, how he sells himself — an empath who can speak to independents and minority communities alike with the wokeness of a man half his age — will have been a key factor. O’Rourke’s star is rising nationally in part because the party’s base sees a best version of themselves in him, someone able to communicate their increasingly progressive values to Americans outside the liberal milieu. Too bad for them he’ll probably lose.

O’Rourke has an opportunity to introduce himself as a vigorous, toothy new face. Cruz, meanwhile, is still the guy about whom a Republican colleague once said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” Pretty much everyone in Texas knows who Cruz is, and he isn’t particularly beloved. A recent Emerson College poll found that 44 percent of Texas voters had an unfavorable opinion of him. (This is in a state where he got 57 percent of the vote in 2012.) Meanwhile, the same poll found that only 25 percent felt the same about O’Rourke, while 11 percent of people had never heard of him and 27 percent were neutral (only 18 percent were neutral on Cruz).

O’Rourke is a pretty good candidate in a race that was supposed to be a slam dunk for Republicans. He’s raised more than any other Democratic candidate for Senate this cycle — $23 million — and has packaged his progressive identity into something that (he hopes) is accepted just as readily by the Democratic base as it is by independent voters who still haven’t made up their minds. GOP attack ads have tried to paint the Democrat as outside the mainstream, despite the fact that the 2018 iteration of O’Rourke is more suburban dad than anything else, the type whose most countercultural tendency is probably owning a monthly pass to a rock-climbing gym.

Recent surveys seem to indicate that independents will help determine the close race. A Dixie Strategies poll from early September showed Cruz and O’Rourke nearly tied among independents, with 20 percent of them yet to make up their minds. That poll and others have showed Cruz struggling with independent voters (only 2 percent didn’t have an opinion of him), while O’Rourke’s numbers with independents showed there’s room for him to make a good impression (a full 23 percent were undecided on how they felt about him). A Rasmussen/Pulse Opinion Research poll from early September showed O’Rourke winning independents 46 percent to Cruz’s 39 percent, and even found that 15 percent of Republicans said they’d vote for O’Rourke. A more recent poll that showed Cruz leading overall also showed O’Rourke ahead among independents.

O’Rourke is going out of his way not to bust up his hopes with Texas’s independent voters, who, in that red state, might tend toward the more conservative end of the political spectrum (52 percent of the state’s independent voters chose Trump in the 2016 election). His rhetoric of togetherness seems clearly aimed at this demographic. “You cannot be too much of a Republican, you can’t be too blue of a Democrat, too much of an independent. You can’t be in prison for too many years, you can’t be too undocumented to be worth fighting for. It is for everyone,” O’Rourke said of his campaign in a speech this summer. His earnest varnish is polished to its highest shine. When baited with questions that could easily lead to Trump-bashing, O’Rourke instead talks about the importance of having “unguarded moments with one another.” The across-the-aisle-guy label is important to his brand — O’Rourke had his first viral moment back in 2017 when he took a cross-country road trip with another Texas congressman, a Republican.

The trick with branding, of course, is that it changes with the times. O’Rourke hasn’t always been allergic to PAC money. He won his first congressional election by defeating an eight-term Democratic incumbent. In that campaign, O’Rourke used money from a super PAC bent on prying longtime representatives from their seats. O’Rourke’s father-in-law, a wealthy real estate developer, gave the PAC $18,750 after maxing out his personal donation to the campaign.

One of O’Rourke’s political assets is his ability to trumpet progressive ideas and a bipartisan spirit at a time when political tribalism and racial tensions are rife. That is in part because he is white and America — and the Democratic Party — seems to have a soft spot for young white men running for office. O’Rourke looks like generations of white male politicians, but he’s advocating for societal changes meant to benefit minorities and disenfranchised immigrants. He’s called for single-payer health care and the expansion of Medicaid, he wrote a book on the drug war, he has made legalizing marijuana a campaign issue, and he wants citizenship for immigrants who brought to the country illegally as children.

O’Rourke’s embrace of Latino culture has stood out during the campaign. Much has been made of that fact that he goes by his childhood nickname, Beto, which is a Spanish diminutive for “Roberto.” Robert Francis O’Rourke is Irish-American, but he grew up in the heavily Latino border town of El Paso and became Beto early on. Cruz (full name Rafael Edward Cruz) has tried to use O’Rourke’s nickname against the congressman as a way to prove he’s pandering to the state’s skyrocketing Latino population. Texas is 39 percent Latino and a harbinger of America’s demographic future. Population projections estimate that the state’s Latino population could surpass the state’s white population as early as 2020 or 2022, while it’s estimated that the U.S. as a whole will become majority-minority by 2045.

Note, though, what O’Rourke’s nickname says about the ways that assimilation has changed in America. Joe Kennedy made sure that his children went to boarding school and college among America’s high WASP set so they’d be taken seriously. It worked — one became president. Beto is a nickname he comes by honestly, but it’s also a boon for O’Rourke to be comfortable with a community whose political clout will only increase in Texas.

The forecasted demographic change portends political shifts, which is why Democrats have long dreamt of turning Texas blue. But the state’s Democrats remain at a political disadvantage if they rely solely on the Latino vote as their near-term path to change. According to 2016 numbers from Pew, 79 percent of the state’s white population is eligible to vote, but only 46 percent of the Latino population is, and in the 2016 election, 69 percent of the Texas’s white voters cast a ballot for President Trump. And there are still a decent number of Latinos who lean Republican in the state — 34 percent voted for Trump in 2016, while 44 percent voted for Republican Governor Greg Abbott in 2014.

But if O’Rourke wants to win this year, he’s got to woo those in the state who are likely to vote and who say they haven’t made up their minds. Even with increased turnout from an enthusiastic Democratic base, he’ll probably need an extra push to get over the hump. That means the popularity contest continues for the next two months. O’Rourke seems ready for the grip-and-grin grind.

[lucillemtu-blog]

Social Issue Blog

It’s not easy being transgender in the U.S or anywhere really, it never has been. As of the last few years it has started to become easier in the U.S but much more has to be done. So much more that try equality for trans people may never happen. It’s a tricky issue to get people to care about because the trans population is so small. But if people truly believe in what the United States represents then they should care. The United States was built on the concept of equal rights for all Americans and time and time again it has failed at delivering that concept. Women,  homosexuals,  racial minorities and the like have historically been unequal. Women for example weren’t recognized being able to vote at the federal level until 1920 and black people experienced slavery and then heavy segregation after the conclusion of the civil war. In the modern day on paper these groups are mostly equal on the federal level but the biggest group that isn’t is transgender people. Coupled with social intolerance and a lack of true legal equality trans people face a bevy of issues in the United States. A famous talking point is the percentage trans people who have attempted suicide which is 41% as of 20141. Transphobes love to cite this statistic to support their damaging narrative(conveniently ignoring the fact that only 2.2% of trans people who physically transition regret it2) that transgenderism is a mental illness and should not be indulged. This quite frankly is a one dimensional view in reality the reason for the majority of the 41% is societal treatment. Yes, some trans people would inevitably attempt suicide regardless of how well they were treated but this can be said about any demographic. What can be said for the transgender demographic however is that they experience unparalleled harassment. According to the 2015 U.S transgender survey 46% of the respondents where verbally harassed in the past year simply for being transgender3. Furthermore, 9% of the respondents were physically attacked in the past year for the very same reason. If trans people were considered a protected class this would help decrease this rampant violence agaisnt them. When it comes to the workplace according to a 2011 survey, a massive 90% of trans people in the U.S experienced harassment or mistreatment on the job4. And 26% of the respondents who were fired were fired because of the fact that they were Transgender. These harrowing statistics can be explained through the use of Sociology. In almost every culture throughout time there existed the concept of male/female due to the sexual dimorphism present in humans. These cultures then developed roles based on the stereotypical attributes of male and female. Ex: Men are stronger and more aggressive so they should do all of the manual labor and protect or Women are more nurturing and passive so they should be in charge of raising children and taking care of the homestead. These roles were created to fit the needs of their respective societies and have been reinforced through centuries of socialization. Today it is arguable whether these roles are even needed in modern society but the fact is that they exist and shape how people interact and behave. Compounding these gender roles/norms is religion in this instance the Abrahamic religions. For the past Millennia Christianity in particular has dominated the western world and up until recently almost every person in the west was heavily religious so people took every line of the Bible to heart. Unfortunately there is a line which basically states men and women should not wear the clothing of the opposite sex which was then used to further the institutionalize gender roles/norms because of all this the U.S tends to be extremely hostile towards gender nonconformity. Due to the nature of transgenderism, trans people tend to face the majority of this hostility. This hostility manifests into harassment, beratement and physical abuse as illustrated by the unfortunate statistics earlier. Which then in turn fuels the transgender attempted suicide rate. Also, because of the society induced internalization trans many trans people are made to feel that something is madly wrong with them and that they should be ashamed. These feelings can manifest into internalized transphobia which then further adds to the suicide rate. Another major area in which trans people have inadequate access to is proper healthcare. The process to getting HRT can be long and arduous if informed consent is not an option. In many cases trans people are gate kept from getting the medications they need which is a big problem especially when talking about young transitioners as the earlier one starts the more effective HRT is and the greater the chance to pass as their desired gender. As mentioned earlier, people are assaulted just for being visibly trans so passing can be lifesaving. In essence society punishes trans people for not looking like their true gender. Given all of this info on what trans people face and why they fact it, a valid question is can anything be done and if so what? Fortunately the answer that question is yes. The main way this can be achieved is simply increasing the general public’s exposure to trans people. A lot of people are completely unaware or have a simplistic view of trans people which can lead to damaging misunderstandings. These people then perpetuate their beliefs regardless of their beliefs’ veracity so then their children and friends and such then believes those beliefs and perpetuate it further spreading it. But, if people are exposed to and educated about the existence of transgenderism and what it truly means they might then start to accept transgenderism and stop perpetuating damaging beliefs. This process in fact has already been taking place as trans visibility has massively increased in just the past decade to where most average Joe’s know what it is. From a survey conducted in 2018 across 16 countries, 70% of respondents believe governments should do more to protect trans people, 69% said that they believe trans people should be able to undergo gender affirming surgery. However when it comes to specifically the united states and certain issues such as bathroom usage it is much closer5(47% supporting trans people being able to use their bathroom of choice vs 43% with the opposing opinion). Most of this support stems from the exposure people have had with transgenderism in the last few years. To substantiate the claim that exposure increases tolerance there was a study conducted that found simply showing people pictures of transgender individuals lowered their transphobia and increased their support for trans rights/ trans equality6. Greater exposure to transgender people via media would also directly help the trans people themselves as like with any group, seeing positive self representation in the media increases self image7. Just like exposure can make public opinion more positive, it can also do the opposite. Which means it is important to deplatform transphobes as much as possible especially when it comes to widely viewed entities. When transphobes are easily heard the trans community is at risk of taking hits. When sexologist Ray Blanchard appeared onto the scene with his many transphobic theories, trans healthcare was greatly tarnished. He completely ignored the existence of Female To Male trans people and did his best to delegitimize transwomen through the use of the terms AGP and HSTS. These terms tried to make transgenderism about sexual orientation and fetishism rather than gender identity. AGP(autogynephilic) means that someone transitions because the thought of themselves as a woman sexually arouses themself and HSTS(homosexual transexual) basically means that someone loves men so much that they transition to female to appeal to more men. Although academia rejects his theories now it was perpetuated by the public for some time and is still held on to by transphobic groups such such fundamentalist christians and TERFS(trans exclusionary radical feminists) to justify their hatred of transgender individuals and to try to inhibit their ability to transition and live authentically. There are some viable debates out there to be had about transgenderism particularly how young should children be able to transition or how far along in transition should a trans person be before they can compete as their assigned gender but right now those debates are being used as a distraction from trans equality. A headline about how a teenage transgirl won a women’s track meet is going to generate a lot more rage and attention than a headline about how trans people are being banned from the military. In closing, just because trans people are a small minority in the United States does not mean their issues aren’t important to the public because they absolutely should be. The united states is touted as a land of equality but the lack of transgender protections speaks otherwise. These desperately needed legal protections (being a protected class) won’t outright fix the social aspect but they will most certainly help as they would disembolden transphobes while emboldening trans people. And since laws are over time institutionalized, more and more people will start viewing trans people as equals.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf ↩︎

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ ↩︎

https://bit.ly/2NEMXWx ↩︎

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2011/06/02/9872/gay-and-transgender-people-face-high-rates-of-workplace-discrimination-and-harassment/ ↩︎

https://globalnews.ca/news/3991849/transgender-people-world-acceptin-ipsos-poll/ ↩︎

https://bit.ly/2V7EcYU ↩︎

https://bit.ly/2IZSkfj ↩︎