Vendor Writing

Jim Crow Makes a Comeback in Tennessee

BY JEN A.

When I was young, on summer vacations, my family would all pile into the car for our annual trip to visit my grandmother in Florida. My father preferred back roads to the super highway so that we could "experience the real America." I was prone to motion sickness and after a rather torturous stretch of winding mountain road I would throw up. You could lay money on it. I think my father and older brothers actually bet on how long it would take me to yack up my lunch.

Dad would pull into an old gas station or souvenir shop and my mother would send me inside to get some water to rinse out my mouth while she cleaned up the car. This one time, I went inside and asked the man if there was a drinking fountain. He motioned to the back. There were two fountains with signs on them. One sign said, "whites only." The other sign said, "the N word." Even though I was very young, I knew that this was wrong.

I ran back out to the car and dragged my mother inside so that she could see the signs. Looking up at her face I saw a flash of anger move like a bolt of lightning across her eyes. She took my hand and we went back out to the car. She told my dad to drive on; we would find a soda machine somewhere up the road. After that trip we never took the back roads of Tennessee and Georgia again. It was super highway all the way to Florida. America, it seemed, was all too "real" for my mother's young daughter.

This past session of the sex-obsessed 112th Tennessee legislature voted to throw up more humiliating, discriminatory signs for young girls to be horrified by. Their new anti-transgender bathroom law requires that signage be posted in all businesses and government facilities open to the public if they permit transgender folks to use multiperson bathrooms, locker rooms, or changing rooms associated with their gender identity. Who exactly is going to enforce this mandate? Will we all have to drop our trousers or lift our skirts before being allowed into a public restroom?

This buckshot-like spate of discriminatory anti-transgender laws doesn't stop at horrifying signage. Transgender female athletes will not be permitted to compete in school sports. (This is a twofer for the legislature. It discriminates against trans athletes AND women.) There's a new law that will allow for civil penalties against schools that don't bar transgender young people from entering bathrooms of their gender identity; even though it is against federal law for schools to discriminate against transgender students.

There's a law that forbids gender-confirming medical treatment and surgery of prepubescent minors; which isn't even a thing that would be done according to the American Medical Association. Arkansas is the only other state to enact an anti-transgender medical treatment ban. But theirs applies to anyone under 18. A lot of psychological damage can be done to a transgender person between puberty and 18. Whew! At least we're not as bad as Arkansas.

It is estimated that only one to two percent of the population identifies as transgender. How many trans folks do you know? Not the famous ones like Chaz Bono, Elliot Page, or Caitlyn Jenner, but people who are your neighbors or who attend your church. None? One? So why are Republican legislatures so eager to protect us from this imaginary threat?

Maybe it's because cisgender Christians are the first to judge transgender folks as other and sinful even though the Bible teaches, "Judge not lest you be judged." Many Tennessee Christians are Republicans and there's a gubernatorial election just around the corner. Gov. Bill Lee needs to keep the hypocrites happy. What better way for him to prove he's on the job standing up for good, wholesome Christian values than by solving a transgender problem that doesn't exist.

Of course he and the legislature don't care about the gross harm they are doing to transgender individuals throughout the state. There aren't enough of them to sway an election. That's about the most callous, horrific, unsettling, calculated, anti Christian thing I can think of. Jim Crow hate and separation are alive and well in Tennessee. This time they're persecuting transgender citizens. If you let them get away with this hate, maybe next time they will be coming for you!