Y the Transgender Hatred? Y the LGBT Hatred?

Right wing politicians and duplicitous religious leaders are surfacing and demonizing trans and LGBT citizens. Dictionary.com has a definition of duplicity that I want to use. Duplicity is the practice of intentionally misleading people, by saying different things to different people or acting in different ways at different times. Brain freeze has led these leaders to declare their opposition to a non-binary world. The velocity of life coupled with our poor cognitive and social skills has driven us to double down on the weak and vulnerable classes while allowing the real culprits a get out of jail free. Often our first response to a suppressed reality is DENIAL. Gay, LGBT in our religious institutions is often the worst kept secret in the church and community.

I am truly upset. I have been insisting that we must solve all murders.  Ninety (90) recorded murders of trans people over the past two years in the country. Texas is behind Florida and Ohio in the solving of trans murders. The Texas legislature is full of fake straight legislators seeking to disenfranchise and marginalize trans people with dozens of restrictive bills.

How does the climate become so hateful that in America, out of many one, e pluribus Unum, that biologically determined traits terrify us to attack children because they are other than straight? There is a straight line from hate speech to the murder of Matthew Shepherd to the murder of James Byrd.

Perhaps we peer back into history. Shepherd was a 22-year-old gay college student who was beaten and tortured to death in Wyoming. His assailants were motivated by anti-gay sentiment. It is very probable that they had heard ‘fire and brimstone” sermons and listened to toxic speech by leaders in print and electronic media. Many pundits who have had a platform have reached into the Old Testament and characterized non-binary people as “Sodomites” deserving of murder and other atrocities. Without “theological hair-splitting” My straight-line logic leads me to conclude that the same hate that led to the killing of Matthew Shepherd bled over into the killing of James Byrd. Congress concluded that there was a linkage between the horrific murders and President Barack Obama signed the Byrd Shepherd Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law in 2009.

The national rate for solving homicides is about 62% but the rate of solving for trans victims is around 40%. Homicide detectives in Dallas and Houston must get the mandate that the community will not go silent on clues for murder, rape and violent crimes, especially for victims of hate crimes. If we are repulsed or morally offended by gay and trans people, don’t date or marry a gay or trans person, don’t be Gay or trans. Other than the sermon on the mount, the most compelling sermon that I have encountered was produced by Benjamin Mayes, President of Morehouse College. After I had a conversation with him, I read “BE KIND TO JUDAS.”

BE KIND TO JUDAS is based on an exploration of the reasons that JUDAS sold out Jesus. Dr. Mayes posited that Judas was motivate by 30 pieces of silver (GREED), Covetousness, Jealousy, Envy and Hatred. Dr. Mayes compellingly showed that all of these negative motivators were present in all of our lives. Let’s follow the money behind the anti-trans legislators and you will find that the donors are the same ones who supported the anti-democracy-voter suppression movement. They are militantly ignorant as evidenced by their embrace of fictions such as the big lie.

Back to Dr. Mayes’ masterpiece, there is a little bit of JUDAS in all of us. By logical extension, there is a little bit of trans in all of us. If you go to D.C. and have coffee at Busboys and Poets, you are indirectly giving tribute to a gift to the world, Gay black poet Langston Hughes. A great man of letters, Jimmy Baldwin, made the point that we often detest in others what we most dislike in ourselves. Jimmy Baldwin did not aim this penetrating insight at those of us who are profoundly insecure of our sexuality, but it must rock, given that many of us have been spooked by “trans people.”

Just stop demonizing. Just stop being so extreme. Don’t tighten up, loosen up. Live and let live.  Get hung up on whether a victim is a human being rather than which gender pronoun that they identify with.  Call CRIMESTOPPERS. Stay straight and stop promoting fear and ignorance of trans and gay people. Y don’t you pick on somebody your size!