State of the Union address – historical words

[Jennifer_1]

It would be interesting if there was a survey of the public reaction to Obama’s comments, it might give an insight to how people actually view the trans* community. Still, good positive press.

[Adrian]

Time magazine has published an article titled Why It’s a Big Deal That Obama Said ‘Transgender’.

Apparently the speech was listened to by 31.7 million people!!

By Katy Steinmetz @katysteinmetz

Jan. 21, 2015

http://time.com/3676881/state-of-the-union-2015-barack-obama-transgender/

It’s all about legitimacy

Quote:

Every word in every State of the Union speech is vetted. And President Barack Obama’s decision to say a certain word among the 6,718 he uttered on Tuesday is reverberating through the LGBT community. That’s because Obama just became the first President to say the word transgender during such a high-profile occasion. And most advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights are thrilled.

“The President’s acknowledgment helps shatter the cloak of invisibility that has plagued trans people and forced many to suffer in silence,” author and MSNBC host Janet Mock tells TIME. “By speaking our community’s name, the President pushes us all to recognize the existence and validity of trans people as Americans worthy of protection and our nation’s resources.”

“As a transgender man and an advocate for transgender people, it was thrilling to hear, for the first time in our nation’s history, the President of the United States acknowledge transgender people as an integral and valued part of our national community,” says Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Quote:

The issues of validity and legitimacy are huge ones for transgender people. Decades ago, doctors didn’t think their feelings about their gender identity were legitimate—that they were inclinations requiring correction. Today, the medical community has evolved, but many people still mistakenly assume transgender people are only really transgender if their bodies look a certain way.

Elizabeth Reis, a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Oregon, says that for decades transgender people have had to deal with the perception that they’re deceiving people. “The people who say that they’re trans have always been undermined and thought of as not telling the truth, being intentionally deceitful of others,” she says. She calls it “the authenticity issue that trans people face, not being believed for who they say they are.”

Quote:

To get medical treatment or to play on sports teams or to change the gender on their driver’s licenses, transgender people have long had to provide documents and testimony that they are who they say they are. In the past, they sometimes had to prove they intended to have or had undergone surgery. And today, there are people who don’t understand what it means to be transgender or don’t “believe in being transgender,” as the sibling of a transgender boy told TIME in 2014. Constantly proving one’s status is not something that many Americans are forced to do on a daily basis. To have Obama offer up recognition using the word that the community itself uses—rather than circling the issue with a some vague phrase like “regardless of how someone identifies”—is him implying that he does believe and doesn’t need any more proof.