Often, when the phrase “women’s rights” or “women’s equality” gets airtime, the platform is a progressive, inclusive one. However, that’s far from a guarantee, and conservative campaigns aren’t afraid to misappropriate those terms for their own missions. Keep MA Safe, for example, is using words and images that evoke the Women’ s March in order to push a dangerous, anti-trans agenda in Massachusetts.
Keep MA Safe isn’t just an obscure, powerless movement, either. It’s the campaign leading the ballot measure to repeal anti-discrimination protections for trans people in Massachusetts.
Two years ago, Massachusetts passed a statewide referendum to allow people to use public restrooms that best align with their gender identity. This public accommodations law was the first of its kind to pass on a statewide level in the U.S.
Now, Keep MA Safe is under fire specifically for putting a protest photo on its campaign homepage. What’s the problem? The protest photo in question, found on Getty and Shutterstock, is a stock image that evokes images from the feminist, inclusive Women’s March. The image is of all women-presenting people, including women of color, with a sign that reads “WOMEN.”
The insidious aspect of this is that not only is it a manipulative play likely in the hope that people will associate Keep MA Safe with the Women’s March but also that when they say “WOMEN,” it refers to only cisgender women.
The Women’s March national organization gave a statement to INTO regarding the photo:
“We value and fight for ALL women or we value and fight for none. Trans women are women and we will keep saying that until it no longer needs to be said.”
What’s particularly frustrating, and potentially damaging, about Keep MA Safe using this stock image is that the Women’s March did so much work to build an inclusive, accepting platform. Its mission has been consistently, explicitly queer-inclusive, and has maintained that trans identities are valid and worth fighting for.
Stock image aside, Keep MA Safe also has a series of fearmongering ads:
The notion that trans people are predators is pervasive and downright ugly. Anti-trans rhetoric often frames trans people as pretending to be trans as a means of preying on others, whether it’s by “tricking” someone into a date or spying on a stranger in a public restroom.
Anti-trans rhetoric tends to fall into harmful stereotypes that a trans identity is a mental illness, and thus trans people are dangerous, erratic, or not in their right state of mind.
These campaigns consistently misgender trans women, by referring to them as “men” over and over.
Of course, trans people are actually victims of violence at a higher rate than the cisgender population. Statistically, a transgender person is far more likely to be the victim of violence or harassment, rather than the perpetrator of it.
Trans youth also experience higher rates of harassment, cyberbullying, sexual harassment, and property damage than their cisgender peers. They’re also less likely to complete high school.
According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, out of all LGBT homicide victims in 2014, 55 percent were transgender women; 50 percent were transgender women of color.
And it’s not just literal life-or-death violence that impacts the trans community. For example, 26 percent of National Transgender Discrimination Survey respondents said they lost a job due to their trans identity.
In the same vein, trans people experience unemployment at double the national average. Even in terms of housing, 20 percent of respondents said they were evicted, or denied housing entirely, because they were transgender.
In 2018 alone, 28 trans people have been killed by shooting or other violence. Given that trans people are often deadnamed (referred to by their birth name, not their chosen name) and misgendered in police reports and obituaries, it’s likely the number is actually even higher.
The lived experience of trans people makes campaigns against their rights all the more insidious. Trans people, and especially trans people of color, face a lack of protections, obstacles, and gender-based violence at staggering rates. Each step forward, like putting it on the books that people can use the public restroom of their choice, is an enormous victory not just for daily life but also in shattering the stigma around being trans.
Campaigns like Keep MA Safe not only hurt individual trans people but also risk taking our society’s slow acceptance of the trans community backward.
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