Human beings “are never born in the wrong body.” To anyone who has spent time
talking to a trans child, or with a trans friend or relative, the arrogance of this statement
in Karen Bercovici’s July 10 guest column [“Conflict of rights — Gender identity dismantles women’s and girl’s sex-based rights“] comes not only as deeply sad, but deeply ignorant.
But perhaps equally sad is that, in arguing that the demands of the trans community are
intruding on the hard-won rights of cis women, Bercovici is repeating a sin that has been
endemic in American politics: one group, having won its rights, throwing the next rights-
seeking group under the bus.
I wonder what it would be like for those of us who identify as cis to just take a breath,
and assume a little humility around trans issues. The simple fact is that we’re all being
asked to try and understand something that, up to this point in history, we haven’t really
been asked to think about. There’s a line from a 1980’s TV movie about a trans woman
(played by Vanessa Redgrave) that has stuck with me for decades: “The free fish can’t
know how the hooked fish feels.” Rather than bloviating about an issue that writers like
Bercovici clearly know little about, we might do well to think about that.
Tony Giardina
Florence