We Will Not Be Erased

A transcript.

(NYC-DSA)

The following is a transcript of a speech I gave yesterday, February 3rd in St. Vartan Park at a protest regarding NYU Langone’s cancellation of appointments for transgender youth in the face of Trump’s executive orders “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” threatening (without enforceability) to withhold federal funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to people under 19, among other things. Given I’ve been… sidetracked with recent events and my scheduled posts are delayed, I’ve decided to make it available here. I always ad hoc a bit, so it is not verbatim what I said. New paragraphs tend to correlate with pauses for crowd response.

Are you fired up tonight New York?

My name is Maeve, and I am a CUNY student, a DSA member, but most importantly of all tonight, a proud transgender woman.

We gather tonight because one man has unilaterally decided he knows better than parents, better than doctors, and the hospital we gather across from is one of few providing this care in the country scared into compliance. This federal administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on the civil liberties of transgender New Yorkers, from nixing every reference to our existence from government resources down to removing the "T" from LGBT.

These policies are nothing short of eradicationist, designed to enforce an extremist worldview that denies our very existence as anything other than some kind of cultural disease, and robs us of our humanity.

But I've got news for Donald Trump: two weeks in, transgender New Yorkers continue to thrive. Transgender kids continue to thrive.

And as terrifying as social death as public policy is, it rests on a fundamentally false premise. Cruelty is the point. Chaos is the point. But the goal of this policy is to demotivate, for transgender folk and our allies to simply roll over and accept these blatantly illegal attempts to force us back into the closet. That is not an option for us. We have no other choice but to fight back.

When I was a trans teenager just two years ago as every trans adult once was a trans teenager, I was hardly in a position to speak as I do today. I lived a life on eggshells. What friend, partner is safe to tell. What moves I had to make so one day I could come out. And how could I rip off the Band-Aid once I was in a financial and interpersonal position to weather the fallout, knowing full well there would be family members and friends that would never speak to me again.

But in that time when it all seemed so daunting, I took a lot of solace in the fact that I was a New Yorker, of a city where queer history and resistance runs deep— as well as resistance to all forms of injustice. What a disgrace to that legacy it is then that in the face of the current moment, less than two miles from where I grew up, stands one of few hospitals to fall at the first hurdle.

My closest friend is a NYU Langone patient who began her care here when she was 16, and while she cannot be with us tonight, she has given me permission to tell snippets of her story. How she went from not having the will to even get out of bed in the morning to optimistic for the future and ready to take on the world in a week.

How the lifting of such an immense weight boosted her self-confidence to a degree where she could succeed in school, and now professionally.

And how her heart grieves for those in the same situation she was in less than five years ago, who today see that light at the end of the tunnel blocked. But are we gonna let them block that light?

No!

All ripping trans kids off their care will do is lead to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, as Dr. Zingman said earlier. But these things are not symptoms of being trans— these are symptoms of being trans without healthcare.

The best performing statewide race on the ballot last year was not Kamala Harris, who won by 13 points or even Kirsten Gillibrand who won by 18 points, but Prop 1 which enshrined anti-discrimination protections for transgender New Yorkers and others by 25 points. So we're here tonight demanding the state government do their damn job and act to enforce New York law. In the news last week, the state of Louisiana charged a New York doctor with providing Mifepristone to a woman who needed an abortion. Did New York comply?

No!

That's right, we did not. We refuse to extradite her. When Baton Rouge passes medieval laws against the right to choose, we do not comply. When Donald Trump's White House signs medieval executive orders against our children, what do we do?

We do not comply!

There is some segment of the political world and the general public that has decided to look away at this moment because they for whatever reason don't believe this care is worth fighting for. To those people, I ask you to consider what happens after this opening salvo. The executive order that NYU Langone is kowtowing to doesn't just refer to care for trans kids, it says under the age of 19. 18-year-olds are adults. This order not only goes after transgender youth and their parents seeking care, it lays the groundwork to establish precedent to deny transgender adults care. With Idaho's legislature passing a resolution asking the Supreme Court to reconsider the constitutionality of marriage equality just last week, don't believe for a second that they will stop at trans rights. If we give an inch, they will take a mile.

To every young trans person out there: you are real, no matter who sits in the White House. Your identity is real. Your needs are real. We are here for you. We fight for you. And we will not stand by and let institutions make cold, dehumanized decisions about whether to provide that care to you. To the parents here today, you should be able to make these decisions with the medical workers here today, not politicians. The government has no right to take that away from you. We will not back down. When trans rights are under attack, what do we do?

Stand up, fight back!