NCTE's Mara Keisling Testifies Before US Commission on Civil Rights

On Monday, March 16, 2015, National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director, Mara Keisling, joined three panelists including Kylar Broadus from the National LGBTQ Task Force, Gina Duncan from Equality Florida, and Ilona Turner from Transgender Law Center in presenting testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The briefing focused on discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace.

NCTE joins with other LGBT activists and advocates across the U.S. in working toward explicit federal workplace protections for LGBT people. Read Keisling's moving testimony as delivered to the commission below.​

Testimony (Oral) of Mara Keisling, Executive Director of National Center for Transgender Equality

Thank you, Commissioners, for having me here today.

NCTE has submitted written testimony that describes the state of transgender people in the US and what we think should be done to improve that. I want to talk to you today more as an actual person than as a policy person. I will of course be available after my testimony to answer questions as a policy person, but now, I’d like to be real.

What I most want the Commission to understand today is that right now, in 2015, transgender people are traumatized. They’re traumatized economically, culturally and physically.

I struggled with whether or not to use the word “traumatized.” I thought that “feeling on edge” was way too weak. I thought about saying we were “under siege” or “feeling in danger,” but I ended up on the stronger word “traumatized.” In my 15 year career in this movement, I’ve never seen our community this way and I want to tell you about it.

I need to add that we are really a resilient and determined people. You have to be when you’re marginalized as transgender people are. But we are traumatized.

Specific to the work of the Commission, transgender people are under siege and traumatized economically with an unemployment rate twice the national average. We are four times more likely than non-transgender people to live on less than $10,000 a year. And for transgender people who live at the intersection of transphobia and other kinds of marginalization like racism, or ableism or ageism, it is so much worse than that.

I’d like to make sure you understand though even though it is not specifically in your purview that transgender people are feeling unsafe physically, it is clearly impacted by the discrimination that is in your purview. There has been a dramatic increase in violence in the last six months. For the 15 years I’ve been doing this work, we’ve always said that one transgender person per month is murdered in the United States, which I think you’ll all agree is way too much. That number has tripled in the last four or five months. We don’t quite know why, but it unquestionably has.  And particularly for trans woman of color. That is who most of our victims are. There is a real palpable fear and trauma out there right now. And we are seeing a spike in suicidality as well. The violence has us traumatized.

Another reason people feel very unsafe is the disrespectful Florida bill that Gina spoke of. We actually have bad bills aimed at us in nine states right now, bills with which state legislators are very specifically challenging and disrespecting the humanity of transgender people. Some say trans kids shouldn’t play school sports, some say we don’t deserve to be in the same spaces as other people, or use the restroom at work. This has a really harsh psychic impact on real people, and while it might be a useful thing for fundraising or demagoguery it is a real attack on real people and we trans people really feel it that way.

We don’t know why it is happening. Part of it may be that there are just more of us out there. Part of it may be the last sputtering of bigoted ignorance. But I think we all also know that some of it is demagoguery and fundraising. It just is.

We knew a backlash would come eventually, and it does seem to have arrived. I find solace only in knowing that this backlash is not because we are losing, it is actually because we are winning. It is actually because most people are good people who recognize our humanity. It is paying off for all of us that so many trans people are educating our classmates and the people we go to the mosque with and the people we go to church with. We’re winning people over and we’re winning policy change and that is causing some backlash that is really hurting our people and traumatizing our people.

Importantly, we also are very aware that as we win so much positive policy change—the policy advances that my colleagues here have talked about—it remains true that every day real tragedies are happening to lots of real transgender people. People are dying. Judges are taking people’s children away. People are being fired. People are not being allowed to use the restrooms at work.

I want to say this very clearly, at NCTE we believe that it is illegal everywhere in the United States, state or territory, to discriminate against a transgender person in employment, housing, education, and healthcare. What we acknowledge however is that it is not settled, that it is not 100% settled. There are still employers who don’t know it and housing providers who don’t know it, and et cetera. We need that clarification to happen.

We also need is an understanding that the protections must be real. If you are allowed to have a job and you can’t be fired, but they don’t have to let you use the bathroom at work, you can’t work. If you have a job, but they’re allowed to sell you a discriminatory healthcare policy, like the federal government does to its federal employees, you cannot bring your whole healthy self to work. You cannot sometimes even work at all.  We need to not just solidify these understandings, these legal interpretations and actual laws, but we need to make them real with a real understanding of what it takes to bring yourself to work and what kind of things you need.  What we need is pretty simple, and Ilona [Turner of Transgender Law Center] and Gina [Duncan of Equality Florida] have just touched on it. First, we do need federal, state and local officials to really focus on the physical violence, the dramatically high murder rate, and the apparently increasing suicide rates of  transgender people who already had a 23 times higher suicide rate than the general public. We need more focus on that from the government.

We need the federal government to stop the discrimination that it does as an employer. Third, we need further sex discrimination clarification from the Commission and from other federal government entities. Finally we need to pass a federal comprehensive anti-discrimination law. We’re very hopeful this spring that Congress will be introducing a bill to replace the old Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which hopefully would include anti-discrimination provisions for employment, housing, credit, education, jury service, federal funding and several other areas. We desperately need these policy changes.

But what I really want you to understand today is that transgender people in 2015 are under siege, are on edge, are traumatized, and I thank you very much for having us here today.