Hi, I have a transmasc boyfriend and am part of the LGBTQ+ alliance. However I started my first year of college and encountered uneducated men who just did not believe that trans people had their rights under attack. One of my friends even told my trans woman friend that she had more rights than him. How or what can you do to help others become educated without “debating trans existence” or starting an argument? Thank you.
A lot of the beliefs surrounding this issue are decade old lies that have been repeated so often that they’ve become the “truth”.
Best example is the classic rhetoric of public bathrooms.
You might have heard that “Trans people just want to rape little girls in public bathrooms”.
The fact is, the only instance of a trans person ever raping someone in a bathroom I could find was at a women’s prison. Prison bathrooms have a certain reputation regarding rape, so let’s leave it at that.
Meanwhile, trans people are 4 times more likely to be victims of rape than the general population, and I was able to find multiple instances of trans people getting raped in bathrooms by cis people. Let that sink in for a moment.
Getting people to realize these old lies are just that, old shitty lies, has given me some amount of success in educating people in real-life debates.