Oklahoma Is Determined to Out Trans Youth For Life
A fight over whether trans youth can update their records is about ensuring trans people can never escape discrimination and stigma, and Oklahoma’s Department of Education is being open about that fact.
by Evan Urquhart
One central paradox of the current anti-trans crusade is the way that efforts to suppress knowledge about transgender identity directly conflicts with resistance to allowing trans individuals to update their records and avoid being unnecessarily outed as trans. A case in point is Oklahoma, where Republican politicians have made efforts to restrict teachers from discussing gay and trans people in school, but other GOP officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure that trans kids are known to be trans by their teachers and peers. That’s the upshot of a report by NBC News that Oklahoma’s Department of Education passed an emergency law to prevent J. Doe, a trans boy who isn’t out to his classmates, from updating his school records to reflect that he is male.
The reason? Oklahoma’s Board of Education wants to make sure that trans people who pass through their schools can be outed as transgender for the rest of their lives.
screenshot from NBC News
According to NBC, J. Doe was showing clear signs of gender dysphoria by the time he was 5 years old, requested he/him pronouns by the age of 9, began medically transitioning with puberty blockers in seventh grade, and is currently not out as trans at school because he wants to live, and be treated as, a normal boy. The state of Oklahoma is determined to prevent him from living quietly below the radar, going so far as to create an emergency rule that states every request for a trans student’s records to be updated must be individually approved by the Board of Education, and then promptly denied approval to J. Doe. His family are suing the state on the grounds of equal protection, and parents’ rights.
This story is an example of the double bind campaigners against trans rights are determined to put trans people in. While complaints often center around people who are very visibly trans and gender nonconforming, every effort is being quietly made to prevent trans people who want to live under the radar from doing so. Forced outing endangers trans people because it makes them much more vulnerable to discrimination, bullying, harassment, and even violence. This is the hoped-for effect of Oklahoma’s policies, which want to protect “the accuracy of historic records for future use,” a euphemistic way of saying forced outing will be the policy of the state.