Despite the proven existence of thousands of people nationally who are born with the genitals of both sexes, and despite decades of research into the biological and early-childhood roots of gender identity, Focus on the Family continues to deny the existence of transgender persons — and to suppress their constitutional freedoms.
Focus’ CitizenLink political propaganda tool sneered at persons of mixed biology in a Jan. 19 article, placing the word “transgendered” in scare quotes and insinuating that such American taxpayers should not granted to equal access to public facilities and government employment.
Focus urges voters in Gainesville, Fla., to vote away equal access. Focus accomplishes this by falsely telling its readership that the vote to repeal an equal-access and non-discrimination ordinance is really a ban of “pedophiles” from bathrooms.
“The statute says if they have an inner sense of being of a specific gender, then they can be that gender,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council. “That’ crazy because pedophiles would love to use bathrooms where little girls are located in parks.”
Quite simply, the insinuation that transgender persons are pedophiles is a lie that is intended to incite violence against people of mixed biology and identity.
According to The Gainesville Sun:
The ordinance defines gender identity as “an inner sense of being a specific gender, or the expression of a gender identity by verbal statement, appearance, or mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.”
That definition broadens the range of application to not only people who have undergone sex-change operations, but also the people in a community who are transitioning from one gender to another or those who simply project themselves as a gender other than what they were born, said Jennifer Sager a private practice psychologist who does specialty work in transgender issues in Gainesville. …
“An estimated one in 200 people are transgendered, meaning they have some amount of feelings that they have gender incongruence,” Sager said.
An estimate based on people who have contacted The Sun and their acquaintances has identified at least 12 people in the Gainesville area who are protected by the new law.
While the population is small, Brian Winfield, director of communications for Equality Florida, said it is a group of people very heavily discriminated against.
“It’s absolutely essential,” Winfield said. “Just this past year . . . in Largo, a small town outside of St. Petersburg, they fired their city manager after 14 years of service to the city … simply because the city manager announced that he was transitioning from male to female.
Focus could have chosen to oppose one controversial clause of the local non-discrimination ordinance which applies to public accommodations such as restrooms. But even then, the ordinance allows exceptions for modesty and safety:
The ordinance in Gainesville specifies that a business is allowed to deny transgender people access to facilities where being seen naked is unavoidable, provided that access to an equal facility is available.
Commissioner Craig Lowe, who helped draft the ordinance, maintains that providing such alternate accommodations for a transgender customer would be required only if such additions were “readily available” – in other words, not cost-prohibitive.
Instead of supporting an amendment or a reconsideration of that clause, Focus on the Family opposes the ordinance in its entirety. In its view, the freedom and wellbeing of dozens of local people may be sacrificed to the insecurity of conservative Christians who insist upon suppressing and annihilating anyone whose biological gender or identity fail to conform to their own sectarian religious ideology.
