Fear should not become policy, but that fear speaks to deeper truths

By Sandi Nizzoli
Reader Contributor

At the City Council meeting on Nov. 19, many community members spoke about their fear of a transgender woman using the women’s locker room. A shocking amount of the public testimony came from women and men who described histories of sexual assault and longstanding trauma.

Those experiences deserve compassion. 

An equally revealing moment came when so many men stood up and spoke not about their own safety, but about their fear for their wives, daughters and granddaughters. They warned of “a man” in the women’s locker room projecting danger onto a transgender woman simply for existing in a public space.

This is where the red flags raised for me.

When an exhaustive line of men publicly testify that they fear a member of their own community being around their loved ones, what they are actually telling the council and the community is that they do not trust men. They are describing a world in which assault is so normal and so expected that the presence of anyone they even perceive as “male” feels inherently unsafe.

That is not a reflection of transgender people. (Please read that again.) 

That is a reflection of their own community’s unresolved crisis with male violence.

The testimonies unintentionally opened a window for all of us to see into: A glimpse into a community where sexual assault is so common that even its own men automatically assume that other men — or even people who they define as men — are threats.

Instead of targeting an at-risk group (with little history of committing these crimes), perhaps it’s time to turn that fear inward and ask harder questions to hold ourselves accountable:

• Why is sexual assault such an unspoken epidemic in these circles that women carry lifelong trauma from it?

• Why are those men not the focus of the community outrage?

• How, in the face of such internal harm, did transgender people become the scapegoat and a deflection from where the responsibility truly lies?

Weaponizing trauma on the backs of trans people does nothing to make anyone safer and is morally wrong. It blatantly diverts attention from where the problem actually is: within the very institutions, communities and cultures speaking most loudly about their fears.

If safety is the goal, then honesty must be the starting point.

Transgender people are not the danger.

The testimonies at City Council made one thing painfully clear: Some communities need to confront the violence happening inside their own walls before pointing outward.

Fear should not become policy. But it can become a mirror if they are willing to look.

Sandi Nizzoli is a longtime Sandpoint resident.