‘Protect our women and girls’

Transphobia is deadly to people and communities

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

On Nov. 19, the Sandpoint City Council and county residents took the future of human rights in our city into their hands. The choice they faced was to either give in to prejudice, fear and hate, taking one step toward stripping Sandpoint’s LGBTQIA+ residents of their rights to live and work here, or to uphold the existing non-discrimination ordinance, which has protected everyone — without issue — for 14 years. They chose to strip one of the smallest and most vulnerable groups in Sandpoint of those protections.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Nov. 20, the world recognized Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the untold number of individuals who have been murdered for their very existence. Founded in 1999, the day originally mourned the deaths of Rita Hester, Chanelle Pickett and Monique Thomas, murdered in different places, at different times, by different bigots.

What it means to be trans

Terms like “transgender” and “gender-expansive” are blanket terms for parents, siblings, friends and neighbors who make up approximately 1% of the U.S. population. Though they were born with any of the hundreds of variations of X and Y sex chromosomes, trans and gender-expansive people do not identify their gender with their birth sex. In the simplest terms, their souls or hearts or minds — depending on your beliefs — know that they are actually men, women, neither, both or some other combination. People whose gender identity is the same as their birth sex are called “cisgender.”

Biological sex is different from gender and its presentation, which are a matter of cultural norms — that’s why XX babies aren’t born wearing pink tutus and XY babies aren’t born holding Hot Wheels. Over thousands of years, humanity has decided what things are “feminine” and what things are “masculine,” even though XY babies can like tutus and XX babies can like Hot Wheels. These characteristics change over time; for example, from the 1800s to the 1940s, pink was reserved for boys and blue for girls.

The Indigenous peoples of what is now North America had much more diverse understandings of gender that did not generally create strict divisions. Though the language and practice vary from group to group, modern LGBTQIA+ individuals often use the pan-Indian phrase “two-spirit” as an umbrella term to describe gender-expansive Indigenous people. World history is full of people who we would now identify as trans or gender-expansive; they simply didn’t have those words to describe themselves.

The ugly truth

In the weeks before 2025’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, Bonner County was up in arms because a trans woman — wearing more clothes than any cis man at a pool — dared to get dressed, fix her hair and put on makeup in the Litehouse YMCA women’s locker room. The most vocal individuals at the City Council meetings of Nov. 12 and Nov. 19 would have preferred she risk physical violence by getting ready in the men’s room, or, if we’re being honest, that she simply didn’t exist.

Those individuals calling for an end to the non-discrimination ordinance had varied opinions that ranged from fearful to hateful to inhumane, but what they boiled down to was this: “We have to protect our women and girls.” 

Anyone who’s grown up in Idaho, as I have, knows that that is a new idea for the state’s politicians and far-right conservatives, who stripped women of their bodily autonomy and elected a rapist, and likely pedophile, to the Oval Office.

This artificial panic is nothing more than a ploy to pretend to care about women’s issues while crushing a vulnerable minority so that politicians running in upcoming elections can feel and look powerful. If these people wanted to “protect our women and girls,” they would vote to revoke the near-total abortion ban. They would vote against bills like the federal Family First Act or Idaho’s parental consent law, which keep children in abusive homes and deny them mental health care or rape kits. They would institute initiatives to provide affordable housing, food and medical care rather than defunding Medicaid and SNAP. The list goes on.

Far-right fearmongers want us to believe that there’s a “transgender mafia” sending sexual predators into women’s bathrooms. The truth is much simpler. The reason these talking heads can’t back up their “transgender rapist” claims is that the number of trans women who rape cis women is so incredibly small, it can’t be quantified in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, the U.S. Office for Victims of Crime easily estimates that 78 cis women “are forcibly raped” in the U.S. every hour, the vast majority by cis men.

Men don’t “dress as women” to walk into a restroom and rape someone. If they want to, they walk in as they are — in a suit or a football jersey or a T-shirt — because these spaces aren’t guarded and have never been truly safe. No space is until we start teaching kids to value consent and to view their fellow human beings as just that — human beings.

When trans and gender-expansive people choose to live as their authentic selves, they paint targets on their backs, especially if they’re part of another marginalized group, such as people of color. The FBI recorded 542 hate crimes against trans and gender-expansive people in 2023 alone, which doesn’t include the hundreds that go unreported. According to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, trans people are at least four times more likely to experience violence, sexual assault and rape than cis people. Three in four trans women will experience this type of violent victimization in their lifetimes.

Trans people aren’t a threat; they are constantly under threat. They don’t risk violence or even death for some kind of “sexual perversion”; they do it because living a lie is unbearable.

Many people joining the conversation about trans rights in our community are coming from a place of fear, incited by far-right politicians with political agendas attempting to amass votes, power and money. We cannot allow these people to dominate the narrative with disinformation.

Anyone who says they support freedom should agree that people have the right to live however they choose, provided that they aren’t hurting anyone. The woman at the YMCA didn’t hurt anyone, but many in this community have made it their mission to hurt her and anyone else who believes in human rights. 

We can’t fall victim to these scare tactics, and we can’t trample our neighbors’ rights in an attempt to build ourselves up. Only communities founded on equality, acceptance, understanding and kindness will ever truly thrive.