Anti-Transgender Laws Are "Jim Crow" Laws

This is part of a series of posts sketching out legal paths for challenging anti-transgender laws in Canada.

1. Anti-Transgender Laws Are Jim Crow Laws
2. Charter Challenges of an Anti-Transgender Law

Laws do not exist in a vacuum - the cleverest of legal arguments are often decoupled from the human experience and day to day lives of people.  Therefore, laws must be understood in the context of the society in which they exist, as well as the legal frameworks in place. 

"Jim Crow" laws were laws passed in various states to create a segregation between white people and people of colour in the United States.  These were the laws that forced black people to sit at the back of the public transit bus, or required them to use specific bathrooms (sound familiar?) or drinking fountains.  They also enabled businesses to refuse service to people based on such characteristics. 

I would hope, that in today's world, such laws are seen as the injustices they are - laws designed to target people based on characteristics - humiliating, segregating, and ultimately criminalizing their existence.  In today's Canada, S15 of The Charter specifically prohibits that kind of legislation.  

Anti-transgender laws are, in this writer's opinion, very much the "new Jim Crow" laws.  Largely they are based on ginned up fears of the "dangers" that the targeted group represents for society.  I'm going to walk through why these laws should be invalidated in Canada, and I will do so by deriving a possible test that could be used to objectively identify a "Jim Crow" law, regardless of whom is targeted. 

About That 40% Suicide Attempt Rate

Over at a rabidly anti-transgender blog called "4th Wave Now" we find the following article which attempts to debunk the 40% suicide rate that several iterations of the US Transgender Survey have found.  The argument largely seems to be that the US Transgender Survey is "flawed", and therefore we shouldn't consider its findings legitimate.

Let's be clear, measuring suicidality isn't the primary focus of the US Transgender Survey's design.  In fact the question is incidental, primarily intended to give some insight into the consequences of stigma, discrimination and minority stress rather than to evaluate the overall risk of suicidal behaviour within the community.