- More than fifty people under the age of thirty killed in ten years. Cranbrook school locked down because someone saw, "a man in a dress." A popular professor, who is also an ordained minister, fired by the university she worked for because of the school's "Christian" principles.

Many - if not most - gay, lesbian and bisexual folks don't give all that much thought to our gender. For the most part, we don't have to. Natal women (or, "women-born-women") especially have more lenience in what we can wear and how we're allowed to act in public than ever in Western history. And while the closets many GLB folks spend all or part of their time in is an uncomfortable, even miserable place, the fact remains that our wider society assumes we are all "just like them" unless we choose to tell them otherwise.

Our transgender brothers and sisters, however, face an even harsher set of choices. Think for a moment about how many things are determined by sex and gender - from what clothing we can wear to which public bathrooms it's safe for us to use to which sports teams will welcome us into their Saturday leagues. Think how much of your identity is wrapped around your sex and gender, from whether you consider yourself attractive to your comfort levels interacting with people of the same and of different sexes and genders.

GLB individuals frequently face the harsh choice of being accepted on the job/by our families/by our culture or hiding whom we love. Our transgender brothers and sisters frequently have to decide between acceptance or being who they are. Imagine not only having to "act straight," but having to constantly act in ways that feel foreign to who you are - having to walk differently, behave differently, even dress differently than what feels right to you. Now imagine that not only your job and your family's acceptance, but your physical safety, depends on your living this lie every single time you step outside your front door and perhaps even within your own home. Further, imagine that in order to stop living this lie you have to deal with physicians who consider you mentally ill, spend thousands of dollars from your own pocket on medical procedures, and risk having an entire school go into lockdown mode just because you dared appear in public on their grounds.

While many GLBT individuals are imprisoned in the closet, our transgender brothers and sisters are imprisoned by our culture's expectations of their bodies. I can't begin to imagine the courage and resilience it takes for them just to be true to themselves. I am grateful for the generosity of spirit so many show the rest of us when they organize and mobilize and work with us shoulder to shoulder to lessen the oppression that all of us face. And I am proud to work for an organization that refuses to support any proposed laws that would protect some of us, but not all of us.

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Triangle Foundation is working to help pass laws that will protect our entire community - GLB and T. Support our legislative work with a donation here.