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RVA Magazine, Retract the October 24 Piece by E. Draim

By: dsa_admin
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Posted: October 26, 2018

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a report stating that this Republican presidential administration is set to roll back Obama-era federal protections for transgender people. This development will further threaten the safety and health of transgender people, already one of the most at-risk demographics in this country. As Danica Roem, Delegate of Virginia’s 13th district and the nation’s only transgender state lawmaker put it:

“When someone in government tries to take the initiative to tell us, to tell the public, that we aren’t who we say we are, that’s dangerous and it does get people killed.”

22 trans people have been murdered already in 2018, after 27 in 2017.

At a time when violence against transgender people is on the rise in the United States, we need to, at the very least, recognize the active threat the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration pose to the transgender community. To suggest that “Republicans have a lot to offer the LGBTQ community” would be utterly farcical even if this were not a time when right-wing violence is on the rise, but, as this is such a time, it is very difficult not to see this as a dangerous obfuscation of truth and of the lived realities of LGBTQ people in Richmond and across the country. Publishing this argument rooted in a seemingly willfully ignorant view of political reality makes RVA Magazine party to this ongoing attempt at erasure of transgender people.

We suggest they immediately retract the article.

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