John Oliver Highlighted The Continued Discrimination Against Transgender People On ‘Last Week Tonight’

The legalisation of same-sex marriage across the United States over the weekend led to a frenzy of back-patting unseen since Year Three nailed their school assembly rendition of Pharrell’s ‘Happy’; a waterfall of rainbow profile pictures and calls to “get it done” in Australia followed the news. While such an outpouring of solidarity for gay and lesbian people is laudable, what got lost in the tumult is the fact that marriage is by no means the only issue on which LGBTI people face discrimination.

Even in our so-called enlightened times, transgender people still face a vast and bewildering array of indignities and prejudices — “bathroom bills” dictating where they can and cannot go to the toilet, invasive and unnecessary restrictions on everything from birth certificates to driver’s licenses and the institutionalised enabling of discrimination and violence that comes from legislative inequality.

Hampering the fight for transgender rights is a lack of awareness and familiarity with transgender people in the community more broadly; understandable given many people have never met a transgender person before, but a problem that leads to misconceptions, confusion and insensitivity nonetheless.

So rather than basking in how great it is that same-sex marriage is now legal across the US, John Oliver laid down a comprehensive and detailed explainer of where we’re at in one of the next big LGBTI rights battles, highlighting our willingness to “champion” transgender celebrities while being strangely resistant to genuine legislative or social change that would make transgender people’s lives better.

“We are weirdly comfortable ‘celebrating’ transgender people while simultaneously dehumanising them at the DMV, pinning awards to them as we drum them out of the military and constantly quizzing them about their genitals.” That is a hell of a summing up, and one that hopefully spurs pressure for change as popular and successful as the campaign for equal marriage. If you’ve gifted yourself a rainbow profile picture in the last few days, good on you for not being a homophobic jerk. Now there’s work to do.

You can find out more about transgender people, issues, services and groups courtesy of The Gender Centre and the Australian Human Rights Commission.