Diane Sawyer's Case Of Gender Nonconformist

In April of 2015, Diane Sawyer premiered an interview on 20/20 that stirred up a heated debate within several, special interest groups in the US. Bruce Jenner decided to tell Sawyer that he was a trans woman, officially “coming out”. After a name and identity change in the public eye months later, Caitlyn Jenner became the media face of the transgendered community. However, as many quickly realized, Jenner’s point of view and experiences differed from other trans individuals in the US, and it drove an already hot topic into a fiery argument in multiple areas of social debate. While there are numerous supporters of Jenner, there are equally just as many that do not see her as a trans woman but a man dressing like a woman. These arguments are

There is a great deal of confusion around this word because of the meaning behind it. There are two generally accepted root meanings of the word “trans” in transgenderism: across and beyond (Lund, 2012, p.8). In the case of gender nonconformists, this refers to the “beyond” definition, where they view themselves outside of the binary structure of male and female. The “across” meaning applies to those that do not believe they were born on the correct side of that line and seek to cross it, usually physically while some choose to simply self-identify. At the turn of the century, psychologists said at least 2% of American children feel this sense of “being born in the wrong body”, and with the U.S. Census of 2000 reporting over eighty thousand citizens under the age of 20, that means almost two thousand children fell into this group (Part Six: Transgender in America, 2001, p.75). While there has been a great deal of progress as far as resources and options for these “crossing” trans individuals, there have also been a lot of

As there is nothing in our law that denotes the definition of gender, judges have relied upon stereotypical assumption to make their decisions. It was not until 2004 that the court system addressed this problem. In the case of Smith v. City of Salem, a trans woman firefighter was targeted with oppressive compliances to convince her to quit or be fire after coming out privately to her superior that she planned to pursue sex reassignment surgeries. Smith filed suit for sex discrimination, which was defeated in its first court appearance but won its appeal. The interesting part about the first ruling was that it stated how transgender discrimination works, and that it did not fall under Title VII’s current verbiage, which was why the case was ruled against Smith. While the appeal overruled the ruling, withdrawing the opinion, the original dictated a possible definition to be