Rights for All People

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GREEN of Texas. Madam Speaker, and still I rise. I rise proud to be a Member of this august body, always honored to have the preeminent privilege of standing here or in the well and making statements, hopefully, that can have an impact on society in a very positive way.

I rise today, Madam Speaker, because I am concerned about the rights of others. I stand for the rights of others notwithstanding who I am. I am not Asian, but I stand for the rights of Asians. I am not Palestinian, but I will stand up for Palestinians. I am not a Muslim, nor am I a person who is from some country that I may not be aware of. I will still stand up for their rights.

I believe that the rights of persons who are Jewish have to be focused on. We have to stand up for them, especially given what is happening with anti-Semitism today.

I am not a member of the LGBTQ+ community, but I stand up for their rights. Today, I am going to take a stand for those persons who are among the trans community, the transgender community.

I am not a member of the LGBTQ+ community, as I have indicated, but I still stand up for the rights of people, doesn't matter what community you are in. If you are being wronged, someone should stand up to make that wrong right.

Today, I want to talk about the bathroom issue, but before going there, let me just share this: I am a son of the segregated South. I know what invidious discrimination looks like, what it smells like, what it sounds like, what it hurts like. I know because I suffered invidious discrimination.

In the segregated South, I was not allowed to go into certain places because of the complexion of my skin. In the segregated South, even if I went into certain places, there were areas that I could not go into because of the color of my skin.

In the segregated South, there were signs on the doors of the necessary facilities, the toilets, that would indicate that they were for Whites or they were for colored. I understood, because my parents made it very clear to me, that you should never go into the area for Whites because people would harm me. It was their belief that I would be harmed, in fact, that I might even lose my life for simply going into the wrong toilet.

So I learned early in life what invidious discrimination was like. I had no differences with the people who were going into the Whites-only facility. I didn't dislike them. I didn't say bad things about them. I didn't try to hurt them in any way, but they chose to keep me out of a certain facility because of who I was, the color of my skin.

Now, this is an interesting phenomenon: But for the color of my skin, we had the same characteristics. We had the same number of arms and legs and eyes, same characteristics generally speaking.

Our physicality was quite similar, but the color of my skin was something that would not allow me to go into a Whites-only necessary facility, a Whites-only toilet.

That color of my skin made all the difference in the world. When I was within the facility, I used it the same way they would. There was no difference in the way I approached the use of it as it relates to the facility. We did it the same way. We went in the same door. We would come out the same door. While there, we would use the facilities in the same way. Nothing different other than the color of my skin that kept me out of a Whites-only restroom.

This is a remarkable circumstance. If you haven't lived it, you don't have the same understanding of how it impacts a person to know that you are now somehow a second-class citizen given that you cannot go into the first-class restroom.

By the way, it was a first-class facility because it was always clean. I know. I worked in a restaurant where my job was to clean facilities. It was always clean. It always had the fine fixtures. It always had the most room for persons to negotiate their way through the facility.

The other restroom for the coloreds was usually one that might have a broken fixture that wouldn't be repaired. It had floors that were not always the same in terms of how they were structured and how they were covered with various types of flooring. They were just different.

That was intentional. There was no desire to improve and have both of them the same. It was separate but equal then, but separate but equal simply meant there is a place for you and there was a place for Whites.

I mention this, Madam Speaker, because of this circumstance and the way I had been treated in life. Having celebrated my 25th birthday for the third time and now 2 years into my fourth 25th, I cannot in good conscience support the segregation of people based upon gender. I cannot support it because I believe that people who are transgender have a right to go to the facility that they have now transformed themselves into by virtue of the transformation process that assigns them their gender. I just believe that I cannot in good conscience decide that I am going to force them to go to now a facility that does not align with the transformed gender that they now have.

I believe that the science is correct. I believe that persons who have this transformation have every right to go into a facility that now aligns with their transformed gender.

This is something that I absolutely believe. Because I believe it, it is going to be very difficult for me--in fact, it would be impossible, in my opinion--for me to support a rule or a mandate that would require persons who are of the trans community to go into a facility simply because it is the gender at birth that determines the place that you would now use as your necessary facility.

Your gender at birth is a wonderful thing. I accept my gender at birth. I am heterosexual. I live that life. However, there are some people who are born with a physicality that does not match their mentality, and science has demonstrated that they can be transformed such that their mental belief and definition of themselves can conform to their physical by virtue of having a transformation operation.

I am all for having people have necessary facilities. I support it. However, I support the notion that we would treat the trans community with the dignity and respect that they deserve simply because they are human beings just like the rest of us. We should not make them second- class citizens. We ought not decide that they can't go into certain facilities that are aligned with the gender that they now have simply because of their birth gender. The birth gender is not necessarily controlling if you within are of a different gender. It just cannot control, and I cannot impose this upon people.

Having gone now to segregated facilities myself, I see this as a step backward. I see this as taking us back to a time when we could segregate people. I don't support any form of segregation.

I understand that there are efforts afoot to resegregate society. Vouchers are a step in that direction. Vouchers can lead to the resegregation of society. It was Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate, who proposed keeping segregation, maintaining segregation after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Proposed vouchers for the school systems to privatize the school systems, to make sure that people attended the school that they chose to based upon race, based upon color. This was proposed by Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate.

From the moment he proposed it to this moment, there have been efforts to voucherize and privatize the public school system. We see it happening in Louisiana. It is happening in Texas. Our Governor went out of his way to defeat persons at the polls who would not support vouchers. Now, he is prepared to pass a bill in the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate, that he will sign, that will allow schools to have private dollars, personal dollars, to go to private schools--personal dollars going to private schools is fine--but to take public funds from public schools and take these public dollars and put them into private schools.

If you want to pay for a private school, I support that. However, if you want your child to go to public schools, I also support having a public school available. If we privatize the school systems and if we find ourselves with Blacks going to certain schools, Whites going to other schools, Latinos perhaps in other schools, Asians in other schools, we will find ourselves revisiting a time that I lived through in the segregated South, a time when I was relegated to certain schools because of my color.

It won't be said to be because of color, but it can take place because of color and because of finance. Black people, generally speaking, are not as well financed as White people and as a result will not be able to afford to send their children to the same schools that Whites can send theirs. Some will say that is just going to be class. It is class that ends up being race-oriented because if you can't go in because of your money and you happen to be of a certain color, that is going to lead to the resegregation of society.

I refuse to stand by and allow this resegregation to take place without voicing my concerns. I want people to understand that I see these vouchers and I see these bathroom movements as nothing more than steps toward the resegregation of society.

I contend this: There are very few laws that prevent us from having a segregated society. There are many that we can name but very few. At the very heart of these few would be Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown v. Board of Education outlawed discrimination in public schools. It was a form of racism that we lived through that was called segregation, but it was racism. That racism caused segregation, forced me to go to one school where there were only people of my color and forced Whites to go to schools where there were only people who were of the White complexion. I don't like the term. I am using the term to communicate. They were forced to use these public schools, and I was forced to public schools where they were segregated.

If we allow Brown to be eroded by virtue of using vouchers, we are taking a step back to a time prior to 1954 when the Brown decision was rendered. If we go back beyond 1954, we will find ourselves slowly chipping away at other aspects of society such that I may again find myself having to go to a back door or I may find myself having to go to a colored-only restroom or I may find myself having to go to the balcony of the movie or the back of the bus. These are the things that I lived through, and I never believed--now that I have seen the change that has taken place in our country, I do not believe that we can conclude that we can't go back.

If you believe that we can't go back, ask women who believe that they should have the right to have choice in their lives as it relates to abortion. Ask them about what happened to the law that was but 50 years of age. Fifty years had passed, and we find ourselves with the Supreme Court overturning the law that gave women the constitutional right to have an abortion. Now this law has been challenged at the Supreme Court level, passed back down to the States to do with as they choose, and many States choose to literally do all they can to ban abortion in the United States of America.

Don't assume that what you have today you will have tomorrow. If you don't fight for it today, you can lose it tomorrow. If you don't fight for the rights of others, you could lose your rights. The rights of others are the rights that protect us. All of us are protected because we protect the rights of others and others protect our rights. If we don't protect each other, we can lose precious rights that we have.

This is a society that desires to have people sometimes subservient, as has been indicated by virtue of the fact that many people were enslaved. This subserviency is something that still exists in the hearts of many in this society, this desire to have people succumb. The need for some to have supremacy is something that we have to be alert for, and we have got to fight against.

I am going to stand up against it, which means I have to stand against any mandate that would require a trans person to go to a facility that is aligned with their birth gender as opposed to the gender that they currently have by virtue of having gone through the transformation.

I stand with them. I stand for the rights of all people to not suffer invidious discrimination. If you are going to stand for all people, you have got to stand with the trans community. This is my opinion.

Let others do what they may. I have taken my position. I don't know when there will be a vote on it or if ever there will be a vote. The judicious thing, they tell me, is if there is something that you may never have to vote on, never comment on it. However, there are some things that are so precious, some things that are so near and dear to the heart that you have to comment on them when you see a mistake about to be made.

I believe it would be a mistake for this House to conclude that trans people cannot go to the necessary facility that aligns with their current sex, their current transformed sex. I believe it would be a mistake for the House to do this. I trust that it will be reconsidered and that it won't happen. The Senate has not done it. I pray that they will not, and I pray that the House will not.

Again, I stand for the rights of others. People not born into their lives--in the sense that I am not an Asian, I am not Latino, I am not Muslim, I am not Jewish, but I stand for the rights of all of these people. I also stand for the rights of Palestinians. I never want to leave them out, because Palestinian rights are being trampled upon every day now.

For me, standing up for the rights of others is a way of protecting my very own rights. I am here to do that. I am here to let the world know that trans people have the same rights to a facility as anybody else when it aligns with the gender that they currently have.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source