Indivisible Puyallup Hosts “Get To Know Your Transgender Neighbor”

Last night I attended a small gathering of people who wanted to find out more about transgenderism. The moderator was a cisgender conservative Christian woman who decided to befriend two gender queer individuals to find out more about their lives and concerns. What she learned opened her eyes in a lot of ways and elicited her compassion, so she is offering forums like this so other folks who have questions and concerns about things like bathroom bills and other political footballs can hear from the people most affected by them.

 

Last night was dedicated to defining transgender terms (always fraught with peril, because the vocabulary is still evolving within a hotbed of passionate discourse–please read the P.S. below!), showing how far-right conservative Christian  ideologies impact transgender Americans when it comes to employment, marriage, legal rights, and citizen blow back (23 transgender people have been brutally murdered so far this year and every year brings equal carnage; thousands of additional TG people have been attacked) despite the much-ballyhooed (and frequently ignored!) separation of church and state clause in the Constitution, and letting the audience get to meet and hear from the very real people who are in the cross-hairs of the maelstrom: transgender people.

 

I could tell that some of the audience members hadn’t been previously exposed to transgender culture. The term “cisgender” was defined as “people who feel completely at home in their gender” (with zero gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), defined, is “the distress that transgender individuals feel as a result of the sex and gender they were assigned at birth.”) When asked why such a weird word to define “the understood norm” was required, the answer was “Because saying that people who are comfortable with the genders assigned to them at birth are normal implies that those who don’t feel the same way are in some way abnormal. It is completely normal for non-binary people (including transgender folks) to feel the way they do. Transgenderism isn’t a malady; it’s merely an additional gender expression. The gender spectrum is wide: male is at one end of it, female at the other. There’s an array of gender expression in between. (Trans is a Latin term, as is cis, so keeping the terms Latin-based made sense.)

 

Let me now, once again, remind you that gender orientation is not the same thing as sexual orientation. Sexual orientation determines who you find sexually attractive (whom you’d love to go to bed with). Gender orientation determines who you want to go to bed as. Transgender folks can be straight, gay, bi, polyamorous or asexual.

 

Let me also remind cisgender folks that your vehicle (your body) is not who you are. Your brain and heart/soul are who you are. You might prefer a Lamborgini body and have only a serviceable run-of-the-mill puddle-jumper. But it gets you where you’re going, serves its purpose, and gets you who you want when it comes to connecting you with a spouse or lover.

 

An unaltered transgender body is a vehicle, too, but it’s a model you would not have chosen for yourself; it’s the one assigned to you at birth (sometimes medically/surgically, if the individual was born intersex and altered as an infant before the age of consent; and P.S., a great many intersex individuals of earlier vintage don’t even know they were born intersex. Not all parents were told they’d produced a child with ambiguous genitalia, back in the day; this particular “birth defect” was “fixable”–usually the girl parts spared because if they’d kept the boy parts, later surgeries would be required to remove breasts, ovaries, and wombs, thereby “outing” the child as an anomaly and causing distress at home and while raising the boy-girl). (This was during the times when the nature-versus-nurture battles were raging. The prevailing thought back then was that raising a child as a specific gender would create the inclination to continue along the same path. Big mistake in too many cases, because gender is brain-based, not body-based.)

 

I encourage all cisgender folks and the loved ones of non-binary and transgender folks to attend a gathering that helps familiarize you with your non-binary and transgender neighbors. I also encourage everyone to attend a local PRIDE Festival. They’re G-rated events for the whole family. They’re fun and fantastically friendly. If you do–if you attend with an open mind (or even a semi-closed one) you’ll discover that there is nothing to fear. LGBTQI individuals are just like you in more ways than you can count. You’ll find some amazing, amazing people among them: young kids,  teenagers, middle-aged, and ancient folks rocking their true identities in affirming, joyous surroundings. It isn’t scary. It’s exhilarating. 

 

Disclosure: if this is the only thing you’ve ever read by me, you might not know I’m transgender (possibly born intersex and altered as an infant to fit a binary gender norm: female. I am a male in female form.) My preferred pronouns are he, him and his–but no one in my family (my sisters, their kids and extended families) uses them, so I’m not married to them, and when you see me it will be hard to remember because I’m sporting a large bosom; not even binding can erase it entirely.

My intersex(?)/transgender story, Womb Man: How I Survived Growing Up in a Booby-Trapped World, is available in three different versions (Kindle, soft cover, and PDF). The PDF version is full color and only $3.95. The Kindle edition is full-color, too. I highly recommend the color versions over the black-and-white soft cover version because my webmaster, Lisa Twining Taylor (DancingGoatWebDesign) did an amazing job not only with the cover but also with the inner images of the boy coming out in me; they aren’t as discernible in black-and-white as they are in color.

Check out the BOOKS tab or use the link from the home page to read the Womb Man book description, an excerpt, reviews, and more…

P.S. I do want to quibble a little bit… respectfully! … about something I believe last night’s presentation got wrong. Both of the gender queer speakers said they didn’t realize they were transgender until they were almost twenty or a couple of years after twenty. For this reason, I cannot in good conscience consider them transgender. One doesn’t suddenly discover they’re transgender that late in life; a transgender person knows it very early on. They feel from the get-go (or as soon as the “binary gender”–male/female description impacts their minds) that they are literally in the wrong body. Although I didn’t know the term “transgender” (nor did anyone else) until it was coined a little more than a decade ago, I always felt/knew that I was in the wrong body. So personally, I simply don’t consider gender queer folks under the transgender umbrella. Most, if not all, of the transgender individuals I know felt/feel acute discomfort inhabiting their bodies because their minds cannot accept them as being truly “theirs”. They’re accepted as viable, serviceable (even crucial) “vehicles”, but not as a true part of who they believe themselves to be.

I hope this clears up any confusion that might be present… Gender queer folks certainly fall under the umbrella of “gender spectrum” but–transgender? As far as I know, being transgender always comes with early-onset gender dysphoria and is life-long, from toddler to adolescent to old age. (At least in it’s original meaning.)

Having said this, it appears that wikipedia and last night’s presenters disagree with me. The term apparently has been expanded to include gender queer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender. Live and learn!

See what I mean by these terms being a hotbed of passionate discourse? There’s an evolving lexicon now that it’s a public topic of discussion!