a person, whose blog i regularly read, posted a wing-dinger the other day. everything from political correctness to language policing and beyond made up part of the excellent read. as usual the blogger did a very good job slicing through the subtleties of how acceptance is doled out or withheld to those within their own sub-culture. but the first paragraph really got me going. because in it, this tidbit came to light: some transgender folk actually dare to wish they weren’t trans.
apparently, in today’s “oh so politically correct” world, not only is it frowned upon to make a difference between transgender or cis-gender, but if one is a member of the former it is abhorred to long to have been born into the latter!
my transgender daughter spends most of her days NOT thinking about being trans, (in fact she doesn’t much identify with the term) but wishing she had been born the girl she is. and it seems that is taboo by some within the T community. it is abhorrent and worthy of a severe reprimand from some.
but here’s the thing, i find it rather disingenuous to be up in arms, as it were, against those folk honest enough to to admit that they wish for an easier time of being who they are. don’t we all who struggle, for whatever it is that we want so badly and don’t have, wish for an easier way of getting it? people who are very poor might wish they’d been born into a family with wealth. is that loathsome too? is it wrong, when life seems to have wronged you, to wish it weren’t so?
my daughter wishes every single day that she’d been born in a girl’s body! is that really a reason to be hated? should she have to be ‘trans and proud’ in order to garner the respect and support of others? because she’s not proud of having the ‘wrong parts’…she’s horrified! she lives for the day that modern surgical techniques can make right the wrong done her by her very own body, its betrayal of who she really is!
if assimilation is wrong, why do so many transgender women and men do so much to ‘pass’ as the gender that is between their ears? must transgender folk all be card-carrying members for life, wearing the “T” on their sleeves in order NOT to be set upon by other transgender types? after all, in my daughter’s mind, being transgender is a temporary condition. one that will be a landscape in the rear-view mirror someday.
even after ‘the surgery’ i know that she will need cross-hormones for the rest of her life, and that no matter how much of a girl she looks, behaves or identifies that there will be those in the lgbt community and society at large who feel it their place to judge and criticise her. under these circumstances, who wouldn’t wish they’d simply been born ‘the right gender’ to begin with?
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