Just came across this article today - Telling Trans Stories Beyond 'Born in the Wrong Body' - from the excellent SSEX BBOX series and I wanted to share it with you, because it's something I believe in. Sharing trans stories is supposed to build awareness and create community, but we've constructed a stereotypical experience that ends up being limiting to all those out there that don't fit the mold of "being transgendered". We must be careful, when stepping outside of one box, not to simply create another around ourselves. People's genders and sexualities come in a rainbow of colors, and there are not just six (or even seven) colors in the rainbow. The rainbow is infinitely colorful!
"For the longest time, I didn’t think that I counted as trans because I thought you had to hate your body in order to be part of the trans community."
And what kind of a message is that? I support a new conception of "being transgendered" that doesn't rely on the gender binary, and celebrates the diversity of ways that a transgendered person can present themselves - their identity and their body - to the world. Whether that means adopting a male persona, a female persona, neither, both, something in between, or something else altogether.
"And with all this bathroom nonsense happening, I feel like the people who are going to be disproportionately affected are gender-nonconforming folks."
This, absolutely this. Still tied to the gender binary. A or B. Male or female. What if you don't even know what your gender is? It's easy to say "let your genitals lead the way", but that doesn't make using the restroom any more comfortable or safer for nonconforming individuals. All these bigots who insist that you're either male or female, and you have to use this or that bathroom, are not simply being principled, they're actively supporting hostile environments for nonconformists. They're prioritizing the principle of conformity to a certain, arbitrary standard, over the comfort and safety of human beings just because they look or act different. This attitude is "natural" in a sense, and it's been popular for most of human history, but from an enlightened, humanitarian perspective, it's wrong - pure and simple.
