Transgender Awareness Day
Today, March 31, in case you missed it, is Transgender Awareness Day. I’ll be honest, although I’ve known about this day for a few years, it started in 2009 in Michigan, and I’ve had some trouble with the idea. However, given the rise of anti-trans campaigns in recent years, I’m seeing more and more that this is really important and thought I’d post some of my thoughts on the subject today.
Most trans people want to be invisible.
This is my main concern about having a Transgender Awareness Day. I have been out and visible for almost 20 years, yet I spent over 40 years being as invisible as possible. Having worked as a trans educator for the better part of the last 15 years, I feel pretty confident in saying that today, most trans people still want their transsexuality to be invisible. They want to walk down the street and mingle as the man or woman they wish they were born with. And even though I’m very proud, I don’t want to walk down the street calling attention to myself because I look trans.
The reason for this is FEAR
Our greatest fear as human beings is the fear of embarrassment or humiliation. It is probably the main underlying reason for suicide attempts. As a society, we seem to despise difference, and often the reaction to difference is to humiliate or harass. Some go further and inflict physical violence on people they consider different. So there is a very real case for being invisible.
I first realized I was trans when I was around 7 or 8 years old. I was very uncomfortable with the fact that I wanted to wear girl’s clothes, and most boys know from a very young age that if they wear girl’s clothes or act feminine. way, they will laugh at them.
In the town where I grew up there was a family with about 11 children. They didn’t have much money, so the younger children wore clothes inherited from their older siblings. A boy my age came to school one day wearing a pair of his sister’s panties. Unfortunately, it was PE day and when he changed into his shorts, someone noticed his panties and started making fun of him.
The other boys quickly joined in like a pack of howling hyenas and I saw him standing there, terrified and humiliated. I didn’t dare jump to defend him or help him because I was afraid that they would bother me too. Instead, I stood and watched, feeling sick. From that day on I knew that my secret had to remain just that, a secret.
But things are changing in an unexpected way.
More and more trans people now identify, not as male and female, but as “neither male nor female.” They’re using labels like non-binary or androgynous, or gender queer, or any of 50+ different labels, with more being added daily – I know – really confusing – even for trans people
This is what is going to change things. It is very difficult to celebrate the day of transgender visibility when I want to be invisible or go unnoticed or just go unnoticed. But that’s only a problem when everyone else conforms to a gender stereotype of male or female. If a large proportion of people don’t conform to those stereotypes, it’s much easier and safer to be visible.
Are all people who do not conform to gender stereotypes transgender?
No problem. In fact, most people who don’t conform are probably not trans. They may be lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or simply gender non-conforming. The problem here is that people are often afraid of being visibly non-conforming because they fear being perceived as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans.
But this also highlights the big problem trans people have faced for years: death. This is a term that means to be invisible, to be seen and accepted by everyone as the other gender. And this is really hard to pull off for a 6 foot overweight bald man who dresses as a woman, or a petite woman with large breasts who dresses as a man. Passing means that everyone sees us as our preferred genre and achieving it is a great challenge.
Most of the time people see me as a woman, until I speak. I made the decision that I would not even try to create a female sounding voice, I am a speaker, but that means I have to be visible as a trans woman. It would actually make it much easier for me to identify as neither male nor female – to identify as non-binary and it looks like it’s likely to be a legal option in the not too distant future.
A Growing Trend Towards Non-Binaries
However, while the growth in the number of people who identify as non-binary is facilitating the idea of transgender visibility day, it is not without its problems. Most people assume that transgender people are people who want to undergo surgical and hormonal treatment to physically change their bodies. The reality is that most trans people do not get surgery. Most don’t even permanently change their gender because they are too afraid to come out and be visible.
Those trans people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are very happy with the gender binary. In fact, they often fit the extremes of gender stereotypes. When I was in college, the debate about offering people an alternative in the form of “Male or Female” raged over and over again, with no solution. There have been countless attempts to introduce third gender pronouns without success. Some countries have now introduced an X marker for passports; not everyone likes this and it is not clear what will happen in the UK and EU.
So for me, the importance of Transgender Awareness Day is not just that trans people are visible, but that as many people as possible challenge gender stereotypes. The more people there are who don’t conform to the gender binary of male or female, the easier it is for all LGBT+ people to blend in and become “visibly invisible.”