Is The World Against The Transgender Community?

Is The World Against The Transgender Community?

The trans community came together on March 31st for Transgender Day of Visibility, to show the world there is strength and support in numbers.

By Daniel Tirabassi

April is a month to focus on the environment, so I wanted to talk about the emotional environment that often surrounds the transgender community. There are some thoughts that, I feel, need expressed. These thoughts are not profound or even shocking, just observations I’ve made over the past few years that have been bugging me and many other transgender people.

First of all, the war on transgender people has taken a weird turn that I am just not understanding. The main argument for many people in the past has been religion. This makes a little bit of sense since the Old Testament says that your body is your temple, no man shall lie with another man, and the destruction of a city filled with people who disobeyed those rules.

However, Christians, in particular, have a very important teaching that comes in the New Testament. It’s kind of the Christian mantra: Love thy neighbor and do unto others as you would have done unto you. This literally means that you are to treat everyone — no matter their gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, creed, gender identity or anything else — in no way different than you would want them to treat you. Basically, don’t kill people like me if you don’t want to be killed. Don’t call me a freak if you don’t want to be called one. Don’t emasculate me if you don’t want to be emasculated. Don’t make me go into a restroom I’m not comfortable in if you don’t want to go into a restroom you’re not comfortable in. And, most importantly, don’t teach your children to hate, bully and tease people like me if you don’t want me teaching my kids to do the same to people like you.

Anti-trans thoughts have also shifted towards science. This is odd for many reasons. There are more findings of transgender identities in nature than there are stories about why transgender people are wrong in religious text. This includes many counts of various chromosome arrangements in humans, differences in human brain function when dealing with gender identity and numerous studies on psychological health of transgender people. All of these studies find that various gender identities are valid in the science community. Since science is based in logic, this means that any argument against these findings without adequate support is invalid. Science is much more cut and dry than religion.

This war on the trans community has also now travelled to literal war zones. With a judge recently declaring that Trump’s ban on transgender military personnel can move forward, transgender soldiers are at risk of not only losing their jobs, but large parts of their identities. This will put these people at risk for declining self-worth, depression and suicide, to name only a few consequences. It is hard to fathom that a country that preaches equality for all is still trying to segregate portions of its population from being in sight.

Second, many transgender people are trying to isolate cisgender allies. In my opinion, this action is not a good idea. As the transgender community watches their rights roll backwards, we are attacking people who are trying to give us the voice that we need. We tell them they will never understand our struggles and that they will never be able to help something they will never understand. Instead of isolating people trying to make things better, why not welcome them into your life and try to teach them what our lives are like? This would make our fight a little easier and increase the visibility of the community.

The next observation is about the bullying that is happening in the transgender community. For a community to turn on itself is unreal and massively unhelpful. I find it hard to believe that transgender people are actually questioning the validity of other transgender people. Just because someone’s journey or outcome doesn’t look the same as yours, it doesn’t make yours more valid than theirs or vice versa. We need to realize that transgender is a term that encompasses many different types of gender identities. Just because I am a masculine-leaning transsexual doesn’t make my transition any more important or less important than a gender nonconforming person’s journey. It just makes the journeys and outcomes different. We are both transgender and want the same rights and treatment as everyone else. The end goal of any transgender person is to be comfortable with who they are inside and out. It is not the job of others to judge the journey that gets us there.

March 31 was the Transgender Day of Visibility. This day is meant to show the world exactly how big the transgender community is and how we all come together. Sadly, there are a greater number of transgender people lost each year to suicide, sometimes because of bullying, feeling unwanted and lack of support from others. With a large number of people becoming more vocal about their dislike for transgender people, the community needs to come together, work out our differences and support each other through whatever journey we need to take. By doing this, the world could stop seeing us as people who just want attention and start seeing us as people who are traveling down a different road to happiness and health. Only by making this shift will the violence subside, the fight become meaningful and our various purposes in life may be fulfilled.

Daniel Tirabassi is a trans man whose goal in life is to make the process of transitioning easier for the next generation.