trans identities there was an episode of degrassi on television tonight that featured an ftm transgendered boy. in the episode, the boy gets outed as trans and faces brutal abuse for it from fellow students and a serious lack of understanding from his mom. the boy goes back to trying to be a girl after he is outed, in an attempt to make everything easier for himself and the people around him, but it pushed him to self-injury because [i'm assuming] it made his dysphoria so unbearable. the episode made me cry harder than i have in quite a while and my girlfriend looked at me with concern in her eyes and asked if it made me that upset because i was transgender, to which i said no, because i've never felt as though i am, but i've been thinking about it since. i've never felt like a man in any way, but then there are a lot of days when i don't feel like a woman either. i wear dresses and feminine clothing but a lot of the time it feels like being in drag. i feel my most comfortable in relatively gender-neutral clothing, things that aren't easily identified as being suited to either man or woman. i think the reason i identify with trans people is partly because i know what it's like to have body dysphoria, to feel like you're in the entirely wrong body, because i have always felt uncomfortable and disconnected in this body. when i see myself in dreams i look like a completely different person. and partly it just disgusts me that we live in a world that treats transgendered people with so much disrespect. they not only get discriminated against in the heterosexual world, the queer world also has a habit of turning its back on trans people. i believe, really strongly, that gender exists as a spectrum, a broad variety of expressions. the idea that all these millions of different people must be divided into man and woman alone really baffles me. i know so many people who fit into such a broad range of gender expression that it is impossible to divide them into just two categories. it disgusts me the way men and women have such ridiculous stereotypes and social roles attached to them, as if we're supposed to act a certain way just because we were born with certain genitalia, and we live in a society that punishes anyone who doesn't act within those expectations. it is unproductive, it discourages variation in a world that so desperately needs it. i have so much hope for a society where we accept people as they are, whatever gender expression they choose to present, whatever life choices they make, whatever roles they take on, but the likelihood of seeing it in my lifetime is so discouragingly small. |