TRANSGENDER

 

Transgender Individuals - Quiet & Brave

The other day, I was thinking of people who I admire and felt that they exhibited bravery in daily life and those individuals who are Transgender made my mental list. I originally was thinking in terms of the typical firefighters and EMTs (my daughter is both), law enforcement and such. But then I started thinking of others and Transgender made my list easily. Why?

Transgender basically means individuals who do not mentally identify with their birth body gender. I have worked with transgender individuals and thought what they have experienced and endured in their lives, in pursuit of personal happiness like every person, to be very heroic. Many people do not understand, do not want to understand or cannot put themselves in others 'shoes' of a transgender person. Here is a list of why I think those people who are transgender are quiet and brave.

1. Around age 2-4, awareness that something isn't 'right'. Puberty hits and the awareness really kicks in and trying to emotionally deal with this while dealing with typical puberty issues is not easy.

2. Coming to terms emotionally that who you are inside as a gender, is not what your body is. You've been raised and treated as your body's sexual gender but your heart and being is yearning for other things. We all find life difficult but add the journey of self-awareness and acceptance of your body and a mind that doesn't 'jive' with it is incredibly difficult.

3. Enduring unbelievable torments from others and from yourself.

4. Hurting others emotionally through no fault of your own. Friends and relatives having to accept the 'death' of one gender and then learn that the 'new' gender is really the same person. Some learn to accept and others do not. Many transgender individuals lose their loved ones, friends, jobs, spouses, children and so forth. Just by becoming what they are on the inside to show it on the outside too, it is a risk of such huge proportions and losses. It is a journey that must be made for personal happiness but I have never met a transgender who hadn't suffered greatly from the journey.

5. The discrimination and harassment experienced is MAJOR (both obvious and not), occurs in every aspect of your life and is a daily occurrence. You can't get hired for jobs that you are qualified for because you are 6 feet tall, have hands that can hold a basketball, wear heels and a dress. Trying to find a romantic partner who will accept you as you are in all ways is difficult enough as it is, let alone if you are transgender.

Can you imagine living with this, just because you appear a bit different? Are we so shallow that we cannot bother to take the time to 'see' the real person and not make judgments based on outside appearance? Handsome Ted Bundy had no problem getting victims because people were shallow enough to only look at the outward packaging and glibness. Be a better person yourself and take the time to make your judgments based on real facts and knowledge - go beyond exterior of every person you meet and see the real person.

6. For those who fully embrace their transgender and medically take actions such as taking hormones or having sexual reassignment surgery, it is filled with difficulties. Large financial costs, changing the chemical composition of your body and what the medications do positively and negatively to the body, actual surgery that is all too often having to be done in foreign countries due to cost and ease of process - yet without the safeguards for success and health that the United States (their own country and to which they pay taxes to) offers.

Life is difficult but what I've seen of the lives of those who are transgender, it is at least twice more as difficult. I honestly have never met a transgender person who wasn't a very caring and gentle person too. I think, transgender individuals have experienced so much pain in their own lives (their own personally and those of their loved ones), that they are more giving, sympathetic, understanding of differences and thus the least judgmental of the majority of people I've met.

As I am not transgender but have only worked with those who are, I can never fully understand the full scope of the difficulties that a transgender person faces. But I have easily seen and experienced enough to know that I truly feel those who are transgender are extremely brave in the many and large variety of challenges they so quietly face each and every day.