Trans 101: Trans 101

Monday, August 1, 2011

Trans 101: Trans 101

You are human. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.

You’ve been brought up and live in a world that’s designed to erase and demonize your existence, you’ve probably internalized a lot of that, and that’s not your fault. It can be hard to deal with, but you aren’t alone in dealing with it. And sometimes you have to buy into it to be able to handle it. And that’s okay.

Your gender is no more or less than anyone else’s. Your history doesn’t make you ‘not really’ or ‘less’ your gender than someone with a cisgender history, it just makes you a person of your gender with a different history.

You do not deserve to be held to higher standards than cisgender people. You do not have to ‘prove’ your gender by forcing yourself into societal roles that may not fit. You are not ‘failing’ anyone by fitting into societal roles that are comfortable. It is not your job to break down the binary/patriarchy/or anything else. If you want to, go for it, but you have no obligation to do anything for cisgender people just because you are trans.

Being yourself does not hurt trans rights (so long as you aren’t trying to do so while stopping others from being who they are) and is not a reason why people don’t have to treat you with respect. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine man or masculine woman, or being a person who’s comfortable in their body, or being a person who doesn’t transition all the way, or being out about having a non-binary or genderqueer gender. You have not ‘failed’ anyone by doing this, you are not ‘less’ your gender than someone else. Being who you are is not a valid argument for why people can’t treat you as who you truly are.

No one else has the right to say your body needs to be changed. It only does if you need to change it. Or if you want to change it, that’s valid, too. Your body does not make you ‘less’ your gender. It doesn’t make you ‘not really’ your gender. It doesn’t mean you’re trapped in someone else’s body. You do not have to fix your body to ‘become’ your gender; you already are your gender. All you need to do is what you need to do to be comfortable in your body. And if that includes reclaiming your right to label your own body, you are allowed to do that.

You have just as much of a right to privacy as anyone else. You do not need to tell anyone about your body, your medical history, or anything else. Whether or not your body needs to be changed for you to be comfortable, you do not have to change it to deserve to be treated as who you are. You do not owe anyone intimate details about your personal life before you can be treated as who you are.

You have no obligation to educate anyone. This includes trans people, but is most important with cisgender people. You are not a walking encyclopedia of transgender and/or transsexual information, you are a person. You do not have to answer every question any cisgender person comes up with, you do not have to represent trans people as a whole, you do not have to bare the most personal and vulnerable parts of your soul to other people on demand.

Not educating people does not ‘hurt’ trans rights. Never let anyone try to guilt you into educating people or doing something you don’t want to do by insisting that doing otherwise will ‘destroy trans rights or acceptance’. Trying to force trans people to become walking information desks or to put themselves in dangerous situations regardless of whether or not you’re even up for dealing with this destroys trans rights and shows a great deal of intolerance.

If you do want to educate people, you are allowed to set limits and boundaries. You are allowed to say that you won’t talk about certain issues, or that you will only talk about them on your terms. You are allowed to decide which people you will talk to about which issues. You are allowed to change these boundaries if you become uncomfortable educating people you were previously willing to educate. You are not obligated to educate anyone just because you educated someone else.

You deserve to take care of yourself, whatever that means. You deserve to be comfortable and safe. You deserve not to be in dangerous situations. If you can’t handle something alone, you deserve to ask for and receive help or, if you can, take a break from it until you can handle it, or just stop doing it all together. Taking care of yourself does not make you weak, it does not make you an attention-grabber or over-dramatic, it does not make you ‘less’ your gender, it does not mean you betray other trans people by not being a full-time (or even part-time) activist. You’re human, you have limits, and that’s okay.

You deserve to have your boundaries respected. Boundaries about how and where people can touch you, what information you give to who and when, what places you feel comfortable going or who you feel comfortable going with, what people can tell others about you.

You deserve to have the words you are and aren’t comfortable being referred to respected. You deserve to have the proper pronouns used (and, if there are times when it’s unsafe for that to happen, you deserve to have your safety maintained by those around you), you deserve to be called the proper name, you deserve to have the words you want used to describe your body used, you deserve not to be called by any label, pronoun, word, or name that you don’t want to be called.

If you’re asking for something that you need to feel respected, comfortable, and safe, you are not asking for too much. Your identity is not ‘too complicated’. Your needs are not less important than anyone else’s.

You are human. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.