Excrement in North Carolina

      The news came in yesterday that North Carolina's state legislature voted not to repeal their law that requires transgendered individuals to use public bathrooms that correspond with their birth gender.  This, despite several long hours of deals between legislators.  Also after months of intense public protest, media scrutiny, and boycotting.
      I have to keep reminding myself that this senseless prejudice is born out of ignorance.  Gender is a critical part of personal identity.  For people who feel grounded in their gender, the idea of wanting to be otherwise can be really baffling, even terrifying.  And if they don't know anybody who is transgender their imaginations can take them to a lot of frightening places.  I understand this reaction, because I'm human: my instincts when faced with something totally outside my realm of experience is confusion and discomfort.  It has taken work to get to a place where I can catch myself*, and check and challenge my assumptions.

Humor is a great way to get people to stop and think, but sadly, there is very little that is funny about this issue.  Transgender women (women who were born as males) experience the highest rate of assault and murder.

      This piece in the news has me thinking a lot about Gender Privilege.  Of course there is the obvious discrepancy in how men and women are treated, but there's more to it than that.  When someone identifies as other than their birth gender - and that identity may not fit into a neat, binary model - sexism complicates matters even further.  Because gender is not just a biological phenomenon, it's also a social one.  A person who was born a male and transitions to female gives up a hell of a lot of privilege.  Honestly, they probably won't even receive the same privileges as a biologically-born female, unless they can pass really, really well.  It's not the physical, but the social aspects of gender that makes being a member of the trans community so dangerous.
       Recently at a training on working with transgendered youth, the presenter asked us all to imagine waking up tomorrow with our genders reversed.**  The trainer explained that those strong negative reactions are akin to what trans kids feel when they undergo puberty.  All of a sudden their body is becoming more sexualized, except that it's turning out to be something that feels foreign.  They live this feeling every day, and for many it only gets worse with time.
      The exercise was to help people understand and empathize.  In talking with my fellow trainees afterward, I was surprised by the spectrum of responses to imaging waking up with different genitals.  Some people felt shock.  Others felt curiosity.  Some said they felt revulsion, or panic.  A few people said they couldn't participate in the mental exercise, because the idea was literally inconceivable to them: they just couldn't force their imagination to go there.
      It reminded me of my college days, when I cut my hair very short (a "boy cut") and tended to wear baggy pants and flannels.  My reasons were simple: I wasn't vain, and this look was both comfortable and convenient.  But I was mistaken for a male from the back more than once.  On one memorable occasion, a well-meaning salesperson at a high-end retail establishment tried to remove me from the women's dressing room.  My reaction to this was anger.  I remember turning around in shock and gripping my chest to make a point.  She was completely mortified, apologized profusely.  Later, when I got over my anger, it made for a funny story.  But now I think back on that and wonder what precisely made me so mad.
      It's not like I didn't know that I wasn't presenting in stereotypical gender fashion.  Nor was that the first time someone had made that error when seeing me from behind.  I'd like to say that my feelings were born of a deep feminist belief that a woman isn't defined by her looks--especially not her clothing and hair.  But that's too cerebral; my reaction was reflexive.  In retrospect, I think it was because being faced with a limitation based on my perceived gender - even for a few seconds - was offensive to my feeling of identity.  And what's more, because it was someone trying to ban me from a space where  I felt instinctively that I belonged, I felt threatened.

      That was a small, small incident in my own life, but I am trying to use it to come to a better understanding of how I experience Gender Privilege.  For some people it is easier to be an ally to people with different skin, because of course we are born that way, it's nobody's choice, and therefore it's nobody's fault, so prejudice based on skin color is inherently unfair.  But being transgender seems to many to be a choice.  More than that, it seems an incomprehensible choice.  So they don't experience the same level of alliance.  We can all empathize with being treated unfairly for something that isn't our fault; it's harder to grasp making what seems to be such a radical - in some cases incomprehensible - choice.
      I think what these people are missing is understanding what kind of choice it is to become a transgendered person.  Most of us are not faced with a choice to be who we are, or not.  We were born with the privilege of having most of our life choices fall within a spectrum acceptable to our sense of self.  I am going to try harder to be aware of that privilege.  The truth is, I admire people who are true to themselves, no matter what.  I just want to develop a deeper understanding of what that means, for everyone.



*Most of the time, I'm not perfect.

**People are beginning to understand that gender is not binary, but for the purposes of this presentation it made the most sense to present the language in these terms.