Transgender Awareness Week

We are entering Transgender Awareness Week which will be followed by Transgender Day of Remembrance on the 20th.

This week is a time to help bring awareness of what it means to be transgender and to try and address some of the misconceptions, half-truths and lies that have been used to discriminate and attack transgender people. It is also a time to celebrate progress and show where real support and kindness exists. This is why I want to share this video with you and the details below on what Transgender is. The video was a talk I made at this year's launch of the Pride Professionals program where I told my story and the difference it made in my life when I finally built the courage to bring the two parts of myself together.

The first and most important thing is to understand what Transgender is. As a transgender woman I have been told that God created me as male, I can never have a baby, I don’t have a womb (or other less polite versions), You can’t change how you are born, you can’t change biology, and so on. This is all true and Transgender people do not dispute any of this. But what is also true is that inside myself, in my mind, heart and soul, I am a woman. I feel like a woman, I think like a woman, I care like a woman, I love like a woman. These are also things that are true and cannot be changed. This is where we come to the fundamental difference between Sex and Gender.

Sex is how you were born. It is something that happened and is there for good or bad. Sex is also not binary and there is a wide range with the most common being male or female, but there is also intersex which is the full spectrum in-between. But it is physical, and it was laid down at birth. We can’t change how we were born or what our sex was at birth. We can however change the outward characteristics of how our sex appears. Cisgender people have been doing this for centuries through things like breast augmentation, plastic surgery, labia reconstructions, face lifts and more. Intersex people have also had this type of surgery done to them for hundreds of years to “correct” their gender differences. However in most cases this has been involuntary done which is another story of sadness and discrimination that I won’t go into now.

Gender is how we perceive ourselves. It is a function of the brain and soul. It develops in the very early years of our lives, usually in the first 18-24 months or even earlier. Our gender identity is affected by a lot of things such as biology, environment, trauma, genetics, culture. In most cases our gender is governed by our biology and matches our sex at birth but not all. During the early months of our lives our neural pathways form and are locked in, this is when and how our gender is built and once laid in it is extremely hard or impossible to change, and attempting to do so causes significant trauma, distress, and mental damage. This is why conversion therapy does not work and most medical professionals consider gender to be unchangeable once it is established. Like sex however gender isn’t a strict binary, and most people are spread amongst the spectrum between female and male. You can see this even in people who are cisgender with some women being ultra-feminine, some more masculine or “tomboys”, very masculine men and very feminine men. You also have those who are in the middle of the spectrum and identify as neither male or female, or both. Gender has also been linked very closely with the brains development which can be seen by the fact that a much higher proportion of neurodiverse people are spread across the gender spectrum.

Being Transgender is where the above two don’t match. It is where our “biology” does not agree with how we see ourselves, or "gender". It is a physical difference where the body is one way, and the brain is another. For many of us this difference has a significant impact on our lives. Basically we feel wrong, we look in the mirror and what looks back isn’t who we are inside. This is called gender dysphoria. To most people this is a completely foreign concept and it is very hard to imagine what it is like, and that is a good thing, it means your mind and your body are in sync. But for transgender people it defines our lives. This is exasperated by the pressures of society, we are expected to act and feel the way we look on the outside. When we don’t we are pitied, ridiculed, discriminated against, told it’s all in our head, beaten, put through mental or physical torture, or even executed. Being transgender is recognised as a medical condition not a mental condition but because of the pressures placed upon us by society and family it can often result in one.

So now we have an issue, we have two things that are physical in our lives, our body or “sex” and our mind or “gender”. These two things are at constant war and slowly destroying our mental state and our soul. Some like myself fought this for many years but eventually it becomes too much which leave us with three options. To live in anguish and misery for the rest of our lives, to give up on life altogether, or to try and change things. Like all the other transgender people who have come out I made the decision that the first two options were unacceptable. There however have been many who chose the other options and they are some of the people we recognise during Transgender Day of Remembrance along with those who suffered the violence of society.

Because we can’t change the way our brains are wired, or the way we think without significant mental damage that leaves us with only one option, to change the way we look. No, it does not change the way we were born and never will. It also leaves many of us with the knowledge that we aren’t truly at one within ourselves, but it is a lot easier to live with when we look at ourselves and the way people react to us, and eventually we hope to forget that part of our lives. For most of us our dream is that we can reach the state where we look in the mirror and say that is really me. Where we can walk down the street and be treated like the person we feel. Where we are simply accepted the same way that everyone else is.

Unfortunately there are many in society who simply refuse to accept this, they say we are freaks, they say we are predators, they say we are rapists. Can you even imagine what that does to your mental health? To have someone walk up to you in the street and abuse you? To read high profile people saying that all transgender women are sexual predators? To be unable to do something as simple as go to the toilet because you will be abused if you go to the ladies, or risk far worse if you go to the mens? This results in more psychological pressure and has been responsible for the lives of so many. Many use the excuse of religion to justify this and what happens to us. They say that God created us as Male or Female and it is his will. But the reality is that God created both sides of us, she created our physical sex but also built our gender and soul. She gave us the courage to affirm the most important part of us, our soul, and to bring our two parts together as one.

This is why it is so important for those of us who have managed to survive to tell our stories and try to help people understand. It is why it is so important for people who care to become allies and stand beside us.

It is also why it is so important for people like me to show that I am more than just a transgender woman. I AM a woman and I respect all women. I have the same feelings, the same desires, the same ambitions. I support the same causes and I want to protect ALL women not harm them. Even more so, because I know what it is like to be discriminated against I am an advocate for equality and fairness for all people, even those who think I should not exist.