Gender Idenity

 I have been thinking a lot about gender recently. Gender is an interesting thing, generally used to refer to one's sex in casual conversation. Before I go on, I want to clarify that I will be using sex to refer to people who are male and female and gender to refer to the socially constructed roles for those who are male and female. This is an important distinction for what I will be talking about. 

Growing up in Portland, Oregon, which has one of the largest numbers of transgender people in the metropolitan areas, I had the opportunity to talk to a number of people who identified as transgender. A number of them had transitioned with the aid of surgery and/or hormones. Talking with these people, I interestingly found a number of reasons why they identified as transgender, reasons I have categorized as because of their sex or because of their gender. A very small number of people who were transgender had a base reason for their sex. A friend of mine transitioned because he felt like a stranger in his body like it was not his, and described it as being his in body. Simply, simply wrong. This was a transition because of sex in my mind. More often I found peers who transitioned talked about how they liked things that were feminine if they were originally male or masculine if they were originally female. Some said they saw themselves as softer or less soft, some said they felt they were more or less outspoken than their gender allowed, and that their clothing choices didn't fit with their assigned sex. This is very interesting and kind of scary to me. 

It is interesting because this is almost a shift in society away from equalizing the genders. It almost feels like saying, well, things are not changing fast enough for either gender so rather than wait let us just switch sides! This is also intriguing as therapists in Oregon are also required to affirm being transgender when people are questioning (this is just what I understood from talking to some therapists), which often may confuse their concerns even more. People need to understand that it is okay to cry and wear a dress and play with dolls and wear makeup as a guy or do manual labor and be loud and like sports as a girl. There are people who truly feel like their sex is wrong but many times they simply feel like their gender is wrong and then try to surgically and/or hormonally transition which leaves permanent scars and effects on one's body! 

Another interesting thing about therapy is from talking to my friends and peers I have learned that in many cases (not all!) therapists treat your body as the problem rather than looking for more. This is scary as all my transgender friends have more! While I will not go so far as to say this is causation this is a correlation that should be addressed and helped, rather than simply working on the obvious trial of transitioning. This is something that needs better help and looking at. While living in one's body may be hard, help need to be there areas.l bases. 

The last point I want to make is that when discussing topics that are hard we need to come from a place of love to gain understanding. We need to show our love to the person and be okay with considering new ideas and new perspectives, as nothing meaningful can happen without that. We need to have a desire to understand them and go from there, listening and discussing not just speaking and wanting to be heard. Furthermore, we need to work together with those we are talking with to gain an understanding together, even if that understanding is just what the others are thinking. We do not need to know all or agree on all things, we just need to be willing to learn together!