Columns, Opinion

REYNOLDS: Visibility or Protection?

March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility, a day for celebrating transgender people and being proud of who you are. It’s also about raising awareness about the discrimination faced by trans people on a daily basis. Many transgender people take to social media to post selfies in honor of this day.

Trans, like most things in the LGBT community, is a spectrum. It includes not only people who identify as male and female, but also people who identify as all the genders in between. For example, people who identify as gender queer, gender fluid, non-binary, agender, bigender, etc. all fall under the category of transgender.

Transgender people sometimes have surgery and sometimes don’t. Sometimes they use hormones, and sometimes they don’t. It’s a personal decision, and it’s none of your business. People think that just because a person is trans means they have the right to know about their genitals. It is never appropriate to ask someone that, and it doesn’t make them more or less of a man or woman either way.

Luckily, more and more people are realizing this, and as a result, many states in New England have been changing their laws to allow a gender change on state-issued IDs without proving you had surgery.

Sometimes, transgender people choose to use different pronouns. Singular “they/them” is a popular choice. Some others are Ze/Zir, Xe/Xyr, Ey/Eir, Ne/Nir. But ultimately, it’s really up to the person who’s using them, and they can get as creative as they want.

If someone tells you that they want you to use a different form of pronouns, it is incredibly important that you use them. Referring to someone by the wrong pronouns is an act of violence. It is harmful, mean and unacceptable.

You might not think it’s a big deal, but it can be very traumatizing to someone. Also, it’s plain disrespectful. When you misgender someone, you are saying that you don’t care about how they feel, what they want and you basically dehumanize them. You are deciding what they can or cannot call themselves, and that’s just not OK.

Instead, you should just respect a person’s request and refer to them as the pronouns they use. No ifs, ands or buts about it. I don’t care if you think it’s grammatically incorrect or not real. Language is fluid and changing all the time to adapt to new contexts. Also, you are essentially saying that grammar and language are of greater importance than someone’s mental health and emotions.

If you don’t know someone’s preferred gender pronouns, ask. If you can’t ask, the best thing to do is use gender-neutral pronouns (like singular they) until you know. If you mess someone’s pronouns up by accident, just politely apologize and correct yourself and make an effort to be more conscious about it.

If we made more of an effort to not assume gender or pronouns, it wouldn’t be so othering to identify as something different or use different pronouns. People who use other pronouns can feel burdensome and uncomfortable by asking people to use their preferred gender pronouns. That shouldn’t be the case. Something as simple as not assuming gender or pronouns will help make this world a better place.

International Transgender Visibility Day is good because representation and understanding of transgender people is so lacking. It unites a community that is too often marginalized and ignored.

It’s also important to remember that many transgender people all over the world can’t be visible. It’s not safe for them to be visible. It’s visibility and violence or invisibility and protection.

My phone background is a picture of Australian street artist Astrotwitch’s work from a segment called “Queer the Streets.” The street art is of a queer person accompanied by the quote “Sometimes being yourself is more important than the protection you get by fitting in.”

While sometimes that is true, others need that protection. However, the protection offered by fitting in comes with a lot of internal harm from not being able to be true to yourself. So how do you balance that? I’m not sure, but hopefully, we can achieve a world where it’s not necessary to balance that.

This world has shown us that they are not ready to appreciate and love our trans siblings. Too many trans people have been murdered. Too many trans lives have been lost to suicide. Too much violence has been acted upon the transgender community.

I hope that our generation can change that. Trans people are humans just like the rest of us and deserve to be treated with love and respect. Remember to value and support the transgender people in our communities. Raise them up and stand with them so that they can be true to themselves and not face the violence and discrimination that is so commonplace in our world today.

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One Comment

  1. This is middle-school level writing and entirely unconvincing. Happy to do you incalculable violence by making this comment.