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The Cisgender Fallacy

Hopefully you have read the 'primer' and 'what causes it' before this. 

It took me several years of questioning and reading and absorbing everything I could about transgender before I could begin to address my own problems.  The key here is that they were MY problems; problems I had created throughout my life so that I could adequately fall into the binary gender model of male and female.

Society sees gender and sex as one and the same thing.  The transgender community has a far more realistic view of it where gender is seen as a role and sex as something people do.  In that most simple of examples sits the truth that gender is between the ears and sex is between the legs.  For most transgendered people, the gender role is learned.  I was no different and I learned those lessons well.  I was a boy.  That was the outside, the gender role.  The truth being hidden was that I am a girl.  That gender role was suppressed and never allowed to mature.  She was a child for most of my life.

Society only recognizes male and female; boys and girls.  Anything outside of that strict definition is rejected.  It is rejected because it isn't understood and therefore it is something to fear.  The hell of it is that most transgendered people fear it as well, only theirs is from a different perspective.  That fear is integral to who we are and anyone in the trans community that doesn’t feel it is lying to themselves.

For most of us fear rules our lives.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of the known.  Fear of discovery.  Fear of discovering ourselves.  Fear of relationships.  Fear of losing relationships.  The list is endless and each one is a boundary we put up to protect ourselves from the world.  For those outside of us; those in the cisgender community, they fear what they don’t know and don’t understand.  How do you get two sides so filled with fear to come together?  You can't; one of them has to change.  That change is another log of fear on the fire for the cisgendered community but it is a life affirming change for the transsexual.

For me to come to this understanding took a suicide attempt, years of therapy and some very special people I have never met in person.  The irony to all of this is that to make this change will make me cisgendered.  Even at that, the transwoman is still feared just as the transman is.  Still there will be fear.

Accepting that the fear is ours to deal with since society wont makes it a long and painful journey.  Along the way the transsexual learns that they can't please everyone and they have to please themselves first.  To do this self definition has to take place and that child within has to grow up.  One cannot happen without the other.  As the child grows many previously obscure personality traits begin to emerge.  They aren’t new, they were simply suppressed.  The same person is still there, it is just that now they are freer to express themselves in their true gender role.  Even so, it is impossible to deconstruct a personality.  After a lifetime of lying and hiding once this process begins it cannot stop and must run its course.  The changes may be dramatic or as in my case less so.

Today, my understanding has allowed me to see the world not as male and female but also with the myriad of colours between them.  There is much exploring and celebrating to do in this.  As a transwoman I see people in a different light, not as male and female but as people.  I often feel sorry for them because of their fear.  They might fear me, or my gay neighbours, or the immigrants down the street, or the people on their doorstep pumping their religion.  Their lives are filled with fear.

I understand this and I also understand how their fears become prejudice and bigotry.  That is why when I see them I know they don’t understand themselves let alone me.  That is why they must band together and seek comfort in their need to have others like them.  It minimizes the fear they have of me.  It minimizes me.  It is the cisgender ideal because that is what they have learned.

I have learned differently.  It is too bad they wont open their hearts and minds to learn about others outside of their definitions of self and by extension; society.  I for one welcome them with open arms, honesty, love, and above all, acceptance of who they are.  I just have a difficult time understanding why they cannot find the same within themselves.  In my eyes, it minimalizes and marginalizes them.

Kimberley

November 2008