Today I wrote a post to one of my best friends growing up. As a minority woman, she was questioning what the difference was between Rachel Dolezal, the caucasion woman who has pretended to be and lived as an African American woman in her adult life versus someone like Caitlyn Jenner, who is transgendered. This is a discussion that we must all have. This summer when gay people were granted the right to wed one another across all 50 of the United States, I said that the battle has just begun.
This is only the beginning of our conversation about sex, gender, gender identity, and people. We need to talk about gender roles, sex, and identity more. The sooner we come to accept everyone the sooner we can truly advance as a species. Here is the post I wrote to her. Again, some of this is fact, and other personal situations are my opinion. But the fact is there are millions of trans people all over the world. The sooner we extend a hand of acceptance, the better.
This is only the beginning of our conversation about sex, gender, gender identity, and people. We need to talk about gender roles, sex, and identity more. The sooner we come to accept everyone the sooner we can truly advance as a species. Here is the post I wrote to her. Again, some of this is fact, and other personal situations are my opinion. But the fact is there are millions of trans people all over the world. The sooner we extend a hand of acceptance, the better.
"Thank you for posting today about Caitlyn Jenner versus Rachel Dolezal. I think you took the post down, but i did want to post this to your wall for you, myself, and anyone else who commented or viewed your post today. I also preface this with a love for you and a hope that I am trying not to sound argumentative or demeaning. but here goes:
As someone who is gay and realized my first "feelings" around age 4, I know that sexual identity is something you are born with, not something you choose. (How could I have chosen? I was four!!! But that didn't stop my mother from realizing that alongside two heterosexual kids, she was raising one homosexual.)
Why would anyone in their right mind knowingly choose to be gay? To be different? Especially in today's and previous societies? Choose to be harassed and bullied? Choose to be picked on and looked down upon our entire lives? If this is a "choice", then you could just "choose" to be gay for a day? No. You are attracted to what you are attracted to and it is in your genetic makeup.
Caitlyn isn't choosing to be a female, she just is. Inside. Her soul is female. This woman who pretended to be black and used her "minority" status to advance her life is nothing more than someone with an identity crisis. She wasn't born black. I doubt very much she even knows what it really means to be an African American woman any more than I do considering she wasn't raised that way nor spent a large portion of her life as a double oppressed minority.
I do not care for Caitlyn Jenner. I think she is a media whore like the rest of that horrible family we so often trumpet. But to say she has an identity crisis is a huge disservice to the trans movement and tragically incorrect.
Science has proven time and time again that brain patterns and overall chemistry are different in trans and gay people. As recent as this year the "gay gene" was discovered and mapped again in German laboratories: proving yet again people are born homosexual for probably the tenth time since the 1970s. Same with Trans people. Trans people cannot wake up one day and decide: "I'm going to be female." And why would you? Why would anyone who is only "doing it for a whim" mutilate their bodies? Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on surgery? You wouldn't. Unless you knew that you were born into the wrong body and had never connected with the sex that you were labeled as when born.
Or what if your new son comes to you as soon as he can speak and says: "I dont know why you think I am a boy, mommy. I am a girl." And then wont stop saying that. EVER. "I am a girl, mommy. I am a girl. " And keeps it up into his/her teenage years until she/he is suicidal because no one else gets it? Do you ignore the pain and suffering your child is going through? Do you admit "him" into a psychiatric ward knowing that there really isnt anything mentally wrong with them?
Just watch the countless amount of videos pouring in from the parents of trans children whose 3 year old tells them: "I was born in the wrong body." And then tell me that they have an identity crisis. The joy in their eyes and soul when finally allowed to live as their internal sex is palpable.
Or say to the hundreds of kids identifying as trans or lesbian or gay before the age of 5 that they are going through an identity crisis. They aren't. They just know. Just like you knew you had a weird feeling in your stomach when you saw someone of the opposite sex that you were interested in for the first time. Or maybe even knew that you were a female.
There is nothing going on in that woman's head who pretends to be black other than a deep desire to belong.
Meanwhile, 18 trans women of color have been murdered this year alone and 85% of trans people have attempted suicide. I'm sure naysayers will argue that they are just fucked up in the head. But I can tell you it is from a society that doesn't understand them, nor condone them. Kind of like how white society didn't understand gay people for 2000 years or Africans for 500 years or indigenous people for a thousand years or interracial marriage for 250 years...
If I can be born gay or with one brown eye or autistic or smart or Asian or without compassion, or grow to be 6 foot 7, then surely some people are born trans too. And that, my friend is the huge difference.
Hope this clears this up and doesn't sound condescending. Heart you and thank you for initiating this conversation that obviously needs to take place.
At the end of the day, we are all people. Vastly different. And one in the same."
(click the link below to watch a heartfelt video about a five year old transgender boy named Jacob)
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/transgender-kids/jacobs-journey-life-transgender-5-year-old-n345131
