Everlasting thank you for posting that story, sad and inspiring at the same time.
Over on the other thread, which I have vacated again, I was told it was not true that there was a time when trans people were not demanding rights and that we always have been.
Until PFC I had never heard of that. And I was amazed to find that anyone was trying. Randall had told me flat out it would never happened. I believed him but it did not matter. When you have to transition they could lock you up in solitary forever and you still would. It is a necessity not a lifestyle choice.
That video with the students walking out just leaves me totally bemused. I have no idea what they are objecting to. Stated facts about differences between men and women. How do you dispute reality?
Datun, the thing is that the more I see, hear and read the more I am certain that transsexual has to be reclaimed as a term because it is more true than I ever realised.
I had just gone along with convention, as I thought it was, and used transgender instead. But I have started differentiating again because I now do think we are all getting het up discussing two entirely different things.
I cannot equate to all this gender fluid boys like this, girls like that, I identify as this or that. It does not match my experience.
This is why when I have been asked to explain how I knew my 'gender identity' was 'female' and I couldn't it created problems.
I thought it must just be innate and you don't notice the mismatch unless it exists, which in 99.9% of cases it doesn't.
But I think now it is that these questions assume gender identity is the anomaly and someone with that problem who understands identifying could explain. I cannot because it wasn't about that.
My distress was based very much on sex and anatomy. I knew my body was male but felt desperately that it was not meant to be. As if somehow at birth my self was swapped with another body by accident. I don't actually think that happened, of course. But it is closer to what it was like.
You just know your body is wrong and you strive to put it right. Not at all because you want to play with dolls or like pink. I did lots of things in childhood and was never stopped by my parents (because they had been alerted early by my primary school teacher and they gave me scope to be me and go with the flow).
So I played with anything and anyone and some of it I liked and some I didn't. But it was never focused through the lens of boy or girl things.
The focus was to readjust the body pretty much from the off and at first you say you ARE a girl, because that belief is inside you, then by around 8 or 9 the reality sinks in and you know that your body isn't but you feel it should be, so you start saying you WANT to be. And the entire focus is that quest to correct body not to express in some way a gender identity through whatever body you have.
This is presumably why I am struggling as much as many of you to grasp gender fluid, identifying as something or all these multiple terms and names.
For me it has always been very simple. There are men and women. We are different. I know biologically what I was. But also knew somehow profoundly that this was a mistake. And correcting that mistake was the final destination. I knew this was never going to be actually possible - I understood the realities. But it was the absolute purpose to bridge that gap to the maximum degree possible.
So, transsexual is the right term for anyone like me. As it is about transiting from one sex to the other as far as science allows. It is never enough, as I recognise, but it is a very traditional journey that challenges in no way the concept of men or women or any third gender or flavour of gender.
I am baffled by those because to me they are just words and concepts and I am like everyone a man or a woman but simply think biologically the wrong one.
I had never really thought it through this clearly. Nor do I have the foggiest how or why it happens in a few cases. Just that it does and it is trans - sexual - not - trans - gender.
Transgender people obviously exist and are in some numbers and we have to find ways to deal with their needs. But that really seems to be a baffling other reality to me and the challenges and changes they wish to bring about to definitions and spaces goes over my head much like it does with you, because this is something unlike what I experience.
Does not solve anything but the clarity brought to me by reading around this site over the past week or two has been helpful in giving me this insight.