My Journey Through Gender Issues

My Journey through Gender Issues

Growing up pretty much everyone is taught about difficult subjects such as racism; the things that affect our country nationally. However some things were left out that people never really talked about too much. Subjects like transgender and gender-variance. These topics just weren’t subjects people talked to young children about. Because of this lack of knowledge people grew up learning about these topics from biased sources that probably gave them the wrong impression. This happens with everyone, I know that before actually knowing a transgender I had my own thoughts about them learned from family and media, and I had never even heard about gender-variance before the articles I read about them. However, by being friends with a transgender and later reading about gender-variant children I have come to learn a lot about these different people, and in turn more accepting and understanding of them.

The summer before tenth grade I had a friend who decided to become a guy. It took some getting used to but everyone eventually accepted her as him. I didn’t know one transgender person before this. However being friends with one in high school was a huge learning experience for me. I learned about how difficult it really is for a transgender person to tell their family and community about the change. I also learned about how he lost friends because of his change, as well as harassment from peers and co-workers. I was shocked by some of the stories he would share and I eventually grew to admire the bravery it took to do what he did. Acceptance at my school was easy to attain, it was small and everyone knew each other personally. At larger high schools though, I can only imagine the increased amount of these students and the harassment some of them must go through. In “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” the author, Jan Hoffman claims that, “a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate – or confound – gender identity and sexual orientation” (1). Hoffman’s claim makes one think; with the increased amount of this behavior, why aren’t more people accepting of cross-dressing and transgender people. This is most likely because people are ignorant about them, so they treat them like outcasts. If more people learned about them then they would probably be more widely accepted. Melissa Bollow Temple, the author of “It’s OK to Be Different,” believes that “teaching about gender stereotypes is another social justice issue that needs to be addressed, like racism, immigrants’ rights, or protecting the environment” (4). I agree with Bollow. Before actually knowing someone who was different from everyone else, I would have thought they were strange and would have stayed away from them.

                Transgender was something I was a little more familiar with, gender-variance however, surprised me most. I never really knew anything about these kids. Sure there are little kids who act a little more feminine than masculine, but I’ve never met a young boy who likes to wear dresses. One father interviewed for the article “What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?” shares how his son was gender-variant when he was younger, and how his son taught him an important lesson about gender-variance: “My son showed me this is part of his core identity, it’s not something people just put on or take off” (qtd. in Padawer 10). I’ve never known a gender-variant child, but I get what this kid’s father means about them. We all have a part of ourselves that we can’t just change because we feel like it; something that’s a part of our identity. Your voice for example, someone can’t just change their voice, it’s a part of them. I think a quote that really effected my thinking the most was from a young gender-variant boy interviewed for the same article by Padawer. In the quote he is talking about a boy from his class, “He comes into school every day in a soccer jersey and sweatpants, but that doesn’t make him a professional soccer player” (qtd. in Padawer 11). This kid makes a great point. He dresses in girl clothes, but that doesn’t mean he wants to be a girl, he’s just being himself, and the way he dresses shouldn’t determine what he wants to be.

The way some people react to gender-variant children really surprised me. I don’t completely understand why some people have such a problem with it. In “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story” the parents of a child, X, decide to keep the sex of their baby a secret from people. What follows is dramatized, but not entirely implausible. Parents don’t allow their children to play with X and eventually demand X’s school to find out its sex, and if X and its family don’t agree then it would be expelled. A psychologist comes in and evaluates X and determines that there is nothing wrong with X at all, and that he is perfectly normal, even though he doesn’t put himself into one of the two genders everyone else does. They then realize that “by the time X’s sex matters, it won’t be a secret anymore!” (Gould 6). This quote sums up the moral of the story, and I feel, a very important quote.  Why should we worry about a child who doesn’t associate with a certain gender? Young children are exploring the world; we shouldn’t rush them into certain roles they don’t entirely understand yet. Plus, sex doesn’t matter to kids, they aren’t interested in each other sexually yet, and once they are old enough their bodies are going to separate them anyways, and they will fall into place in society, whether that be as straight, gay, transgender, etc.

Subjects like transgender and gender-variance are not something a lot of people learn about growing up, and it’s this ignorance that make these subjects intolerable to people. I learned a lot from personal experience and from these articles. However, because you would need to go through these subjects yourself to fully understand them, a person who doesn’t may never really get why a person is transgender or gender-variant. However we can learn enough from them to be able to understand them to a degree and accept them for who they are.