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Why Do We Transition?
Why Do We Transition?
by Sierra Burke
Why
do we do this? There are people that say we do this because it is fun
or we like to play dress-up. I pooh-pooh their ignorance.
I know girls who are fighting to keep relationships
years in the making, debating whether to go back to a life sure to lead
to death simply to stay with their partners. I know of girls that have
given up everything they have to make their transition a success.
I know of girls that have said goodbye to
all they know, all friends and family, for a chance at freedom, safety,
life. I have heard of girls selling their very bodies because they have
nothing left to get by with. I know of many who cry themselves to sleep
every night because they struggle every day with the prejudice, injustice,
and cruelty that forces them to live two lives, one real, one false, to
live a craziness that wears at the soul, beating down the essence of life
that keeps them going each day.
So why do we do what we do? It is who we
are. We are simply living. It is not something we are doing; it is like
breathing. As much as breathing is something we do, so is transitioning
something a transsexual does. It is what must be done to live. For many
it is something that happens late in life, for the lucky, it happens earlier.
For all who survive, it is something that happens because they reach a
point in their life where they must change what they are doing or stop
being. This is about life, about being true to ourselves and embracing
the person in side of us that we have repressed for years.
So much of the world focuses on the physical
transition and the change that is monitored and dictated by the Harry
Benjamin Standards of Care. Perhaps less emphasis would be placed on all
of this if trassexuality were taken out of DSM-IV [manual of psychiatric
diagnoses] and treated as the medical condition that it is. Perhaps people
would recognize the men and women that are crying out to be seen; the
same men and women that are undertaking huge, life altering, medical procedures
to be recognized for the people that they already are.
That is the key that society is missing.
We are the men and women we acknowledge ourselves to be before Sexual
Reassignment Surgery, not after. This focus on conforming to a standard
that controls a set of physical changes removes the focus from living.
Transitioning is about living. It is a stage of life for a transsexual.
Unfortunately all of society, non-trans, heterosexual, homosexual, and
trans, have placed such stigma on the transsexual community, and gender
as a whole, that embracing the correct gender becomes a process as opposed
to a natural evolution.
Unlike boys and girls that have no gender
conflict, transsexuals are not allowed to grow up to embrace the gender
that is natural for them. Their life path is altered into a gender development
that society dictates to them. Only later does the transsexual get to
learn what it means to accept, embrace and become the gender that they
associate with. This process is not a constructed physical process. It
is also not a process that the Standards of Care addresses. This is a
life process that happens naturally inside of the TS person, often in
a very lonely space and time.
So if we are simply living and this is a
life process that has been altered by the constructs of society, why don't
we change the path? According to an article on www.gendertalk.com,
transgender people are more likely to be stabbed or beaten to death then
other murder victims. This indicates increased anger and violence in the
crime. In the years leading up to 2003 the murder rate for transgendered
people went from 19 in 2000 and 2001 to 30 in 2002 with a total of 294
deaths between 1970 and 2003. These numbers are coming from those names
collected by the Remember Our Dead web project as reported on www.gender.com
and are most likely not a complete count.
Very few states have gender identity listed
as a protected class under employment rights. Health benefits are at risk
for gender identity disclosures, along with educational benefits and other
rights most people take for granted. With all of this, these reasons are
only indicators of why we do not simply live but rather endure years of
a life that does not match who we really are. The answer to that question
is in a mirror. We love that person in the mirror, be it ourselves, our
mother, our father, sister, brother, or best friend. We love the people
we grow up with and are petrified that they will be the one that might
support the bill to withhold health benefits from the transgendered, or
that they might be the one to label us freaks and walk out of our lives.
For that reason, we conform until we can conform no longer.
It is with that same love that a TS person
moves forward into the next chapter in their life. So many of the difficult,
caring "coming-out" letters that I have read carry with them
words of love and kindness. They try so eloquently to express to the person
they are writing how much they love them. When we start to transition,
it is usually an internal acceptance that this is something that must
change. When we reach this acceptance we seek out ways to bring those
we love into the true side of our life that we have kept from them. This
is a process of trying to complete our lives, trying to start to finally
live. As we live, more fully, we are freer to express our love, more free
to contribute to the loving relationships to which we belong.
Why do we do what we do? Love and life.
Transition is a life process for the transsexual, not a choice. It is
filled with love, strife, and hope. We are living.
Sierra Burke lives and writes in Central Vermont.