An Open Letter to People Who Hate Transgender People
I’m The Excluded LGBTQ Person
“Why do you have to tear us down? What are you so afraid of? What have you got lose? We’re not selling anything. We don’t want anything from you. Why are you tearing us down? So you can sleep better tonight? So you can prove the world is flat?
I paraphrased that quote from the movie PHENOMENOM when the locals were tearing down the main character because of their own ignorance.
I am transgender. I was born that way. I didn’t ask for it and it doesn’t make me less of a person, good or bad. It’s no different than being born left-handed or with red hair or very short or very tall. It is something that just happened to me by a random act of nature.
So, you can’t see my gender.
You can’t see my gender because I wasn’t as lucky as you. Your physical body matches your sense of gender. You feel male and you see male in the mirror and you feel female and you see female in your mirror. It all works for you so well that you don’t even think about it.
You don’t need to.
But what else in your life do you dwell on that others don’t see? Maybe you’re not smart enough, you hate being so tall or so short, you’re not as pretty as you want to be, you’re not strong enough, no one loves you, you had a miserable childhood, you were bullied, the list goes on and on. As a human we all deal with what we have to. We all have things that should have been better in our lives that aren’t but then we still have to live with what is.
So, I am transgender.
Why do you need to tear us down? I have yet to read any reputable report globally of multiple incidences of a transgender sexual predator, in a ladies toilet, ladies locker room or in any dark alley. The massive number of pedophiles worldwide that I have read about repeatedly are trusted priests, ministers, boy scout leaders, teachers and politicians, yet they are not told that, as a group, they can’t go to the bathroom.
Yes, we are different. We are working against a body that we were born with that is not the “us” that we see in the mirror. Being transgender is when your wired sense of gender is different from the physical genitalia that you were born with. We have a medical condition that has been proven by both science and medicine.
Why do we then have to prove it to you?
You are right, you can’t see gender, you just feel it. So, therefore it doesn’t exist for you, right?
Let me ask you a simple question: Have you ever felt love?
Prove it. Show it to me. Where is this “love” so I can see it and believe you?
I have the same problem proving my internal gender to you. It is not seen, it is felt. Just like you, I feel my gender but unlike you I was born with the wrong body parts and body parts are just things attached to the body.
A male soldier loses a leg or worse, his genitals, in battle. Is he any less a man? A woman loses her breasts through a mastectomy. Is she any less a woman?
Clearly no!
The same is true for me and other transgender people. We are who we are inside a body. The body is not who we are. Some of us try to make the body fit our gender. Medical science has finally advanced to the point that we have medical solutions to being transgender. Should we forego medical treatment to make you feel better?
At this point, all I can ask is that you try to understand and maybe, just maybe accept that we just people with a curable physical malady.
If nothing else, please just stop tearing us down.
Emma Holiday
Thank you for reading my work.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, I’m The Excluded LGBTQ Person, THIS is What I Want You to Know.
Other stories in the prompt so far →
Plus More of Emma’s stories →
Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.
My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.