Don’t Fear Ignorant Hatred: Knowledge and Hope Are Stronger.
LGBTQ Hope and Joy Are Antidotes to Fear: A Prism & Pen prompt
The most destructive element of gender dysphoria is self-loathing.
The best definition I found for self-loathing is shame resulting from strong dislike of yourself or your actions. You fight a constant battle where you attack and defend yourself, usually in the same moment.
This is the pain of gender dysphoria and being transgender today.
Tragically, the world around you joins in that attack. Whatever strength or success you have in reconciling the realities of your gender dysphoria, it’s smashed by a general hatred for those who are battling to heal the pain and destruction that gender dysphoria brings.
Your internal turmoil is fed by the intolerances and ignorance of our family, friends, society, media, religion and political organizations. They all feed the fires of our self-loathing. It should be no surprise about the number of suicides and homicides that occur in the transgender community.
The world has made our community a leper’s colony.
Prior to the cure, that was discovered for leprosy in the 1940’s, lepers were killed outright, shunned or driven to distant colonies, usually on isolated islands to rot away their lives. In a similar way we are shunned, killed, driven to suicide and trapped in our own islands of internal loathing.
This has got to stop.
We were born this way and we are wonderful people. We have the opportunity to express the best, not the worst, of gender acceptance of others. Our uniqueness makes us special in the best ways and not social pariahs worthy only of hatred, shame and condemnation.
We have solutions for gender dysphoria but we may never eliminate the hard-core ignorant people that refuse to learn and grow. We can’t let those haters dictate the future.
Let us hope that outside hate shrivels and dies over time as the world learns understanding and acceptance. We stopped burning witches and stoning lepers.
People are capable of learning and we are not going away.
Believe in yourself, believe in others and hope for the future.
Emma Holiday
Please also read:
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.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, “LGBTQ Hope and Joy Are Antidotes to Fear”.
