Isolation

How the Pandemic informs the transgender experience

You have experienced the isolation that a pandemic can create. It happened on a world-wide scale. Unless you are a hermit, once the uniqueness of the experience wore off, for most of us, it became grinding and lonely. It is amazing how much we took the company of strangers in our daily lives for granted.

We need social contact; we seek human contact and we sometimes even crave any human contact. It is part of social fabric of our humanity.

Isolation manifests in so many different ways. Many of us have felt it from time to time independent of the pandemic.

There are different kinds of isolation. Some include:

• Feeling alone when surrounded by friends and family
• Feeling unaccepted and misunderstood
• Fear of getting hurt and being rejected
• Not trusting others and pushing them away

To someone who is transgender in today’s world, isolation seems to have a particularly painful reality.

It incorporates all four of those senses of isolation into a toxic mixture that eats at your soul.

You feel alone when surrounded by friends and family because, if your gender dysphoria is difficult to explain, understand and accept in your own mind, it becomes almost impossible to do so with others. You live in fear of rejection and then you live in fear of discovery.

Beyond your family and friends, society has a whole, in many ways, even attacks you for what is simply, a medical condition and it makes you a social leper.

Fear of hurt and rejection engenders an instinctive reaction of survival and preservation. You trust no one and you, at least emotionally, push them away.

You are trapped in your own head and no one has a clue what you are going through.

It also turns out that isolation actually is used as a political weapon. “Divide and Conquer” was a strategy used effectively by Julius Caesar for achieving political or military control. Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political theorist, wrote in 1951 in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

In 2021, seventy years later, it feels like we are still fighting the same battle but with a new generation on so many different levels but, in particular, being transgender seems to have become one of the special “lightning rods” that have been chosen by certain political elements to drive a wedge between us and the general public.

This cannot be allowed to happen.

Public consciousness has come too far regarding the reality of being transgender to allow bigots of any kind drive that reality back to the dark ages, when electrotherapy and conversion therapy were considered “real” science. If you are transgender, you should find the confidence to be who you are and shed your isolating cocoon. You are a wonderful person worth knowing and you should connect with those who can accept you for who you are.

If you are cis gender, just simply be willing to hold hands with others without biased qualifications.

Do not allow yourself to be divided and you will not be conquered.

Emma Holiday

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.

Thank you for reading my work.

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