The Missing Link
I have lived the majority of my life in a strictly binary world of male and female. I was taught at an early age that that was all there was, there were no other genders. As my life progressed, I became aware of gay and lesbian people. They were binary too but their big difference was that they only liked the members of their same gender. Somewhere along the line, I became aware of another group, they weren’t clearly defined as binary. Society didn’t even have a name for them. I even heard them referred to as “It”.
Fast forward to 2015, Bruce Jenner comes out as Caitlyn and I begin to internalize the name “transgender”. It confused me. I agreed with others that surgeries, dresses and hormones don’t make you a woman so how could Bruce make that claim… but I wasn’t really sure what it made you.
I didn’t understand what transgender really was but it was the beginning of my internal awareness. There was something different about me, but what?
Over the next two years, my confusion grew. My confusion became turmoil. Suddenly it became very personal and I couldn’t understand why. I have been accused of over-thinking everything; well my over-thinking went into overdrive.
What was wrong with me?
In 2018, after having suicidal thoughts, I sought professional counseling and read everything I could only to discover a simple fact, I was transgender. I also began to understand the incredible power of my lifelong denial and suppression of that fact. I learned that gender is more than surgeries, dresses and hormones. They don’t make you a woman. Those are just external validations of who you are, that gender that was wired before I were born. Nature just randomly decided to put my female-wired brain inside a male body.
In 2019, I realized that I was transgender.
After 4 years of painful self-analysis I realized that being transgender made you the missing link between male and female. You are essentially a mix of both. I have had a lifetime of getting “guy” right but, although I feel strongly female, I feel extremely awkward and perplexed as to how to be a woman, albeit a transwoman. No, I won’t get into the reproductive organs or YY/XY debate of gender and sex. That is as endless as “What is a Woman?”.
Maybe that is why so many cisgender individuals, male, female, gay and lesbian, attack the transgender community. We just don’t fit in their camp nor their simple gender categories. To many we shouldn’t exist or just don’t exist at all.
I would love to see the day that this transgender linkage between the binary genders is finally understood, accepted and even praised for the special value we bring to the human community. My firsthand experience has been that the members of the transgender community don’t want anything more from the world than to be treated as an equal member of the world.
That is not a lot to ask.
Emma Holiday
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