Transgender for Dummies

I am going to break it down into ten basic elements

If you are a typical, cisgender person, one whose sense of gender matches your physical body, then you will have a problem understanding what it is like for those of us when our mental sense of gender and the physical sex organs we were born with don’t match.

We are transgender.

If you are honestly trying to understand this concept of gender, then this is the course for you:

I am going to break it down into ten basic elements. This course is entitled:

Transgender for Dummies.

1. Transgender people are those individuals that have the gender wired in their brain before birth not match the physical sex assigned to their body. Our gender is between our ears, not our legs.
2. We are born transgender. It is not a choice.
3. Being transgender has always been a natural part of the human experience from the beginning. It is as natural as being red-headed, left-handed or being very short or being very tall.
4. Gender dysphoria is the excruciating mental pain and anguish that increases over the lifetime of a transgender person who tries to ignore the need to realign their gender and sex. It is an increasing alarm bell that never goes away unless they fix the problem.
5. Transgender individuals have only two choices to fix the problem: try and ignore the pain of gender dysphoria or physically transition to the gender that was wired in our brain before birth. There is no third option. There is no brain surgery currently available that can realign the brain to the body.
6. If transgender people try to ignore their gender incongruence, there is a possibility that the pain of gender dysphoria could not only cause deep depression, but also lead to suicidal thoughts and actions.
7. Transitioning is a very painful process emotionally, socially and physically. We put everything in our lives at risk: our families, our jobs, and our acceptance in general society. We surgically change our bodies and relearn the basics of socializing in a new role. There is far too much pain in the process. For example, think about the pain of 200 hours of electrolysis to remove an unwanted male beard. That is when they insert a very sharp, tiny needle into each hair follicle and then run an electrical charge through the needle to kill the hair. Ouch! No one does that for fun or to be fashionable.
8. There are more transgender people in the United States than people who live in Boston. We are everywhere.
9. Society makes the rules, and we try to live within them peacefully. We attack no one, which includes children, women, butterflies, and little puppies, but we do have the right to defend ourselves when we are attacked: politically, emotionally and more specifically physically. That occurs every day in America.
10. Try to ignore the transgender haters. They probably don’t like you, either. Treat them as you would the parasites that inhabit the underside of a rock and leave them there. They are a waste of human flesh.

That concludes this very short course of Transgender for Dummies. I hope you found it useful. Please share it with all of your friends. The transgender community would really appreciate it…a lot!

Have a great day!

Emma Holiday

Thank you for reading my work.

Please also read:

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.