Transgender Day of Remembrance

Okay, I'm a few days late with this one. (I'm on vacation, okay?)

This past Tuesday was the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside to remember all of the transfolk that have been killed by acts of anti-trans violence.

I have a couple of dear online friends who are currently experiencing tremendous distress and hardship because of their desires to live an authentic life. Not physical violence, fortunately, but vicious emotional violence that threatens to tear apart their families and destroy their professional lives.

And why, exactly? Is it ignorance? Fear of the unknown? Is it an irrational hatred born of misunderstanding what "righteous indignation" is supposed to look like, and when it's appropriate? Maybe. But in both of my friends' cases, their avalanche of suffering has been triggered by the actions of a family member!

"Tough love" or not, that isn't how love is supposed to work!

But as bad as these situations may be, I can't help but think of those who have it so much worse. A recent report by Transgender Europe (TGEU), a non-profit organization that monitors these things, stated that by their count, at least 265 trans folk have been murdered in the past 12 months alone (and that count is likely low, due to unreported or under-reported cases)!

That breaks my heart.

There may come a day when transwomen and transmen alike can navigate the world with the confidence of relative safety afforded most cis folk. Where even if someone disagrees with your worldview, they respect you enough not to kill you over it. (honestly, that seems like a such a LOW bar to clear! Has humanity progressed so little since Cain and Abel?). I pray that day will come soon.

Thanks!

Image by See-Ming Lee

Just a quick note before the day is past. To everyone who has been there for me this year, as I've struggled to come to grips with who I am and what it means, a huge THANK YOU! Seriously, you all mean so much to me, individually and collectively, I would be a lesser person indeed without your friendships.

I Don't "Get" Guy Talk

So this morning I was part of a conversation at work with several of my co-workers (all men), and as is sometimes the case, there was a little mild teasing going on (I forget about who, exactly). Trying to get into the spirit of the thing, I made a joke that kind of ribbed one of the guys for not being as unrealistically awesome as his predecessor was. Then I almost immediately felt bad for doing so, because I was worried I'd hurt his feelings. Not that he'd ever admit to that, of course, and honestly, given the tone of the conversation, I doubt anyone gave it a second thought beyond the initial chuckle. But I so often read these things wrong!

I'm at a point in my career where it's becoming just as much about my people skills as it is my technical skills, and situations like this have a tendency to make me overthink everything. It's like I'm speaking a foreign language when I try to banter with guys, because I have no instinct for it. Maybe this is a learned trait that I just never learned, because I hung out with nerds and other social outcasts through most of my growing-up years. I don't know.

And you can just forget about "smack talk" before any kind of game or sporting event. My brain's just not wired that way.

Western Gender Roles and Christlike Attributes

Way back in the spring, I read a blog post by Christi Taylor about the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Developed in 1971 by Dr. Sandra Lipsitz Bem, it's a 60-item survey that asks you to rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 7 (never to always) on various personality traits like "sensitive to other's needs" and "willing to take risks." When you submit the survey, it take your input and uses it to give you kind of a "thumbprint" of your personality as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated, essentially based on cultural gender stereotypes.

Christi posted her score: 65 masculine / 76.667 feminine / 67.5 androgynous (all out of a hundred). At the time, I took the test to see where I fell on the spectrum, and got 55 masculine / 86 feminine / 70 androgynous.

Interesting.

Recently I was curious about whether my rating had changed at all in the past half-year, given the effort I've been making to be truer to my self and integrate the different sides of my personality. So, I went back tonight and took the test again. This time around I got 50.833 masculine / 82.5 feminine / 61.667 androgynous... so my rating was less than before, in all three categories! I can only guess that this is because I chose the more neutral options for a lot of the questions.

Obviously, this has very little to do with eternal gender identity, or even brain gender: it's solely based on how much we reflect the gender stereotypes of Western culture. So the fact that I don't strongly reflect the stereotype, male or female, doesn't surprise me all that much, nor does it upset me.

Actually, I think Christ set a good example here... He was kind, compassionate, always thinking of others, sympathetic, tender... a lot of the things on the Bem survey that feed into the "feminine" category. Likewise, He was always truthful, a strong leader, and was willing to take a stand: all masculine traits according to Bem. So, clearly, this is a cultural thing, and not an Eternal one. In fact, I'd go so far as to say if He were to take the Bem survey, I'm fairly confident His score wouldn't be 100 masculine / 0 feminine / 0 andro, but something closer to 60/70/80. So no matter what our feelings about our gender may be, patterning our lives after His, and not caring about how that may affect others' perception of our gender, is probably a good place to be.