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What is it to be Transgender? We believe we are all made up of three basic parts that make up our self image. Anatomical Sex: Our sex is made up of anatomical properties of our bodies. It includes male, female and intersexed. It is simply the plumbing our bodies were born with or surgically changed to after birth. Orientation: Orientation describes which sex we are attracted to sexually. That would be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Gender Identity: Gender is how we view ourselves as either masculine or feminine based on cultural and social norms for each gender. This can be feminine as in womanly, masculine as manly or androgynous. Everyone has both masculine and feminine traits. Some people have more masculine some more feminine but all are somewhere between masculine and feminine.
These three parts are independent of each other. You could be a heterosexual masculine male, a homosexual masculine male, heterosexual feminine male, homosexual feminine male etc. Gender takes on a new meaning when you realize that we are all feel somewhat masculine and somewhat feminine. Our interests, actions, clothing and thought patterns are all influenced by your gender identity. Clothing is used as a form of communication. If you are a police officer you dress in that uniform as a form of communication to let people know that you have authority. If you are a business person you dress in clothing that is appropriate for the business world. We also use clothing to communicate gender identity. Feminine people will feel most comfortable in clothing deemed by the prevailing culture to be feminine. Masculine people will feel most comfortable wearing clothing deemed by the prevailing culture to be masculine. Modern American culture has a binary view of gender. It says that males should be masculine and wear masculine clothes and females should be feminine and wear feminine clothes. In the case of a masculine female or a feminine male, social pressure is applied to enforce the cultural norm of binary gender. This social pressure to conform to a binary gender view opposed to the persons true gender-sex-orientaion reality, creates difficult choices to be made by the transgender person. One of the choices that can be made is to become secretive about his or her gender identity. The hiding and secrets can cause mental distress that can become depression. For this reason this choice can become a deadly one. Another choice is to become an outed transgender person. This can cause problems with family friends and careers. Quite often the reality of the damage from actually being outed is less than imagined it would be. Another choice is to have surgical reassignment surgery (SRS) to try to make you gender identity match your anatomical sex in the binary gender role maintained by culture. This also makes blending in to society a possibility by maintaining the binary gender role maintained by culture.
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