Written by Maggie Bass, contributor
With the president’s recent public call for transgender rights as well as the death of Leelah Alcorn and rise of pop culture icons such as Laverne Cox, the media eye of America is finally beginning to see the gross injustices that transgender people face every day. I am genuinely excited about the outcry for basic rights for these people, especially since I have been a lot more active in the LGBT community since I came out as gender fluid last year. I have learned that the LGBT “community” really only accepts you if you fall into one of those four letters. Also, people who say they are “allies” mean they are your ally if your gender identity falls into the binary of men and women that we are told from birth we have to associate with. While I am beyond elated every time there is a small victory for the LGBT community in receiving the basic human rights we should all have, I have to remind myself that it doesn’t really apply to me.
If you’re not aware, there are more gender identities than just cisgender, identifying with the gender assigned to you at birth, or transgender, not identifying with the gender assigned to you at birth. If you’re gender fluid, like me, it simply means that the gender you identify with changes, sometimes often, between man and woman, neither or somewhere in-between. There’s also agender, which is not identifying with a gender at all. There are of course other genders as well, such as pangender, which is identifying with all genders, sometimes at different times and sometimes all at once.
The problem is that most people only see men and women. I worry about using public restrooms, especially on campus, because there are no neutral restrooms and I don’t want to cause a problem if I use the men’s restroom one day and the women’s restroom the next. While I’m glad that a lot of activists for transgender rights have been advocating for people who are transgender to be able to use the restroom of their choice, I wonder why there aren’t more advocates for neutral restrooms so that people who don’t fall into that male or female binary can feel comfortable urinating while away from home.
Another thing that I’ve noticed, is how quickly some people start using a person’s preferred pronouns — which is great — but only if they’re masculine or feminine pronouns. A friend of mine was quick to begin using the correct male pronouns for one of our transgender friends, but when I brought up that my preferred pronouns are “they” and “their,” I was told that it made them “uncomfortable” because they thought it was “dehumanizing” — even though their blatant disregard of what makes me comfortable was probably one of the most dehumanizing things I’ve ever experienced. These issues are just scratching the surface of all of the problems that occur when you erase a huge group of people from the community that you should be helping to protect.
When the only groups of people that most of the country associates with the LGBT community are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, that leaves out a lot of the rest of us who don’t identify with those. People like me have actually been told that our identity isn’t real, that we have to pick between one or the other, or even that we don’t deserve the fraction of representation we get in the media. I’m not trying to say that the problems of anyone else are more or less important, only that there are some problems that have yet to receive significant attention. I don’t believe you should pick and choose whose rights you fight for within the community.
