Blessing or Curse
Is being transgender a blessing? A curse? Some combination of the two?
I think about that a lot these days as I read the headlines and watch my Facebook family of hundreds of transgender siblings negotiate the stormy seas of being transgender in 2019.
For transgender women of color, it is too often a literal matter of life and death. As I write this, media sources are reporting that Denali Berries Stuckey, as 29-year-old North Carolina resident, is the twelfth Trans woman of color to be murdered in the United States this year. Sadly, this is nothing new. In 2018, activists tracked the killings of twenty-six transgender people, most of them women of color.
Sometimes it’s their very status as transgender that puts them at risk. In other cases, it’s apparently related to the unemployment, poverty and homelessness that results from their transgender status. Sex work becomes a means of survival, but it is often a gateway to sexual violence and death.
The Executive Branch of the United States Government has banned transgender people from serving in the military and wants to allow them to be discriminated against in government funded homeless shelters and most alarmingly of all, in health care.
When I expressed dismay about this last move (which I doubt will stand up to a court challenge) to a friend he said he wouldn’t want to go to a provider who didn’t want to treat him. I agreed but pointed out that we’re not just talking about selecting someone for a routine checkup. Imagine some of the more sparsely settled places in this country where providers are few and far between. Imagine you’ve been critically injured in an auto accident and the air ambulance delivers you to an emergency room where the only provider refuses to treat transgender people or other sexual minorities.
Am I painting a grim picture here? I mean to be. I may have stepped down a rung on the privilege ladder in the eyes of the world by transitioning from male to female, but every day I am more aware of how lucky I am to be white, middle class in an accepting community, in a management position in my organization, the owner of my own home — in short, I’m not facing the obstacles that too many of our family have to battle every day of their lives.
I’ve seen many say they wish they hadn’t been born transgender; that the emotional and physical suffering isn’t worth it. I can’t imagine not being transgender. I would be a fundamentally different person. I think being trans has made me more open, accepting and empathetic of all kinds of people. I fear a cisgender version of me might have been a shallow guy, not too interested in people not like him. In short, a person I would not want to know and would certainly not want to be.
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Category: Transgender Body & Soul
About the Author (Author Profile)
Claire Hall was born and grew up in a large city on the left coast and has spent most of her adult years in a beautiful small coastal community where she's now an elected official in local government after spending many years as a newspaper and radio reporter. In her space time she loves reading, writing fiction (her first novel was published by a regional press a couple of years ago), watching classic Hollywood movies, and walking.Subscribe
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