Celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

No matter how you feel about the Trans community, I hope you will pause for a moment to open your mind and read this moodling. 

As the mom of wonderful queer kids of whom I am very proud, one of whom is trans, I invite you to try to understand something that perhaps you've never encountered, or that you've already judged in your mind one way or the other. After all, we only learn through openness to one another. 

I don't often write about my kids because I want to protect them and myself from people who can't see that human beings are not static creatures. Why can't we evolve beyond the two check-boxes of male and female found in the book of Genesis? 

As a Catholic woman, I've had a long hard struggle to reconcile my faith with my kids' lived experience. But slowly, over the past ten years, I've come to understand that God thinks and moves and creates and loves outside the boxes that human beings have assigned to God's creativity through centuries of mistaken theological wrangling. 

I've realized that, basically, God doesn't judge us the way we (or our churches) judge each other! God creates and loves every last one of us, whether we fit into human-designed check-boxes or not.

The problem with boxes is that they have walls, and they are often given labels that, too often, divide us from each other. They allow us to pretend that people who are different from us are WRONG. And what has that given us over the millennia? If you really want to know, look up Persecution on Wikipedia and read the sidebar under Discrimination. The long list is enough to turn the stomach.

But the antidote to discrimination and persecution is education. My children have certainly educated me. My youngest child is my greatest teacher. As I watched them struggle with fitting into a gender that didn't feel right to them, my heart hurt. Many times I wished they could be so-called "ordinary" gender-wise, because being non-binary is not something most human cultures understand. (Some do.)

I'll admit that there are a lot of things I wish I had said and done differently when I learned that my child needed to take a different direction than my status quo expectations. It's taken a few years to forgive myself for my past inability to understand. I questioned my kid's sense of self, cast doubt on their decisions, and grieved the loss of the future I had envisioned for them in ways that weren't helpful. Definitely not my proudest moments -- it was more about me than about them. Damned ego.

But when I was able to talk to them, to really understand how they were feeling about themself, I came to see that they were doing what was necessary for them to thrive in this world, even if it meant leaving me behind for a time. It was a challenging road, but they have moved on to become who God made them to be. Which, of course, is as it should be. As I said earlier, I am proud of them.

Clearly, our world falls short when it comes to understanding and accepting those who are different. It expects everyone to live into the same so-called "norms" -- even if those norms aren't really "normal" and often arise out of the fear of difference that creates xenophobia, racism, sexism, misogyny, homo- and transphobia, and any other ism or -phobia that divides us. Fear (of those fears, mostly) sometimes keeps me up at night, when I worry about the safety of my kids at the hands of fearful people.

It all boils down to the fact that too many people forget how Jesus spent his time with the very people his community pushed to the margins. And too many people choose to ignore how a spiritual leader named Paul once laid it out for us: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ." (Galatians 3:28) For those who aren't Christian, there's an anti-discrimination rule that applies to pretty well every world faith, too: treat others as you want to be treated. 

It's all just basic respect.

We don't hear a lot about the International Transgender Day of Visibility here in Canada -- yet. In fact, I didn't even know the day existed until this morning. I do know about the Trans Day of Remembrance that falls on November 20th each year, a day generally spent naming trans people who have been murdered for refusing to identify themselves according to the sex they were assigned at birth. A very sad day.

But a Transgender Day of Visibility is an opportunity to celebrate! It's time to celebrate their ability to be visible in a world that denied or denigrated their existence for too long. We need to acknowledge that there are those among us who live their experience of gender differently than many of us do, who are less hung up on those M or F check-boxes, and who, because of that freedom, bridge the human-made boundaries between male and female in beautiful, gracious, and sometimes unusual ways. I know trans folks who are incredibly gifted and loving, and who deserve to be seen and celebrated in their own right on this day. They are some of my favourite people. Three cheers for them!

I've collected a couple of links to articles written by trans people speaking from their own experience. They deserve to be heard. The first is a parent who writes about their trans child way better than I do, the second is a two-spirit Metis elder who has come a long way to a self-acceptance that allows them to mentor others. And if you want to look further, here is a link to a Trans Day of Visibility and Trans History in Canada webpage. 

There are many other ways to learn about trans folk and the visibility that's been too long in coming. I offer these links today in the hope that they will help us all to realize that trans people deserve love, respect, acceptance, and friendship every bit as much as we do. 

After all, friendship, acceptance, respect and love are the beautiful gifts God gives to us so that we can give them to each other. Let's celebrate by doing just that!

(Thanks for reading. And if you want to engage in one-on-one dialogue on this topic, you can always email me through the link in my profile to the right.)