You Know What? Trans People ARE Amazing

If you're not following the +MyGenderation youtube channel you should be.  They have some inspiringly smart people posting videos to that channel every day, and the need for daily uploads has caused them to do some real soul searching to produce videos.  The results have been pretty great.

But the video for today really caught me.  +Jen Kitney, one of their regular content creators posted a video about how the world perceives trans women as a joke.  I have it linked below.  You should watch it before you go reading the rest of this.

So, as I started watching that I felt like she was spending too much time on her point, repeating the word "joke" a bit too much.  I'm not sure I feel that way anymore.  It felt like she was droning on, repeating herself, not making a new point.  And that WAS the point.  Because that's a lot of what the outside world has been doing for years.  Painting us as funny, as a mockery, and just doing it over and over.  We're used as punctuation for titillation, we're called out as girly (like that's an insult) or fake.  Men dress like women on TV for an easy laugh, so people just make our lives into that.

But Jen's right, and I don't spend enough time thinking about this, we're freaking amazing.  Seriously.  Most people have this whole section of their persona that they can just move on and live with, but we have to construct it, very carefully, just to live something along the lines of a normal life.  We have so many steps to take before the answer to "how are you" is honestly, "I'm good." 

Defining ourselves is something that takes conscious effort and time, research and medicine, perseverance and hope.  We don't have literature or history to provide us much context, most of us don't know a bunch of trans people in our home town, a lot of us have to fight our own families just to succeed.  And yet, we accomplish as much as trans people.  We're major musicians, CEO's, inventors, mothers, fathers, leaders and workers, just like everyone else.  And they've had to clear none of the hurdles we have to get there.

We're a wonder, a great example of what the modern world can accomplish.  We're the people other people should look up to for accomplishing so much through so much adversity in an environment that would have otherwise been very easy to get along in.  And we're not asking for sympathy, just integration, we're asking to be able to be ourselves without someone finding our grand accomplishments somehow laughable. 

Thanks +Jen Kitney for reminding me and all of us how amazing trans people are - I think the complexity of our situation occasionally just clouds that for us.