An article aimed to present you an uncommon way to get the meaning of being Transgender : understanding gender identity, sexual orientation. To start with a practical example, Ladyboys are the facto transgender or transsexual persons.
For a short explanation, a transgender person is an individual that do not feel to belong neither to female or male gender technically. Though, very often you will see transgender who were born male, behaving like a woman. Whereas transsexuals MtF are instead transitioning to become a woman. The ladyboy term, it is often used to referring both transgenders and transsexuals women in Asia.
Now, if you are a man attracted to ladyboys, is important that you understand the world surrounding your future partner or girlfriend. This will help you to understand better your sexual orientation, and indeed, living a better relationship eventually. None the less, if you happen to be a father or mother, to better understand your son or daughter.
Unfortunately, today we will get to understand the meaning of transgender trough a sad story. I wish I could open the first 2015’s post with some happy news, but I have to bring a more serious matter. Maybe you heard already the story of Leelah Alcorn these days?
Trough the story of a young transgender
Few days ago a young transgender 17 years old committed suicide. She was the last victim of ignorance, went to a tragedy by family rejection. Her family was unable to recognize her gender identity and to accept her for who she was.
I don’t want to see this extreme sacrifice has been in vain, not forgotten. I’m myself a person attracted to transgender, so-called trans-oriented man. If you are like me or a transgender yourself, I save the hope the following content, and video will not take you down, but instead be inspiring. How? Knowing there is people like me, Julie and my friends that are by your side, doing something to defeat the ignorance and fight for transgender community rights.
The following video made by Julie, transgender herself, explains what feels a transgender person, what has to face sometimes during her life path. Also, a tribute to Leelah’s story, because her farewell letter posted on her personal blog was shut down few hours ago.
Everybody deserve to live their life, happy, love and be loved, equal opportunities and respect as a human being. As long as you don’t damage anybody’s life, you are free to live your life as you feel to. Leelah wasn’t able to live her life according to her gender identity. My hopes, with this article and Leelah’s story, is to let people understanding the meaning of being transgender in more serious and respectful presentation. The following paragraph will be based on the concept of what being transgender is.
Transgender : understanding gender identity, sexual orientation
It is already hard to stand the social stigmas and stares of ignorant people for LGBT community. Especially persons with unconventional manners like transgenders. It is true that these years the society is more tolerating different sexual orientation. But yet, even being in the new millennium, there is a big slice of people still living in the past century, bigot and stuck to obsolete convention. Part of our society is still unable to accept the social changes and evolution of human society.
Despite the social culture, the good side today is that we live in years where is possible to apply changes our physical appearance when doesn’t match with our gender identity. Repairing to what nature did not give us when we were born. This is the case of transsexual people, who accept their gender identity and apply changes to align gender identity to their look. Being transgender is simply somebody that doesn’t recognize them self with the and sex assigned at birth. The case of Leelah was a woman trapped in a wrong body.
The 17 year-old high school student wrote in her suicide note that despite identifying as a girl from the age of four, her devout Christian parents refused to allow her to transition
A transgender male to female ( MTF ). Her sexual orientation is indeed matching to her gender identity. Feeling a woman by soul, mind, heart, she was attracted to the opposite sex, men. Not all the case of being transgender are related to guys that feel like women; there are also women that feels like men. The case of transgender, trans man, Female to Male ( FTM ). Women that feels trapped in the wrong body. Note that, being transgender, not always means that your sexual orientation or preferences follow the binary heterosexual normative. There are also transgenders MTF attracted to women for example. Being transgender is even a condition of not recognizing oneself male or female.
In short, this is what a transgender is about. The most common cases like Leelah’s one, was binary sexual orientation, recognizing her sexual preferences that match to her gender identity. Do you find this explanation simply as being Gay? If was that the case was there no point to create this article. But think of it, Leelah even tried to live her life simply as being gay, rejecting herself with the hope the family would accept her easily. She attempted to negate herself the true nature just to find better acceptance, and the result led to a tragedy. Here is the letter written by Leelah Alcorn, Ohio, 17 years old, who commit suicide last Sunday. The original post published on her personal Tumblr blog shut down few hours ago.
If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.
Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.
When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.
My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.
When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.
I formed a sort of a “f*** you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.
So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.
At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a s**t about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.
After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like s**t because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.
That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a s**t which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s f***ed up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.
Goodbye,
(Leelah) Josh Alcorn
How does it make you feel Leelah’s story? What do you think about transgender people? Are you a trans-oriented man? Transgender? I’ll be glad to read your comments and share my opinion with you.
I know this topic related to Transgender : understanding gender identity, sexual orientation is not enough to answer all the questions. But for at least, you now have a less vague idea.
