We live in an amazing epoch, where it’s possible to be born in a completely wrong body, but actually manage to change your sex.
Now, of course, the 21st century isn’t the first time that trans* people were recognized. There have been countless non-Western cultures that have seen gender as more than just men and women. And that’s great for non-binary people.
However, I’m talking about BINARY trans* people. (Most of whom probably wouldn’t identify as “transgender” anyway!)
A binary trans woman is as much a woman as any cis female out there. Like me. I’m 100% a woman. I’m not bigender, genderfluid, or any of that. Which DOES mean I avoid many of the classic trans* struggles.
I don’t have to convince ignoramuses that my gender exists. I don’t have to convince the world that, just because I have a beard or breasts, I’m not a boy or a girl. In a lot of ways, I’m incredibly lucky.
But where I’m most fortunate is in the medical field of today. In these last hundred years, for the first time in human history, it’s possible to change a body’s sex. Not only can I be recognized, externally, as a woman – I can actually get, surgically, most of the correct biology. (Everything short of reproduction.)
There aren’t words to describe how grateful I am for this.
I’m writing this on a train across India, surrounded by friendly Indian people who don’t speak English and don’t see me as anything other than the woman I present as. More than presentation – the woman I AM. Even in cultures that accepted a third or “other” gender, it was only possible to transition to THAT gender. Trans* people were boxed into a third box, which also might not have fit them. (It doesn’t fit me.)
This persists even today. On the Indian Railways website there are three options for gender: male, female, and transgender. If you’re “transgender”, you’re the other.
But, thanks to modern medicine, something new is possible. In the past, even in cultures that DID accept that not everyone with a penis was a man, there was still no real “cure”. There was no chance of a binary trans person living a regular life in a body that’s right. Now there is.
At the hospital where I had my sex-change surgery, I met someone who refused to share her contact info with people she met there and begged us to keep her out of pictures. No one at home knew she was trans*. She’d self-identified as a girl early on, been accepted as such by her mom, and raised as a girl. Her only problem was a growth down bottom that had to be surgically healed. And it was. That aside, she was a woman to everyone who knew her – living the transsexual dream.
At the hospital, I also met a lot of people like me. Like me, they don’t identify as “trans*” (except “transsexual”, which everyone agrees is a medical condition that CAN be cured). Like me, they don’t want to be – and don’t like being – seen as trans*.
Like me, their only desire, in terms of gender, is to live a full, happy life as the one on the opposite end of the spectrum to which they were assigned at birth. And this, for the first time in human history, may actually be possible.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock