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A lot of my right-wing friends are annoyed at how they see many of us handling gender. It may not be because they lack compassion; instead, they never really noticed how the tireless adherence to some manufactured gender norms have been used in the past to demean people, hurt them, and top them from achieving what they want.
There have always been transgender people, gender people, people who did not specifically conform to the things that other people thought were NORMAL. People who have never been pushed and oppressed by perceptions of normalcy may not understand, unless they look harder, how it is that pressure to BE that version can tear your life apart.
The future is where people build their own identity—one that makes them happy—and where the people around them can celebrate that. This is what we want to make visible today, on the international Trans day of visibility. It’s not about people standing up and saying “I’m Trans” because that is not always the safer thing to do today. It’s about standing up and saying “I support that goal. I support the idea that a kid growing up feeling their gender identity somewhere on that spectrum can grow up in joy and happiness with the support of the people around them.
Let’s make the idea of transcending the “normal” visible today, along with the idea that people can explore and make decisions for themselves about their own happiness. Let’s make allies visible and trans heroes visible and trans ideas visible.
While US companies have made significant strides in creating workplaces that are more inclusive of transexual individuals, discrimination and employment penalties remain.
Trans and gender variant people’s existences are overlooked, invalidated, and erased every single day.
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About Jim Marcus
Jim Marcus is an artist, musician, and typographer from Chicago, Illinois. He was one of the originators of the Industrial music scene as the lead singer of the band Die Warzau, has played in over 30 other projects and currently heads up the band Go Fight.
