The depressing delusion of “LGB minus T”
Smile! You’re being phenotyped.
At least while HIPAA here in the States and common decency exist, no one knows for certain what’s in your pants; it’s all about practical appearances. More accurately, no one knows your genotype — quite likely even yourself, unless you’ve braved the obvious health insurance risks and jumped on the sequencing trend. You simply live with the content assumption that you don’t, in fact, have an extra X chromosome and that your young daughter’s puberty in ten years probably won’t be a fraught and confusing series of events leading up to the big reveal that she’s been XY and wombless the whole time.
And you’re probably right — good for you! Imagine living with any of these conditions and dealing with society’s utter, callous, sledgehammer-esque obsession as of late with presumed chromosomes, all under the guise of a ‘transgender problem’ that only floundering right-wingers running out of ways to explain away corporate greed seem to have a particular need to solve. Or just imagine being a lady naturally built like a linebacker, a tiny man with a soft face, a quite-possibly-already pained and self-conscious person who considers her or himself to be a terrible loser of the genetic lottery thanks to the relentless cruelty of today’s beauty standards and their social media contagion — imagine being any of those not-so-exceedingly-rare things and not even being transgender in the first place.
And now, on top of all that, you’re suddenly just as subject to people’s stares, just as subject to questioning, just as subject to being harassed and picked apart and made to feel ten times worse than the ceaseless voices in your head have already tried to make you feel. You might even get arrested for real at this point, despite the fact that you’ve tried to make yourself small your entire life, tried to blend in and bite the bullet and burden no one with the looks you’ve been conditioned to believe are an unforgivable burden to yourself and everyone.
Ten years ago, being physically (or even socially) gender non-conforming still sucked, but did it suck quite as much as it does today?
Or did we simply give our fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt?
Because, believe it or not, that’s something the vast majority of not-so-picture-perfect humans of any appearance, genotype, queerness level, or combination of those things have in common: they’re simply trying to get by.
We’re already using our best judgement to survive the mundane act of using the restroom away from home, and putting us under a brand new set of unnecessary microscopes has already caused the sort of collateral damage that most gender criticals would prefer to forget. But don’t take my word for it on the word ‘unnecessary’ here — consider the actual transgender crime statistics for yourself. (Spoiler alert: the problem is the other way around.)
All that said, the reality — and by that I mean, the day-to-day, the undeniable moments in practice that will befall everyone, including those who endlessly and ironically accuse trans people of this sort of ‘denial’ or that — will always stem from what’s visible. The human fear response, bolstered and profited from by 24-hour news cycles and 24/7 clickbait machines, will always be rooted in what’s apparently off and distasteful and plainly, unacceptably gender non-conforming, with no time for nuance and no particular care that you are, in fact, one of the ‘good’ letters in LGBT.
Because do you know what else is gender non-conforming? Holding hands with another woman (if indeed she’s dressed enough like one or short enough to be one or has pink enough hair for everyone’s disliking), putting your arm around another man, growing your hair out, or buzzing it all off.
In the end, no one cares — until they very much do.
Whether it’s injecting the opposite hormone or sitting too close to someone of the same visible sex, what they see is simply a woman or man doing something they should not be doing. And any form of that will always make the traditionalists uncomfortable.
If you think L, G, and/or B will ever be precisely sorted out, precisely delineated in practice, and precisely protected from scrutiny and malice and prejudice without the T and the I and the Q and all the rest of us — including those who don’t seamlessly and immediately fit in, for whatever reason —
…you’re utterly and depressingly delusional.
But I get it: you’re scared.
So am I.
