Lee Harrington - Traversing Gender: Understanding Transgender Realities

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Traversing Gender: Understanding Transgender Realities

2016 Lee Harrington and Mystic Productions Press

www.TraversingGender.com

All rights reserved. With the exception of brief excerpts for reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, artist or their estates. Please contact the publisher or author for permission.

Any information or safety guidelines provided in this book are offered as a starting place for discussions. Personal research as well as dialogue with qualified providers is always encouraged. By deciding to engage in any activity, including those mentioned in this book, you are taking on physical and emotional responsibility for your own actions, and agree to hold harmless all individuals associated with the creation, publication, and sale of this book.

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Published in the United States by Mystic Productions Press, LLC; 603 Tudor Rd. Anchorage, AK 99503

www.MysticProductionsPress.com

All text by Lee Harrington, except where otherwise noted

www.PassionAndSoul.com

Artwork by Andi Fogt www.AndiFogt.com

Interior and Exterior Layout by Rob River www.RobRiver.com

Image of Lee Harrington by Darrell Lynn www.KiltedPhotography.daportfolio.com

ISBN 978-1-942733-81-2

Ebooks: MOBI 978-1-942733-82-9

ePub 978-1-942733-83-6

PDF 978-1-942733-84-3

For those who died too young.

By Lee Harrington

When a child is born, instead of saying its a baby, we lift them up and declare its a boy or its a girl. In an instant, a childs gender identity, orientation, life experiences, sexual behaviors and social interactions have been painted upon them by societal expectations and standards. The truth is, people are more complex than that.

For most people, the gender they were assigned at birth is the same as the gender that they identify with throughout their lives. For others, they are not a perfect match. They might not be a match at all.

Every person notices gender for the first time at different moments in their life. For some it occurs when you notice that boys and girls have different bodies. Perhaps it was when a parent took away a doll from you, or said that you should man up. Others experience this when someone tried to dress them in frilly outfits, or said thats not very ladylike.

Whether a person notices gender on a day to day basis, gender affects us in different ways. It affects what people wear. How we navigate culture. The expectations of our family, friends, and associates. This is because gender is embedded in the societies we live in. This includes how people perceive our gender, as well as the messages the world around us tells us about gender.

For transgender people, this is an even bigger issue. An estimated 700,000 transgender people live in the United Statesplace for transgender individuals. This will lead to the world being a better place for all of us, since gender affects every one of us.

This book is intended as an overview of diverse gender journeys, the many topics that affect transgender and gender nonconforming lives, and those of the people who care for and about them. It is an introduction to the topic, a road-map to the world of gender variant people. Creating this map, whether we are trans or otherwise, will build an awareness of gender, or the paths we already find ourselves on.

Trans is a shorthand for transgender. Trans means across, on the other side, or beyond in Latin; used commonly in terms like transatlantic. Both transgender and trans have been used to create social cohesion for a movement towards equality, with the goal of bringing individuals of different gender journeys together. They are powerful and useful terms. They have simultaneously been considered reductive of the experiences of individuals and populations who do not identify with these words. This is important to consider because not everyone that is trans within a specific definition is necessarily trans according to their own definition. This is why transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) is often used as a broader net, including a wider range of people from diverse gender experience.

The term transgender is offered in contrast to those who are non-transgender, or academically speaking, cisgender. The prefix cis is the Latin term for on the same side of, and refers to individuals whose gender is in alignment with the sex they were assigned at birth. There are those who use cisgender in a derogatory way or perceive it to be offensive. The term itself is not inherently offensive, simply a different adjective, similar to describing one person as brunette and another person as blonde. Being referred to as blonde is no better or worse than being brunette, it is simply an adjective to describe someones hair. So it is with cis or trans, especially within the context of this book.

Transgender is also an umbrella term. For the context of this book, it includes all concepts of gender variances outside of having your gender or sex assigned at birth correspond with your gender experience, as discussed further in . Since transgender is sometimes used as a specific term to discuss people moving from one end of a binary to another, such as women who transition to being men, and men who transition to being women, the terms gender-nonconforming and gender variant will also be used throughout the book.

experience is not real and true for the vast number of trans people.

There are many terms under the transgender umbrella:

• Transsexual (moving from one gender and/or body configuration to that of the opposite gender and/or body configuration)
• Trans woman (a woman who was assigned male at birth, who identifies as a woman)
• Trans man (a man who was assigned female at birth, who identifies as a man)
• Two-Spirit (a term used by certain North American indigenous populations for those who exist beyond the heterosexual, cisgender experience)
• Third Gender (a diverse category of individuals who are beyond or between binary genders worldwide)
• Agender