We followed her lead, consulted with transgender friends, and met with her pediatrician. My daughter’s transition was not one we took lightly. But, when she started to be insistent, consistent, and persistent that she was a girl, my former partner and I realized our guess had been wrong. Of course, most people’s gender identity does align with their biological sex (that is called cisgender), so I was comfortable calling her my “son” and using male pronouns before we knew her true identity. A baby shower was held to celebrate her life, but I wasn’t about to celebrate the biases that accompany gender. I was not anticipating having a transgender child, nor was I motivated to strive to raise a gender-neutral child, but I certainly did not throw a party to celebrate the penis between my daughter’s legs. There is nothing wrong with my daughter, either. In our society, heteronormativity is the default: the assumption that all people are heterosexual and cisgender that binary, straight, and gender roles are the norm and that anything outside of this narrative is abnormal.Ī post shared by Amber Leventry took me coming out of addiction and then coming out as transgender to finally see: There is nothing wrong with me. We don’t follow stereotypical gender roles and maintain stereotypical masculine and feminine appearances. Why? Because we don’t fit the heteronormative idea that all people fall into the gender binary of either male or female. I, however, do not feel celebrated nor do other transgender folks who don’t align with the gender we were so eagerly assigned by others at birth, with labels tossed around as party games. (Truly everything from forest fires to car explosions to fistfights have dominated news headlines after people tried to go viral in their one-upmanship in the use of pink and blue props.) The proof of this ignorance is in the millions of dollars being spent on gender reveal parties and even more millions spent on damages caused by them. Even after science and peoples’ lived experiences have told us otherwise, the majority of folks still believe that biological sex is the same as gender. That said, my name is feminine, and I have hips, so people not only assume that I have to be one of only two genders they assume that I fall under the “female” category of those two options. So I switched to they/them pronouns and had gender-affirming top surgery. I finally got to the place where being referred to as a “woman” with female pronouns and gendered language made me feel small, irritable, and sad. But being forced to choose one gender has always made me cringe. Other times, I feel a mix of being both male and female. Most often, I don’t feel like I have any gender. It wasn’t until I heard the words “genderqueer,” “nonbinary,” and “gender-fluid” that my identity at last made sense. I spent years trying to decide if I would be happy socially and medically transitioning from female to male. I have always presented as masculine based on society’s expectations of masculinity and femininity, and for a time I wondered if I was male. A post shared by Amber Leventry lived almost 40 years as a female, but that label never felt right or like the whole story.
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