English
Nederlands
2006-03-26
Thirty-fifth Column
Tonight my thirty-fifth column was broadcast in Gendertalk #553.
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.com/audio/ENJOY01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:
Enjoy
I think it is high time to tell you something about the bright side of the story. I have told you so much about the difficulties and hardships of being transgender, but there is more to it than that. Transgender individuals all have to struggle in their lives to reach a state of balance between the way they feel about themselves and the way other people look at them. And they will enjoy this balance once they have reached it. Every day they will consciously enjoy something most people take for granted: The harmony between the way they feel and the way people see them.
On this journey to balance and harmony we learn an awful lot about the role of male and female people in our society. Living part of our lives as men and another part as women, we also get an opportunity to pick up skills that are traditionally only learned by one of the sexes like knitting or bricklaying. And we get to socialize in both 'men only' and 'women only' situations. We...
Well, as I list them, I see that none of these examples hold in all cases and none of them express exactly what I am trying to say. What I am trying to say is that all of us are beyond the binary view on the sexes that is common in our society. I think that is an advantage. It gives us an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective. That makes it possible to see things other people don't see. It is not so strange that throughout history many cultures have thought transgender people had special abilities and wanted them to be priests or seeers.
And even if we don't do anything, our mere existence may help other people to see things in a different light. This week I got an email from a twenty year old girl who stumbled onto my website while she was looking for something else, got interested and read almost all of it. I am so glad this happened and I am also glad she told me about it. The reason she got so interested was that only a few days earlier she met a transsexual woman in the supermarket where she works. Unfortunately this woman didn't pass well enough to go unnoticed and that made some of her colleagues quite nervous, not knowing whether she should be addressed as "sir" or as "madam" and things like that.
So she found my website at the right moment, just at a time she was eager to learn something about this subject. Hopefully she will also point her colleagues to my site so that they can learn from it as well. My website is there to tell people that transgender people exist and to tell them what this is all about. I hope it can take away the fear some people feel when they meet transgenders because it is something they don't know anything about.
This email is but one example of the many positive experiences I have encountered since I have decided to stop trying to live as a man and to give room to my true feelings instead. I have stopped to see my gender dysphoria as a curse. Now that I have learned to live with it, it is becoming more and more clear to me that it can be a blessing. It can be a starting point to stop thinking in black and white and start to see many shades of gray, not to mention all the beautiful colors!
Transgender people from all countries, please come out of your closets if you can and start shedding your colorful light onto your environment. And enjoy!
<< Home
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.com/audio/ENJOY01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:
I think it is high time to tell you something about the bright side of the story. I have told you so much about the difficulties and hardships of being transgender, but there is more to it than that. Transgender individuals all have to struggle in their lives to reach a state of balance between the way they feel about themselves and the way other people look at them. And they will enjoy this balance once they have reached it. Every day they will consciously enjoy something most people take for granted: The harmony between the way they feel and the way people see them.
On this journey to balance and harmony we learn an awful lot about the role of male and female people in our society. Living part of our lives as men and another part as women, we also get an opportunity to pick up skills that are traditionally only learned by one of the sexes like knitting or bricklaying. And we get to socialize in both 'men only' and 'women only' situations. We...
Well, as I list them, I see that none of these examples hold in all cases and none of them express exactly what I am trying to say. What I am trying to say is that all of us are beyond the binary view on the sexes that is common in our society. I think that is an advantage. It gives us an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective. That makes it possible to see things other people don't see. It is not so strange that throughout history many cultures have thought transgender people had special abilities and wanted them to be priests or seeers.
And even if we don't do anything, our mere existence may help other people to see things in a different light. This week I got an email from a twenty year old girl who stumbled onto my website while she was looking for something else, got interested and read almost all of it. I am so glad this happened and I am also glad she told me about it. The reason she got so interested was that only a few days earlier she met a transsexual woman in the supermarket where she works. Unfortunately this woman didn't pass well enough to go unnoticed and that made some of her colleagues quite nervous, not knowing whether she should be addressed as "sir" or as "madam" and things like that.
So she found my website at the right moment, just at a time she was eager to learn something about this subject. Hopefully she will also point her colleagues to my site so that they can learn from it as well. My website is there to tell people that transgender people exist and to tell them what this is all about. I hope it can take away the fear some people feel when they meet transgenders because it is something they don't know anything about.
This email is but one example of the many positive experiences I have encountered since I have decided to stop trying to live as a man and to give room to my true feelings instead. I have stopped to see my gender dysphoria as a curse. Now that I have learned to live with it, it is becoming more and more clear to me that it can be a blessing. It can be a starting point to stop thinking in black and white and start to see many shades of gray, not to mention all the beautiful colors!
Transgender people from all countries, please come out of your closets if you can and start shedding your colorful light onto your environment. And enjoy!
Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home
© 1985-2006 E.G. Snel
