Lack of Understanding Is Not Rightness

It seems fairly common for people that when they cannot understand how a person feels, they see the problem as being with the other person.

I am not speaking about differences of opinions on politics. I am talking about life choices. Big ones. For many of us, the decisions and feelings of a trans person are unrelateable. We do not get it. So some folks demonize the trans community as deviants.

I am being honest here. I do not understand what a trans person is going through. There is a simple reason. I have never been in question about my gender versus my body. These two aspects of my being are not in conflict. I can never truly grasp the struggle if they were to come to terms. How frustrating it must be to feel something is not… Exact…but not understand what as I am growing up.

The same is true of being gay. I have never been in question of the fact that I am drawn to women. I wonder at times how I would deal if society told me at every turn that being attracted to women was deviant and immoral.

Angelina Jolie took heat from “heartbroken” men about a double mastectomy. They could not fathom why she would removed a great pair of breasts. Sure, I suspect some men thought they were being funny…but it isn’t really funny.

Granted, I could probably identify with Jolie’s situation a bit more than the other two examples.

But the thing is, the real problem is not the situations above. The real problem is with the people who decide that their lack of understanding makes them right. That because they cannot understand or relate, there is something deviant or dangerous about the people they don’t understand.

I may not understand what a trans person is fully going through. But I am not “normal” because of it. I am simply a person. As are they. I am not helping a person in their struggles by telling them they are deviant simply for their realization that their identity and birth gender are in conflict. Making them the but of jokes, or embarrassing secrets is cruel. How is being cruel “normal”? How is being ruled by our inability to relate “wise”?

Instead, we see numerous people separating these groups out as if they are an evil attack group out to destroy “good, decent and moral” society. When compassion is treated as a weakness, one forfeits the ability to say they are on the side of good, decent or moral societies.