Close Your Eyes…
By: Emma Holiday
Tags: Gender, LGBTQ, Creative Non Fiction, Equality, Transgender

Trust me for a moment. I promise no harm will come to you in this brief experiment.

I want you to close your eyes and simply ask yourself the following question:

“What gender am I?” and then say it out loud.

The one rule is that you are not allowed to touch any part of your body for reassurance, you just need to feel your gender.

What was your answer?

How long did it take you to say it? Was there any pause or confusion? If there was none, without any visual confirmation, where does that confidence come from?

Did you just know? How?

Did you just know that without touching your body or looking in a mirror? Those around you, your family, friends, and society at large, do they all accept that what you see and what you feel are the same?

If your sense of gender and your physical body match, then you are cisgender.

Now let’s try a new experiment. You can close your eyes if you want.

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and seeing your opposite gender staring back at you from the mirror. Suddenly what you feel inside does not match the image you see in the mirror. You then look down at your genitals and they are the wrong ones. Look in your closet. What clothes will you wear?

You’re not in the right body. You just know it is wrong, despite the physical evidence. You are not you.

Now try and explain that to your family, friends and society.

I am transgender. My sense of gender, the one wired into my brain before I was born, does not match the genitalia that I was born with. For my entire life I could not explain this incongruence to myself, much less find a way to share it with family and friends. Forget about society. It would be like explaining a round earth to a medieval pope. It is just not in their belief system.

But you are more sophisticated than a medieval pope. You know the earth is round without flying around it to prove it. It is in your belief system. What I would like you to do is challenge your current gender belief system. Accept that I and hundreds of thousands of others like me exist in this gender middle ground between gender and sex, between what is between your ears and what is between your legs. Appreciate the incredible emotional pain that this incongruence produces for people who simply want to live their lives, trying make it all work and simply express who they are.

Challenge your belief system. Educate yourself. Try to understand that transgender is no more an aberration than being left-handed or red headed. It is another way some one is built.

Do you really want everyone to look like you?

Emma Holiday

Please also read:

I have tied all of my stories to the above thread.

Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.