Transgender people, are they born that way?
Lisa Littman, the assistant professor of Brown University, wrote an article about "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" several days ago. This article quickly became be focus of attention.
She interviewed some parents, adults and teens, who are regard as transgender people in her study. 21% of parents said that their kids have transgender friends, 20% of parents said that their kids use social media more frequently than before. Most importantly, 62% of parents indicated that their children had suffered from mental disorder before being defined as transgender people. We cannot deny that her study is not as perfect as what we thought, since it's not easy to find parents with the same experience, there are individual difference between different people. But this topic is worth of attention.
Many transgender activists disagree with the opinion "transgender people are born that way", they cannot accept this kind of opinion. Brown University has published many researches about this topic.
Every one has a gender, it is a thing affects everything of our lives, it affects how we act like and look like every day. Gender is a thing that describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine. Transgender is the state of one's self gender identity not matching one's assigned sex which based on physical sexuality at birth.Today, most of the counties define gender based on the physical and genetic sexuality at birth. There is at least one transgender person, whoes self-gender identity is different from the assigned gender sex at birth, in each 100 people. Under the rules of our society, there are at least 70 million people living in the world without their identity. Transgender people would have a 4-times higher risk in attempting life-threatening behaviors because of the experience of past parental verbal and physical abuse, it doesn't mean transgender people are born this way. There are a growing number of state, cities, and countries with transgender explicit nondiscrimination laws.
To redefine the gender's definition to include transgender people and help them escaping from discrimination, society must acknowledge the fact of the existence of transgender people. However, the mass media has blocked the road for the society to understand the truth, the mass media has ignored the facts and reinforced the perception that transgender people are unacceptable by clinging to the binary sex category and misleading the images of transgender people. In the world that almost everyone is talking about freedoms and rights, there are 70 millions transgender people living without their identities, facing serious life-threatening discriminations and difficulties in their everyday life. 70 million people are not enjoying the same rights, benefits, and even basic protections as others. When we mean a human, we mean the person inside his body. Besides the physical body is born this way, the humanity inside the body is also born this way.
No matter how shemale people are born, we need to respect them like ordinary people. I'm not force everyone to accept transgender people, but to show our respect, it couldn't be better if you can accept them and make friends with them.
