The Erosion of Gender Ignorance: There is Hope for Us

I have had a tough time with the emotional battering that gender dysphoria has confronted me with over the last two years. HRT has added to that mix, both good and bad.

It is such a personal turmoil. Explaining it to others is like a mother trying to explain what giving birth is like to Rocky Balboa. She hits the intellectual stone wall full force.

Even one of my best friends at work who knows about me and has many multi-gender friends still can’t get her head around the concept. She accepts but she doesn’t understand. It’s not her fault. Our society has failed us in giving us the adequate tools to describe what seems an alien concept.

The intensely hateful responses I have seen on the internet remind me of the ignorant hatred that the world has witnessed over and over again: The Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, slavery, Nazis racial purity laws, and religious zealots of all kinds. Some people attack what they don’t know and can’t accept and look for others to support their ignorant beliefs. They then build their own walls of denial using bricks of defective facts and off we go.

There seems to be two kinds of ignorance, innocent ignorance and militant ignorance. Innocent ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge. Most have a desire to learn. Even those with an intellectual laziness or who lack the desire to learn have potential. It is truly a matter of the proper approach.

The militantly ignorant, on the other hand, is an impossible mission. They chose to not learn and close their mind to facts and proof. They resist any attempt at reason. They are beyond intellectual reach.

The concept of gender has rapidly evolved from the societal ignorance of the 1950’s and 1960’s to the 1969 Stonewall Riots. It has taken decades for gays and lesbians to achieve social acceptance and legal protection. Transgender individuals are still decades behind.

Being transgender requires the intellectual capacity to accept that gender and sex are two different things. The first is how your brain is wired and the second is how your body is built. Being transgender is when they don’t match.

That is when most people go “huh?”.