Paper & Pronouns
Trans people in Hungary have lost the right to update their ID to reflect their gender identity thanks to a far right opportunistic pandemic power grab (say that three times fast!).
Amnesty International says this pushes the country “back towards the dark ages”.
It’s only a piece of paper though, right? How can this be such a big deal? In my experience the answer is down to the pain of two clashing needs in the mind of a trans person:
- We all aim to feel a sense of social stability, we cannot all climb to the top of the social heap but we’ve evolved to be OK with this reality. We however have not evolved the capacity to accept no role in the social group we find ourselves in. Humans feel a stress response in their body with recordable health outcome variance simply due to feeling rejected by their social group. This is worth repeating our bodies decline due to social rejection. We all get this feature as factory fresh humans.
- For trans people though we get an extra feature. We get a sense of self, a sense of our gender, that contradicts what everyone else in the social group (the one our body needs approval from) sees in us. So we are set in opposition with ourselves. Given a Sophie’s choice as our birthright. We learn to conform for the fear of losing the 1st need. Then we also end up ragged and desperate to meet the second need overtime, hence transition.
To put is simply: When society judges identity on genitals and chromosomes trans people suffer whole body, whole consciousness pain and suffering. They are put on a knife’s edge between the two needs they feel. We have to ask ourselves why would we torture people this way?
I in my own life experience this power. I am lucky as of now that I am granted the dignity of my friends, family and work respecting my gender identity. Nonetheless I feel pangs of relief when the correct pronoun is used for me. This is because I am still so unconsciously terrified of exile. I don’t know if or when I will stop feeling this but it grabs me and stops me at least a few times a week still. These words matter to me so much…so much more than I feel I can put into words..into reason.
I suspect this is because the cause of my difficulty is not rooted in human reasoning but rather on my unconscious drive for social survival, social viability. I have no pretty words to describe why I must eat lunch and sleep well to function. I have no pretty words to explain why I need to be accepted as myself to function well.
OK so we can see how words hurt for trans people but perhaps there is a very serious reason genitals must define ID? Why our words cannot change? Why traditions must be upheld?
Piers Morgan recently made a statement perfectly matched to mine relating to these issues and our current global situation:
‘We can’t go back to all this cultural war nonsense; I think people’s perspectives will have all changed. I felt like we had moved on from this, I felt we have got the perspective that we needed, where this think (sic) would look ridiculous.’
I agree Piers, we can surely all see that what really matters is our shared humanity. Making the most of the time we have and most importantly respecting the health needs of people above our habits of speech.
Then he ruined it by showing how painfully trivial bigotry really is:
‘But here is the UN telling people not to use mankind anymore because it’s offensive, well that offends me.’ The UN controversially suggested the use of humankind instead.
I’m sorry you were hurt Piers, this pandemic has really affected us all deeply, you have my heart felt regret that you also had to go through such personal suffering in 2020.
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