Tennis and the "T" in LGBTQ

[Hazumu]

Gender Lens

This blog is my offering of light, a tiny illumination of the gender constraints that color my lens, my world.

My mom works in the medical profession, and I remember the first time she encountered a transgendered patient. She called me just about every day, telling me that the young person was very ill (with an illness unrelated to sexual reassignment surgery), and how much compassion my mom felt for her. My mom said to me, "I don't know if I should call the patient 'him' or 'her.'" We talked about what was acceptable (in this case, the gender one has chosen in surgery) and how it's completely appropriate to ask the patient's preference. But more importantly, I told my mom that the best thing she could do was to care for this individual and offer compassion.

My mom comes from a relatively conservative church background, and in our small town, transgendered folks are not generally visible to the public eye. I was a little concerned that my mom would act awkwardly, but on the fourth day that the person was in the hospital, Mom called and said, "I realized today that it doesn't even matter what gender she is. She's just a human being who is in need of care."

[NicholeW.]

The issue of transgender individuals is a complex one because it defies our society's definition of gender binaries. We like to cling to our "firm" ideas of male and female, despite evidence to the contrary.

I've almost come to the conclusion that it is not "ideas" that are the problem. Ideas tend to be fluid, un-boundaried concepts that serve as imaginative, often, ways into our relaities and the ways we view them.

I've about decided the problem is "beliefs." Hard and closely boundaried, usually very concrete and more or less deeply held opinions about reality and our places in it, and others' places in it as well.

The fluidity of "ideas" makes for less conflict and deeply enmeshed hatred and threats from others. Beliefs tend to be guarded as one might imagine guarding some vast treasure from infinite people coming to take it and one's life from them.

Nichole