Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Breaking the Gender Convenant

By Joy Ladin, special contributor | Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - 2:07pm

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/breaking-the-gender-convenant/5711 (http://www.onbeing.org/blog/breaking-the-gender-convenant/5711)

Gender is a covenant I have broken: a covenant with others and a covenant with myself.

"Did anyone ever teach you to be true to yourself?" a therapist once asked me. I had come to her in the midst of what I call my gender crisis — the physical, mental, and emotional breakdown I experienced after 40-plus years of living as the male I knew I wasn't. I had just told her about my shame about hiding for decades my lifelong sense that I was female. Having failed to keep faith with my own gender identity, how could I now break my covenant with my wife, my children, and all who knew me as a man?

Gender is a covenant, a promise that the maleness or femaleness we present in public represents both our genitalia and our gender identity, our private sense of whether we are male or female. People who visibly fail to keep this covenant, those we call "transgender," are subject to severe penalties: exile from family and friends, loss of employment, and verbal and physical abuse. Every week, one or two transgender Americans are killed, in a hate crime, for breaking the covenant of gender.

Most of us are literally born into the covenant of gender, when those who deliver us from our mothers' wombs examine our genitals and proclaim, "It's a boy!" or, "It's a girl!" My body entered me into the covenant as male, and, for 45 years, that is the way I presented myself to the world. But though my gender presentation matched my genitalia, I was still breaking the gender covenant, because the maleness I presented to others didn't reflect my own sense of who I was.