Partly because of the internet, and partly because of a new wave of transgender role models, more and more people are coming out as trans, and they are doing so younger, and their friends and families now have the language to understand what that means. As celebrated trans author Julia Serano told me over email, “The truth is that trans people exist and our lives are fairly mundane. In the U.S., the number of transsexuals is roughly equivalent to the number of Certified Public Accountants. Nobody views accountants as exotic or scandalous!”
Not everyone is born a boy or a girl and stays that way. A significant minority of the population is born intersex, meaning that they are not clearly assigned as biologically male or female when they are born, and many more are transgender, meaning that they do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, and sometimes choose to change their physical appearance with hormones or surgery.
If gender identity is no longer a fixed commodity, that affects everybody. Not just those who are transsexual, their friends, families and colleagues, but everybody else, too. If gender identity is fluid—if anyone can change their gender identity, decide to live as a man, a woman, or something else entirely, as it suits them—then we have to question every assumption about gender and sex role we’ve had drummed into us since the moment the doctors handed us to our panting mothers and declared us a boy or a girl. That’s an enormous prospect to consider, and some people find it scary.
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