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I Wasn’t Born Trans
I was born a fucking baby.
What is the difference between cisgender people and transgender people? Well, cis people, for one, align with their gender assigned at birth. But what if we didn’t assign genders in the first place? What would the difference be then?
There wouldn’t be one. We’d just be people living our lives, free from cis/hetero-patriarchal standards of gender. If we weren’t assigned a gender at birth and subsequently expected to fit into normative gender roles, we wouldn’t have to create labels to identify those of us who don’t fit into those roles. And, perhaps more importantly, if we didn’t marginalize those who don’t fit into these arbitrary roles of gender and sex, we wouldn’t need the LGBTQIA+ civil rights movements in the first place.
Trans is a label necessitated almost entirely by the othering of people who fall outside of cisgender socio-cultural norms. I think this is a hard concept for cis people and even some trans people to grasp, but the fact is that cis and trans people are far more alike than we are different. We have these labels not because trans is fundamentally different from cis, but because cis people marginalize us. We need labels to unite together to access the resources we need.
We need labels not so we can differentiate ourselves from cisgender heterosexual people but to define our struggles in…
