Lately, though, Bruce Jenner has become quite widely known for something that has nothing to do with sporting achievements or horrible television. You see, Bruce Jenner has made it very public knowledge that he no longer wants to be a man and has taken several steps toward his goal of eventually living his life as a woman – even considering complete gender reassignment surgery; a sex change in layman’s terms.
While some people are gossiping about this, poking fun in many cases, and generally shaking their heads in disbelief, I have taken a different approach. As someone who would probably feel weird taking a bubble bath because it feels a little too “girly”, the concept of someone identifying as a gender completely different than what they were born is almost unfathomable to me. It’s mystifying but incredibly interesting at the same time. What’s even more interesting is that I see around a half dozen people on a daily basis living their lives in much the same way as Mr. Jenner is attempting to do.
You see folks, this isn’t just a tabloid headline. I have started to notice the number of folks in our little city that are going through their own process of gender identifying. This is a very real phenomenon that is happening right here at home and I think it needs to be talked about a little more. Even more than being talked about, I think it’s something that needs to be understood because the people who are going through this transition are, I believe, some of the bravest people alive and they deserve our support.
I’m not proud to say it, but I wouldn’t have always thought this way. I grew up in a very small town that was rife with many backwards attitudes – not the least of which was homophobia. In our backwoods little community, boys liked girls and girls liked boys – and anyone who declared that they didn’t fit this mold would simply be tormented and made an example of so relentlessly that nobody would ever think about ‘coming out’. It’s probably why I didn’t find out until we were all in University that 2 of my closest friends since grade school were gay. They said that they were, literally, petrified of outing themselves as homosexuals in our town because they would have been almost completely ostracized.
The sad part is that through my upbringing and immaturity, I may have been among the folks who tormented these guys who I had always seen as my friends – and that was only because they loved and were attracted to men instead of women. Could you imagine the number of heads that would have exploded if these guys had announced that they felt as though maybe they should have been women instead of men? Even though sexual orientation and gender identification sometimes have nothing to do with one another, it would have been a perfect storm of conditions that probably would have led to burnings at the stake. Being gay would have been a little molehill compared to the mountain of a Chris who decided that maybe he was really a Christine.
Thankfully, the stigma of homosexuality has been reduced significantly in our society. I probably know as many gay people as I do straight folks and they are all very proud of who they are. There will always be detractors, but most people have moved past the point where they are shocked and outraged by who someone chooses to share their bed with. That being said, even though my mind may be far more open than it was when I was younger, let me go on record as saying this whole transgender/transsexual/intergender thing is completely uncharted territory for this old fellah, and I really don’t understand it much at all. The good news is I want to understand it because anyone who has the intestinal fortitude to live their life completely oblivious to what others think of them is someone I want to be in the corner of.
In our lives, we all wear masks depending on who we are dealing with. One for your friends, one for your family, one for your boss – the list goes on. I am in complete awe of those who not only refuse to wear these masks to impress others, but they don’t lie to themselves about who they are either. Whether it’s Bruce Jenner or the fellow at the coffee shop, they make us all look weak with their courage to not live within the limits of what society expects from them.
I’d love to know more about it all but I have no idea where to even start.
Perhaps listening to a former Olympic gold medalist without snide judgment is a place for us all to begin.
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