In the lives of transgender individuals there are three emotional states that isolate, confine, and destroy souls: fear, deception, hate.

Fear

The ever-present fear within many transgender individuals is fear of a climate of hate and rejection closing in.

It is nowhere in particular, and yet is everywhere.

It is an internal mood grounded in the toxicity of social environments. It is fear of those who control these toxic environments in which many are trapped.

The fear is not particularly of death, although that is possible; the overriding fear is of the deep humiliation of the soul.

This fear comes from the total disregard of our humanity and our rights.

The fear comes from within through considering that the social milieu is right in constantly repeating, “You have no worth. You do not count in the spectrum of humanity.”

Fear is the safety valve that many transgender people surround themselves in order to provide protection from a total nervous breakdown.

How so?

One method of adapting to toxic environments is to learn “safe” behavior and yields all claims to personal significance beyond a very little world in which they isolate themselves.

Deception

I believe that all transgender people have felt driven to deceive others or themselves at one time or another.

Children often hide their true gender from their parents for fear of parental rejection.

At school many transgender children pretend to be their assigned gender to avoid being bullied or worse.

Adult transgender individuals hide their true gender for fear of losing their job, losing their health insurance, or daily rejection from coworkers.

Married transgender partners pretend they no longer have gender dysphoria and try to live in their assigned gender. They do this because they love their partner deeply, want a family, want to be “normal.”

These individuals are “safe” from the external toxic environments they might encounter.

Survival through constant deception of others and oneself can feel like perjuring one’s soul.

The transgender individual is often faced with three basic alternatives.

To accept the apparent fact that, one’s situation being what it is, there is no sensible choice on offer. There is no possibility of dealing with various communities openly, for they are not part of the wider communities. The ultimate penalty is to become a living, breathing deception. The soul is put into jeopardy. The transgender person juggles the various areas of compromise. According to this approach not all issues are equal in significance or in consequences. Some circumstances over which the person has no control require stealth. In other places, the person can openly be their self. This can become like walking a tightrope and can also be soul destroying. The third alternative is a complete sincerity. Be true to yourself. The acceptance of this alternative is to be simply, directly truthful, whatever the cost. There must be an assumption that the effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor. Honesty takes away a relationship based on oppressor/oppressed and replaces it with merely a relationship between two human beings. This one can be particularly difficult where society rejects and dehumanizes transgender individuals.

No good alternatives until society accepts that transgender individuals are human beings who deserve respect and the same rights as all other human beings.

Hate

Hate often starts in dealing with toxic environments and in which contacts with others are devoid of any overtures of warmth and genuineness.

Also hate can start within a transgender person when someone says that they “understand” transgender people but it is with a sense of pity.

To “understand” empathy is required.

Hatred emerges where empathy is absent in environments in which a transgender person lives.

Hatred is the device by which some transgender individuals seek to protect themselves against internal disintegration.

The logical conclusion of the development of hatred is death to the spirit of the hater.

That is an evil outcome caused by toxic environments in which transgender individuals cannot cope.

The Takeaway

External, societal forces drive the fear, deception and hatred that harm so many transgender individuals.

People who openly reject and work to undermine transgender civil and human rights cause harm.

People who stand by and silently watch from the sidelines as transgender individuals are denied their rightful place in our society are also causing harm.

Please add your voice to those who are advocating for transgender equality.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said “no one is free until we are all free.” This idea, profound in its simplicity, finds company among famous aphorisms in the Jewish textual tradition—the biblical command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and Hillel the Elder’s famous principle, “that which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbors.”

Renate