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Some musings inspired by Elliot Page's coming out. If you're a cisgender gay person and you don't feel kinship with trans or non-binary or genderqueer people; if you don't understand why we belong together as a group, if not a family;
if you think THEIR lives have nothing to do with YOURS, I'd ask you to do one thing: Listen to their coming-out stories. Listen to them talk about the fear, the self-loathing, the lifelong sense of not belonging, of something being "wrong" with them that they couldn't articulate.
Listen to them tell of the years of denial, the prayers and pleadings that they not be THIS, anything but THIS, please God. Hear them when they talk about their fear of losing friends, of being cast out of their families.
Pay attention when they talk about looking for themselves on TV, in the movies, in pop songs or games or comic books - and the eventual horrible realization that they're not to be found there because they are so singular, so freakish
that no one would ever want to tell their story or see their faces in magazines. Listen to their tales of how jubilant, how exhilarated they became as they slowly embraced their truth. Stop focusing on yourself. Don't looking for the differences. Just... shut up and listen.
Trans, enby, genderqueer folks - they are not us and their experiences are not going to exactly parallel ours, but that's not why they are our family. It's because of how they once felt and how it tracks with how we once felt about ourselves. THAT is the bloodline we share.
We should celebrate and embrace our trans siblings not just because we all threw rocks together at Stonewall or because we march in the same parades. We should embrace them because we have all had to make that
journey from shame to self-love. We all had to do the one thing cishets NEVER have to do: come to terms with our essential selves and, in the face of tremendous opposition, declare ourselves for who we are.
Don't focus on our differences. Listen to their stories and marvel at how similar their journey was to yours, even though your destination looks different from theirs. That's what families are; folks who travel the same road until it's time to forge their own paths.
