Something I\u2019ve seen people ask when they have a trans\/nonbinary kid is \u201cwhy.\u201d As in, why are they trans? How did they end up that way? It makes sense: a lot of people don\u2019t really know what it means to be trans beyond a very basic definition, and once you learn more, you realize how much trans\/enby folks have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, so why would anyone take that path?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about this, and my personal response is that that\u2019s not the real question. The real question is \u201cwhy didn\u2019t anyone prepare me to have transgender family members?\u201d One could get into stuff like \u201cis being trans a \u2018choice\u2019,\u201d potential biological or neurological underpinnings of gender, etc., but on one level that\u2019s not really what matters. On a tangible, everyday level for the average person, what matters is simply that someone\u2019s relative, friend, whatever, is trans, and how they respond to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t think being not-cis – cis meaning your gender matches what you were assigned at birth if that\u2019s unclear (cisn\u2019t is one fun way to say something\u2019s different about your gender without specifying trans people) – is inherently weirder, cooler, worse, or otherwise more or less remarkable than being cis. The problem is that cis is presented as the unspoken default, and people aren\u2019t proactively informed of the other possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that\u2019s why it seems so shocking when someone comes out, and why we want to know why.<\/em> Because it rocks our not-entirely-conscious expectations about what to expect from people and the world socially. It\u2019s not actually remarkable for your kid to be trans; it\u2019s just remarkable to you<\/em>\u2026and \u201cyou\u201d refers to large numbers of people. The problem is that education is failing people in this area and not telling us this stuff until someone we know comes out, and then we have to figure it out from somewhere near the beginning while questioning what we thought we knew about how things work. Something something comprehensive sex ed\u2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Regarding the actual answer, I\u2019m not sure that one exists in a tidy way. No one reason is going to be universal for cisn\u2019t (I love that word) people if someone has an answer to that question for themselves. Probably a lot of us couldn\u2019t come up with any reason as individuals if asked; I couldn\u2019t give you much more than a shrug, personally. There\u2019s the whole autism-trans correlation, which may provide one explanation, but not all trans people are autistic, and if it\u2019s the case that that shows up because being autistic makes it easier for people to reject arbitrary social rules and do their own thing, that more so explains why people are out of the closet rather than why they\u2019re trans to begin<\/em> with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On an everyday level, it\u2019s just something that is, and we\u2019re just not used to it yet and some politicians like to make a huge deal out of it; that\u2019s all. I mean, if you\u2019re cis even though you could have been \/ could be something else, why is that? Like for real, why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n (That last question is supposed to be more thought-provoking than serious, before anyone feels obligated to write a personal essay in the comments, but do feel free to leave a comment if you have thoughts :).)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something I\u2019ve seen people ask when they have a trans\/nonbinary kid is \u201cwhy.\u201d As in, why are they trans? How did they end up that way? It makes sense: a lot of people don\u2019t really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gender"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}