On Saturday, if you do not know, we celebrated International Transgender Day of Visibility. This is a day on which people raise awareness for and celebrate the transgender community all over the world.
To coincide with it, A transgender woman shared an amazing video on Twitter which debunked common transphobic myths that some people still have to this day.
A Vital Video
Serena Daniari is a transgender woman from New York who works as a writer and producer.
A video she had done previously, entitled ‘Walking While Trans’ achieved popularity as it discussed how trans people navigated a sometimes harsh world. However, it got lambasted by Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. This new video was in response to his criticism, and others like him.
Some people “like to rely on this dusty, crusty, tired argument that men are men and women are women and there’s absolutely no room for nuance and fluidity,” she said in the video posted on Twitter yesterday.
“But if we actually look at the research and findings of biologists and geneticists, it’s very clear that biological sex and gender are two distinctive things.”
“Biological sex has to do with our chromosomal makeup. And when we are born, we are assigned a sex at birth by doctors who give us a five-second glance at our genitalia.
“Gender is what’s in our soul, it’s what’s in our spirit, it’s how we move through the world and identify and present ourselves to other people and in society.”
When Shapiro attacked Daniari for her previous video, he described her as “suffering from a delusion” and stated that “this person is not a biological woman.”
“Initially, I think I was taken aback by the personal insults, but after that sort of settled with me, I was more shocked by how ignorant and uninformed a lot of his comments seem to be,” Daniari explained.
“If we actually look at the findings of medical organisations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, they have very, very explicitly stated that to be trans is not a mental illness.”
It is because of this, the term “gender identity disorder” has been changed to “gender identity dysphoria”
“Anatomy doesn’t dictate gender,” Daniari said. “For the majority of us, we just want to live our lives and mind our business and sort of navigate through public spaces without the fear of harassment and violence and ridicule.”
Happiness Should Conquer All
I have to say, I have never completely understood the whole transgender thing. This is because a) I am not trans and b) I am not a doctor. I am not going to sit around faking some intrinsic knowledge just because I have gathered the P.C thing to say via Twitter.
Still to me, that is the point. What I feel is important is that people get to express who they feel they are, and as long as you are not harming anyone, who cares?
I am well aware of the opinion that doctor’s opinions can be politicized. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realise that in the present climate, the doc who says that being trans IS a mental illness is likely to find work hard to come by in the future. Doctors however have much more training than me, so once again, I can’t say categorically what is true and what isn’t from my computer chair. What is true is that we are learning more and more about the human body and mind, and consequently we are understanding trans people more. This research will become more and more thorough, and I suspect it will be become irrefutable.
As a society I feel we are becoming more accepting of those who are different. What was once written off as a mental illness is now seeking to be understood. It is by this knowledge that we can break down prejudices, which is of course what we all want.
In the end, I don’t care about biology. I care about happiness. We get one go at this life so we need to make the most of it. Letting trans people embrace who they are is what counts.
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