In recent years, a group of people have attracted mainstream attention, and while society has been more or less understanding, they are still met with ridicule and general lack of understanding or refusal to understand. These people I'm talking about are transgender people. Today I'll talk about what it means to be transgender, the discrimination they face today, and how our language influences the conversation surrounding transgender people. My hope is that this will help you better understand transgender people and how gender and biological sex are viewed, in order to better accept transgender people and sympathize with what they may experience in life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay First of all, while I don't agree with some of the language used in the article titled "Transgender People" published in 2015 in the Opfacing Viewpoints Online collection, I have to admit that the general understanding of trans people is somewhat similar to this one. To quote the article, “Transgender people identify as members of a different gender than their biology at birth.” The article goes on to explain that “biological” women who identify as men are trans men and “biological” men who identify as women are trans women. Transgender as a term itself is basically an umbrella term for people whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, according to “What Does It Mean to Be Transgender?” published in 2015 by the American Psychological Association. This article also delves into how one's sex is actually assigned at birth, referring to one's biological status as male or female and is primarily associated with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. However, gender is actually a social construct that refers to gender roles, behaviors, activities, and other characteristics that a given society might deem appropriate for boys and men or girls and women that influence how people act, interact and they feel themselves. I'll address why I disagree with some of these expressions later, but for now I hope you have a general understanding of what transgender is in today's society. Let's move on to the discrimination that transgender people face today. According to a graphic published in 2015 by Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, a report created by the US Census Bureau used records of name changes and sex coding with the Social Security Administration to create estimates of people who may be transgender and this report actually found that transgender populations tend to be higher in states with laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual identity, such as Washington, Oregon, and Vermont. However, 90% of transgender people surveyed reported experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination at work, and 26% reported losing a job due to being transgender or gender non-conforming. This data was collected by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Aside from workplace discrimination, transgender people still face a great deal of social stigma which has led to a body count. According to NPR Weekend All Things Considered published in January 2015, a UCLA study found that 41% of peopletransgender had attempted suicide. Shifting attention to transgender youth only, more than 50% will have had at least one suicide attempt by their twentieth birthday. In February 2015, a transgender woman named Melonie Rose from Maryland committed suicide at the age of 19 after dealing with an already difficult life and emotional problems. The discrimination Melonie faced only served to exacerbate her situation. At the time of the commemoration his identity was not even recognized and he was only known by his friends. Her own family called her by her birth name rather than as Melonie and called her a he rather than a she. A similar, though more well-known, story occurred in December 2014 in Ohio. A transgender girl named Leelah Alcorn committed suicide after her Christian parents' "extremely negative" reactions to her identity and desire to transition since being designated male at birth. In his suicide note he states that life is not worth living because he is transgender and began suffering from depression when he attempted to come out to his mother at 14, to which his mother responded with no support. Her parents also began isolating her by taking away her phone and laptop, banning her from using social media and seeing her friends who knew of Leelah's identity, and leading her to undergo abusive "conversion therapy" in an attempt to convince Leelah that it wasn't. I'm actually transgender. Her last words were a plea for gender to be taught in schools, for her death to be counted in the number of transgender people who committed suicide that year alone, and for someone to look at that number and say there is something very wrong about this. it. Finally, he begs for society to be fixed so that another story like his never takes place. To this day it appears that her parents continue to deny her transgender identity, referring to her as their son and even preventing her friends from attending her funeral. While Leelah's story has received the most coverage, it's actually not unique. It has been shown that many transgender youth have a tendency towards other mental illnesses caused by discrimination or gender dysphoria, which basically means an extreme dissatisfaction with the gender role assigned to them at birth and by society and the desire to have a body that best suits the gender with which they identify. Furthermore, family rejection, discrimination, and violence have actually contributed to large numbers of transgender and other LGBTQ-identified youth being homeless in the United States, approximately 20 to 40 percent of 1.6 million youth. homeless. Many social services and homeless shelters often fail to serve transgender homeless people culturally and appropriately and often deny them shelter based on their gender identity, inappropriately housing them in the wrong gender living space, and failing to to address the issues facing homeless transgender youth. and adults. Shortly before Christmas 2008, the Salvation Army in Austin, Texas denied hospitalization to transgender woman Jennifer Gale on the grounds that her genitals were incongruent with her gender presentation. She was found dead asleep on a sidewalk outside a shelter run by the Salvation Army following a heart attack caused by unusually cold weather that reached temperatures near freezing. Now that we have clarified two of these points, I will now address why I disagree with some of the language used in the articles "Transgender People" and "What Does It Mean to Be Transgender?" and discuss how theLanguage influences transgender discourse. First, these two articles seem to emphasize the idea that there are only two sexes and two genders, which not only erases the existence of non-binary trans people but also intersex people. To elaborate, the idea that there are only two genders is called gender binary, so those who fall into neither the male nor female categories, or the gender binary, are called non-binary. Now, before you act non-binary, there's a modern, made-up online trend or whatever. There have been numerous cultures throughout the world and throughout history that have accepted the idea of ​​a third gender. In South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is a group of people called Hijra, people who were assigned the male gender at birth but who have a very feminine gender.expression, in other words they present themselves in very feminine way but are recognized as a different gender than feminine or masculine. The Bugis of Indonesia actually divide their society into five genders which are oroane, men, makkunrai, women, calabai which are comparable to transgender women, calalai comparable to transgender men and bissu. To be considered bissu, all aspects of the genre are combined. It is a cultural belief that all five genders should coexist harmoniously. In Japan, the third gender is called X-gender, in China yinyang ren are people who have an equal amount of both feminine and masculine qualities, usually indicating gender non-conforming individuals. In Samoa there is a subculture called fa'afafine who were assigned male at birth but do not identify as either male or female, however they dress as women. In Germany, a third gender has actually been recognized in its official documents according to The Humanist in 2014. Even in Native American, First Nations, and Aboriginal culture, the idea of ​​a third gender called "two-spirit" exists. While the term two spirit was actually coined in Winnipeg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept itself has been around for much, much longer, according to the article Two spirit in Aboriginal culture published in 2009 on Canadian Dimension. Two-spirit generally stems from the belief that a two-spirit individual has two spirits within them, one male and one female, and often do the work of both men and women and have relationships with same-sex partners. Additionally, in many tribes such as the Navajo, Mohave, and Lakota Sioux, two spiritual people were highly respected and believed to possess special spiritual powers according to an article titled "The Native American Traditional of Acceptance" published in 2005. Written in a Liberty article Press in 2010, Native cultures and many Native nations have traditionally had alternative genders, but when Spanish and French missionaries and settlers first encountered these beliefs and practices, they were considered barbaric and resulted in the deaths of practitioners because they did not adhere to the beliefs Judeo-Christian. This forced the two-spirit movement underground. European contact also led to the decline of reverence for two spiritual persons, replacing veneration with the European view that homosexuality is sinful and abhorrent. So now the question of the idea of ​​biological sex remains. If one takes into account the existence of intersex humans and hermaphroditic animals in nature such as snails, slugs, barnacles, many families of fish, and some insects, one could argue that the idea of ​​biological sex as a strict dichotomy is sometimes not it's so accurate in the first place. So what are intersex people? Simply put, intersex means that a person is born with.