Woman First. Trans Second.
Not letting others define us
Originally published in Prism & Pen, 17-02-20.
‘Transgender' does not define what I am. It defines what I am not.
I'm a transgender woman. However, the way that works as a sentence is by telling you that I was not assigned female at birth. But that I am indeed a woman. Transgender, as a word, only holds value in denoting that I've moved away from my gender as assigned at birth.
Now, as lovely as the trans community is, we could maybe do with remembering this central fact. I say that for a couple of reasons.
For one, remember that being transgender is first and foremost a move away from the gender we are assigned at birth. We don’t need to go as far to explain the non-binary identities of my lovely siblings who are so often overlooked in the endless debates of the 'trans issue' (cue eyeroll emoji). A swath of society would be better understood by the general public, by which I mean the cisgender population, if we gave primacy to the notion that being transgender is a rejection of our assigned genders.
I sometimes think this would be a painfully simple way to explain it to cis folk but an effective one nonetheless. Instead of trying to get people who’ve never experienced any disconnect between their biological sex, their…
