Doctors and Gender.
Transgenderism is a topic that spans multiple cultures, and ubiquitously seems to have a negative viewpoint amongst all of them. I’ve seen it really bad from the country that my parents immigrated from: Nigeria. Or at least I’ve seen how the stigmatization against LGBTQ+ has such a stranglehold on the community of Nigerian immigrants that my parents interact with. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the stigma against LGBTQ + in is extremely atrocious. Kids terrified to come out to their family in order to not be disowned, even brothers and sisters hiding it from the people you are supposed to be closest to in order to avoid being strong-armed out of their family/support systems. As I read through Why Sex is not Binary, It jogged my memory on a story that had to do with gender and Doctors. How lucky is that?
I have a certain story that I’d like to tell. I don’t remember all the details so bare with me but the strong details have still stuck with me. My cousin had just come back from an optional sensitivity training that he enrolled in a few weeks after He and I had a terrible argument that escalated to me calling him a bigot. That’s a whole other story but he had come back with a story that was closely connected to our family. A very notorious doctor in my parents circle of Nigerian immigrants had just broken it off with his husband after being cheated on. The sympathy for him was overwhelming.
After he got cheated on, he soon transitioned (FtM) and started dating his soon to be wife. The sympathy that was once there was immediately rescinded, insults and threats were sent his way. He was thought of as a devil who would also “corrupt her children”. And soon after all that, they cut him completely out of the community. In their culture, transgenderism or anything along those lines are seen as devilish and evil.
Culture should be used as a means to bring people together. I understand that culture can run deep, but for culture to be deep rooted enough to ruin connections like this is saddening to see. It is remarkably easy to treat people as you would, I don’t understand why people let something minor in the grand scheme of things ruin everything.
Why is it that so many cultures have the same idea of transgenderism being “evil” and or having special powers or things that are considered dangerous? Do you think it comes from religion, from society seeing it as abnormal, or is there another factor that we do not see?
