We don’t get to define them as wrong.

“But she cannot hear my guilt, so she cleans just one small patch of me before preparing my blood for needle puncture, before she prepares my blood for analysis, before she prepares my blood to know what letters I am.”

They’re always seen as a diagnosis on a piece of paper.

“Trauma or no, I would have been trans no matter what body I’d been born with. Tell the doctors that we exist for the health of humanity, which needs to find wholeness and belief in complexity. Girl in boy’s body or boy inside a girl; call it fate or biology, will, or spiritual choice. But I was not born in the wrong body.”

They don’t want to be seen as wrong.

Aimee Herman’s poems and “The Wrong Body” made me realize how much excessive emphasis we’ve misplaced on the diagnostic side of transgenders. Transgenders are born into a body they don’t agree with and many of them end up doing a sex reassignment surgery, but that doesn’t mean the body is “wrong” or needs “fixing.”

We the oppressors, with our inextricable savior complex, always seek to find the solution that we think is the best for the oppressed.

Oh, you’re a boy born into a girl’s body. That must be painful. Let’s get you diagnosed so we can proceed to the next step. Don’t worry we’ll get you fixed. The results are out: you are medically a transgender. When do you want to get a sex reassignment surgery? It can be anytime you’re comfortable but better be early…

Enough. Enough.

They’re not a random joke that God made for fun. Can they be seen as just enough the way they’re born, and anything they do with it is just an addition but not a fix? Can they be treated the way they want to be treated?

“Being born female makes me a man that good men may look to for ways to understand and honor women, a person that people may look to for ways to find and appreciate themselves.” Schofield genuinely sees his “wrong” body with gratitude and appreciation, and he knows he’s born this way with a purpose.

“The Wrong Body” reminds me of something that a color-blind artist said, “I realized that my color blindness has made me view colors in a different way than normal people. Maybe this deficiency is a gift.”

You can argue that this is romanticizing physical deficiencies. But that’s just from the perspective of an oppressor. They’re born “less” than you so you feel sorry for them. Birds can distinguish between “cherry color” and “hot pepper color”, but they are both just “red” for humans. Birds should feel sorry for us because we’re all color blind.

Similarly, when Schofield wrote that he was not born in the wrong body, it might be just our oppressor illusion that it’s beautiful and sad. Maybe from their perspective, it really is a gift.

And me arguing all these might still sound hypocritical because I’m just an observer.

So let’s listen more to them, the people who’re actually experiencing.