The Idiosyncratic Routine

In today’s current day and age, identity politics is a huge deal for many Americans. It is important to identify who you are as a person through key characteristics, and it helps to characterize how many obstacles you likely have faced in your life. Common examples of demographics include blacks and Asian (i.e. based on ethnicity) and also gay vs. straight (i.e. based on sexual orientation).

Even male vs. female is a legitimately important demographic, especially considering how much sexism there is in the world today, indicating that women objectively have it harder in life than men for various reasons. But an important demographic combines both sexual orientation and gender. We are of course talking about transgender people, and in particular, transgender women.

Transgender women are people who were born as biological males but have since realized that they are women on the inside. They have become quite prominent thanks to the emergence Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce Jenner), and today, transgender people are properly recognized as a member of the LGBTQ community.

However, unlike being lesbian, gay or bisexual, transgender people have it worse off. For one, the confusion of who you are sexually attracted to is nothing like the confusion of who you are as a person. Think about it – if every day you look down at your genitals that you were born with and think something is wrong, that is going to be a huge thing to deal with on a constant basis, and something that you can’t escape from your thoughts, no matter how hard you try.

This confusion also typically lasts longer than the confusion of not being heterosexual. While most people realize what being homosexual or bisexual is in their early high school years (if not early) and have seen at least a few of their peers coming out of the closet, transgender people typically don’t know how to interpret their confused feelings until they are well into adulthood.

This is just how it is in today’s society. Because homosexuality is more well-known and more widely accepted than transgenderism, people who are transgender may know what they really are, and in fact may confuse their transgender nature as just being homosexual or bisexual to some degree, which only makes things harder to clarify as they get older.

Now once a person has identified themselves as a transgender woman (i.e. born as a biological male), it is now twice as difficult because you are dealing with all the difficulties of being transgender along with identifying yourself as a women, which comes with its own set of obstacles that all biological women are already facing on a daily basis.

So as much as you may feel like you are oppressed as a typical woman in American society, keep in mind that transgender women have it a whole lot worse. They need to essentially take on two separate sets of demographics, each with their own distinct obstacles, and take them on as a single person. It is definitely something that deserves our sympathy, not only as biological women, but as compassionate people in general.