MARCH 31, TUESDAY

TRANS DAY

Yesterday I happened on a celebration of transgender people in Marshall. The event, it looked like a party with decorations, was almost over and breaking up. There appeared to be some men dressed up as women but I couldn’t tell, or guess, if most of the people there were transgender or not.

But what struck me was how hard it must be if you feel you are a woman but look like a man or feel you are a man but look like a woman. How hard it must be just to be yourself and be what you feel like. Because you aren’t the norm people often either mock you for being different or feel threatened because you don’t fit into their category of what is normal.

But in thinking more about it it seems to me that in a way people who don’t fit into normal categories are actually demonstrating, in a more extreme way, the situation that everyone is in. Part of being human is to want to be like everyone else, but at the same time an important part of being human is being youself and going your own way. Our individual DNA is different, our cultural upbringing is different, our experience of life is different. We naturally veer away from each other and find our own path. We want to belong and fit in while at the same time we want to veer away from each other and to live by the patterns that seem most alive to us. That is all a transgender person is doing, all that a gay or lesbian person is doing, all that a straight man or a woman are doing, we are all trying at the same time to fit into a group and to also go our own way. This was what this little party was about, a place where transgender people could just be themselves with other similar people.

It seems to me that in a way trans people are a model by leading the drive by any one of us to let go of patterns that aren’t satisfying and to find patterns that are fully alive. They show us the way. But how hard it is to be a leader and one that doesn’t fit in. We can learn from those leading the way but also honor them for demonstrating how to be yourself when that means being different from everyone else. That honor could also be what the party was about.