morganoperandi easily explains from a cis-gender perspective how someone can be transgender and it makes perfect sense. It’s a really great post and a simple concept, but even if this doesn’t work for you it really doesn’t matter, you don’t have to understand someone to respect them and just let them live.
Source: morganoperandi
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I think the confusion might be because more people are like me than most assume. I’m a cis-gender woman, but not because I feel somehow attached to being a woman. It’s more like I happen to fit the general description of a woman and I don’t see any point in struggling against it. If more people somehow reflexively referred to me as “he”, I wouldn’t feel weird or uncomfortable. If my brain was put on a robot, I’d probably be “they/them”, and wouldn’t care much if people referred to me as “he” or as “she” as I would be fine with either.
I think so much of the problem cisgender people have with understand us and understand trans identity is because it comes with an inherent necessity to admit ignorance. “I don’t know” is all there is. “Why do you feel like a man/woman/both/neither?” “I don’t know.” That’s all there is. There is no specific, one reason that we can point to and go, “Oh, there’s the reason. That’s it. That’s why.” It doesn’t work that way. To admit that we are trans is to admit and accept our own inability to understand something as crucially identity defining as gender and how it works. We don’t know. None of us do. It just is the way that it is. And for a lot of people that kind of unknown, uncertain, completely unresolved question mark hanging there in perpetuity is absolutely terrifying. Cis people who cannot understand or accept transgender people cannot accept the unknowns – cannot admit their own lack of knowledge or expertise or understanding, so they fight it. They fight against it and deny that it even exists because they can’t explain it and they cannot leave something so integral to their own identity on the gameboard of life unexplained, unresolved and nebulas. It throws their entire world view and personal identity into chaos and question. Transphobic people are not scared of trans people, they’re scared of what trans people mean in a world where they think they have the answers for everything. We are proof that they do not, and that cannot be allowed or tolerated.