Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

What Family Really Means

... is doing whatever it takes to keep a loving family together.  Even if one of the pieces isn't what you all thought it was when you picked it up.
Tags: family skills, gender studies, like this, news
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  • 3 comments
wyld_dandelyon

I love this story.

wyld_dandelyon

March 11 2012, 16:55:07 UTC 9 years ago

It amazes me how often people who transition are seen as "different people" rather than the same person who have changed. Of course, it also amazes me that people who move away become, to some of their friends, distant strangers.

We don't (usually) see someone as a different person when they change jobs or spouses, after all.

One could guess that changing the name is part of it, but we don't see a woman as a different person when she gets married, or even someone else who changes their name from one they dislike to one they like as being inherently a different person.
ysabetwordsmith

Re: I love this story.

ysabetwordsmith

March 11 2012, 21:51:57 UTC 9 years ago

I think that part of it depends on where a person places the weight of their identity. For some people, gender is absolutely central. For some people, their career is, or their marriage. The more important a given facet of identity is, the bigger the shift will be if a person's relationship to it changes.

Then too, there's the whole "betrayal" issue. People often feel they've been lied to by gender-variant folks. What they do not realize is that, a vast majority of the time, they're reacting to the end of a lie, not the beginning. Cisgender people think of transitioning as the creation of a false identity. Transgender people think of it as ceasing to pretend that they are something they're not. It's that divergence that often causes the sense of "becoming a different person." It's not that you don't know them now. It's that you never did.