From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/the-choice-that-isnt_b_3574277.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
Brynn Tannehill
07/15/2013
When I first blogged on The Huffington Post six months ago, I tried to address the most controversial aspects of transition. Perhaps none was more controversial than my statement that transition is often perceived as a choice, and a selfish one at that. One of the most consistent criticisms of people who transition later in life is that they did not take the effects of their transition on others into account. This is untrue, as most transgender people agonize and delay transition for years precisely because of how hard it will be.
When a lesbian or gay person chooses a life of celibacy and isolation for religious reasons, many people condemn that choice because they see it as both harmful to the person making the choice and damaging to society as a whole because it stigmatizes homosexuality. Another related situation is when lesbian and gay people find themselves in heterosexual marriages with children because they felt pressured to conform.
However, I have seen cases where the same people who would advise lesbians and gays to come out and be themselves counsel transgender people to stay in the closet because being transgender is so socially stigmatized, or for the sake of everyone else in the transgender person’s life. In some of the cases where people have questioned my own transition, I suspect that they would have not hold LGB people to a similar standard.
I don’t believe this seemingly inconsistent viewpoint comes from a place of malice. Instead, I believe it comes from the mistaken perception that being transgender is a choice, or that transition is more of a choice than whom you sleep with. Not only are both perspectives harmful to transgender people, but they hurt the LGB community’s ability to rebut the charges of religious-right leadership.
There’s little evidence to suggest that gender identity is any more a choice than sexual orientation is. The medical and psychiatric establishments tried for decades to change both, without success. More recent studies have suggested that gender dysphoria is a deeply hard-wired perception of our own bodies. However, when people who are otherwise sympathetic to the LGB community seem to agree with Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, it actually diminishes their ability to argue that being gay isn’t a choice either.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/the-choice-that-isnt_b_3574277.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
