Binary Thinking
My day started with a bit of irony.
The mayor sent me a letter saying I would not be selected to serve on a commission I wanted to participate with. She found other candidates that better fit the state requirements for diversity. In a touch of irony, the letter was addressed to Ms. Kim Grehn.
Hey, I've dealt with this misunderstanding (prejudice?) my whole life. But trust me, there are other males named Kim. I went to a party once where there were three men named Kim. Yes, the axis of the earth tilted slightly, no harm was done.
So many of us are binary thinkers. There could only be two ways of thinking, right? Anything else is an outlier, strange even. Taken to an extreme, feared. Fear of the 'other' is exploited by certain groups of politicians and certain religious leaders to create the illusion they have the answers that will keep us all safe. They will play on our fears and phobias.
Trans Fear
My situation doesn't even come close to the fears being exploited over the prejudice against people who fall outside the binary explanations of sexuality. It's being used now to ban trans individuals from participating in sports activities based on their gender identity.
There's an article in Psychology Today about the fear of gender identity that may fall outside what is considered by some to be the norm. That assumption alone is dangerous because it marginalizes people.
I'll drop down to the conclusions. You can read the article. You might see a glimmer of enlightenment.
In other words, if you strongly believe that there are only two sexes and that those two sexes always create two genders, and that it is not possible for someone to change from being one gender to another, being presented with a masculine trans man (someone who was identified female at birth) who visually and behaviorally is indistinguishable from a cisgender man, may be a very jarring experience that challenges binary beliefs about gender. Furthermore, gender conforming trans individuals may elicit distinctiveness threat because if you yourself are a man and hinge a great deal of your identity on being a man, what does this piece of your identity really mean if someone born female can ‘pass’ as being just “as much of a man” as you? Thus, the more an individual strongly believes in the gender binary, the more threatening transgender individuals (especially those who ‘pass’) are to that individual’s own personal identity as either a man or a woman.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that a transgender individual’s gender expression is not responsible for eliciting the prejudice of others. Rather, transprejudice stems from an internal process in which the person holding the prejudice experiences a threat to an aspect of their own identity, and thus lashes out against trans individuals as a means of trying to reaffirm the boundaries surrounding important aspects how they define their identity—in this case, their gender.
Undervalue leads to underestimating
Open your mind, listen and learn. The world is not binary.
Your fear of others is holding people back. Your fear is holding you back.
Great article!
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