Would you be friends with a transgender person? A full 27 percent of American adults on a recent YouGov survey said no. Even fewer—less than 20 percent—said they would be open to dating a transgender person.
excerpt from “Why A Lot of Americans Don’t Want To Befriend a Transgender Person”
~ blog written by SAMANTHA ALLEN (SAMANTHA.ALLEN@THEDAILYBEAST.COM)
Could it be true? Is it possible that the average American citizen wouldn’t be up for hanging out with a transgender man or woman? “I can’t believe it,” Savannah retorted sarcastically.
Of course, the above is very much the normal reaction to members of the transgender community. Baby Boomers don’t understand us or want to understand us while millennials are more apt to engage with us on a personal level. It still will be several years before transgender America will be accepted like in many other countries.
We are the strange in-betweeners of the masculine and the feminine, some of us never settling on one specific label. Will people ever accept what they fail to comprehend? It is a difficult challenge since many of us do not understand why we do what we do either. Not because we are unable to face ourselves, but because we really don’t have a rationale for it.
If you look at the survey results, it doesn’t bode well for a transgender individual who wants friends or a partner to love. A low percentage would want to engage with a transgender man or woman as a friend. Even fewer would want to date one, let alone admit that they had done so. Are we still such a taboo or sideshow novelty that people cannot see that we are human beings with actual human emotions? Do people believe that we can’t feel joy, pain, shame, hurt, or love? Or is the transgender label so all-encompassing that they have blinders to anything about us that go beyond a 2-dimensional stereotype?
Many transgender individuals feel that they will never find friendship and love outside the transgender community. All any of us wants is to be considered normal and accepted as people. All I ask is to keep from shunning that which you may not understand. We are transgender, but we are people first. People who strive for the best existence possible in the limited time we have on this earth.
