In the past few months, no fewer than three Facebook friends have come out as transgendered. I want to clarify they didn't come out to only me. All three did so unreservedly on their pages, telling everyone who cared (and even those who didn't).
Did they do so because it's become something trendy? No, of course not. In fact, if anything, doing so puts them and the people they love at risk, even if it's "only" verbally by people hiding behind their anonymity.
I've had many Facebook friends who are trans~ for years. Some are former students, some school friends, several are friends I've socialized with for years. In all instances, I can genuinely say I hadn't a clue they were trans~ until they came out, their closeted lives were so well-guarded I never saw inside.
And that, I think, is why this gives me hope. Because in this period when hate and willful misunderstanding of people's identity has become a political football bandied about in legislative chambers and school board meetings as if there aren't real, live people involved, and as a group are being held up to ridicule, stereotype, and blame, as individuals they have opened the closet themselves, letting the rest of us see them as they are. Opening themselves not only to the surprise and of their friends but to the blows, sometimes real blows, of strangers or acquaintances who can't imagine a world beyond their own noses, or whose imagination provides them with fear of such a world, in order to live their lives, as my old friend Roger used to say, "in their authenticity."
It is such a big but such a small thing to declare "this is who I am," whether intentionally or not echoing God's statement to Moses, "I am who I am." When even the Baptists recognize God is genderless, can the rest of us accept any less of one another? No, we shouldn't. This is what points up the whole mishigas of states and courts decrying help for the people looking for guidance and giving them punishment as the bellowing of dinosaurs drowning in the mud. This is what gives me hope.
