So much time… so little change

I just read the Scientific American article, The World’s First Trans Clinic, about the clinic made famous by the 2015 movie The Danish Girl.

Oh has my world changed since that movie. Like most of us, I was blissfully unaware of the extraordinarily difficult reality for transgender individuals in this world when I watched The Danish Girl. Like most, I watched the film as though it were ancient history. One likes to think that it was totally different for people in the 20th century. The truth is that it’s not nearly different enough.

In reading the Scientific American article, one quotation struck me like a knife to the heart. It was Dr Hirschfeld’s  words about the gay soldier who died by suicide, a tragedy that greatly affected Hirschfeld’s drive to prevent such tragedies in future, “the soldier had called himself a “curse,” fit only to die, because the expectations of heterosexual norms, reinforced by marriage and law, made no room for his kind.”

This was more than 100 years ago. Yet, before my daughter died, she wrote about why she was leaving us. Her words were like a distant echo of that soldier, “I'm never going to get to a point where I look good and love myself and have a boyfriend and have friends,” Charlie wrote. In her last days she spent a lot of time reading anti-transgender posts online. There is no shortage of such rubbish. She read this stuff because, “It's much easier to kill a monster than it is to kill a flawed and complicated human being with a whole life ahead of them.”

100 years since that soldier died and so little has changed. Those who spout homophobic and transphobic sentiments claim that they have a right to their opinions. But their opinions may as well be the train that ended Charlie’s life. Those opinions are not okay. It’s not okay to convince another human that they are a monster. I am not okay with my beautiful, brilliant, kind, witty daughter having been convinced to kill herself. I am not okay with anyone else’s child feeling that they are less than because of the garbage that is allowed to ooze out of misled individual’s mouths and onto websites and into newspapers, books, and journals that do nothing but harm. How is it that humans can be so cruel? Why is it that the rest of us let them do so much harm? Change needs to happen. The world needs to get better and I will do all I can to help make that so.