In recent years, a group of people has gained more mainstream attention and, although society has more or less been understanding, they are always met with ridicule and a general lack of understanding or refusal to understand. These people I'm talking about are transgender people. Today I'm going to discuss what it means to be transgender, the discrimination they face today, and how our language affects discourse related to transgender people. I hope this helps you better understand transgender people and how gender and biological sex are perceived so that you can become more accepting of transgender people and empathize with what they may experience in life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay First of all, while I disagree with some of the terms used in the article titled “Transgender People” published in 2015 in the Opposing Viewpoints Online collection, I admit that the general understanding of trans people is somewhat similar to this one. To quote the article, “Transgender people identify as members of a gender different from their birth biology. The article goes on to clarify that "biological" women who identify as men are trans men and "biological" men who identify as women are trans women. Transgender as a term in itself is basically an umbrella term for people whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that generally associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth, according to “What does it mean to be transgender?” ?" published in 2015 by the American Psychological Association. This article also delves deeper into how your sex is assigned at birth, referring to your biological status as male or female and is primarily associated with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormonal prevalence, and external and internal anatomy However, gender is actually a social construct referring to the gender roles, behaviors, activities, and other characteristics that a given society may deem appropriate for boys. and men or for girls and women and which influence the way people act, interact and feel I will explain later why I do not agree with certain terms, but for now I. hope you have a general idea of ​​what transgender is in today's society. Now let's move on to the discrimination that transgender people face today. According to a 2015 graphic published by Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, a report created by the U.S. Census Bureau used records of first name changes and gender coding with the Social Security Administration to create estimates of people likely to be transgender and this report actually found that transgender populations tend to be higher in states with laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, like Washington, Oregon, and Vermont. However, 90% of transgender people surveyed reported experiencing harassment, mistreatment or discrimination at work and 26% reported losing their job because they were transgender or gender non-conforming. This data was collected by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. In addition to discrimination in the workplace,Transgender people still face great social stigma which has resulted in a body count. According to NPR Weekend All Things Considered published in January 2015, a UCLA study found that 41 percent of transgender people had attempted suicide. If we focus only on young transgender people, more than 50% of them will have made at least one suicide attempt before their twentieth birthday. In February 2015, a transgender woman named Melonie Rose from Maryland committed suicide at the age of 19 after facing an already difficult life and emotional issues. The discrimination Melonie faced did not only exacerbates his situation. At his memorial service, his identity was not even recognized and was only known to his friends. Her own family referred to her by her birth name rather than Melonie and referred to her by his last name rather than his wife. A similar, albeit more well-known, story occurred in December 2014 in Ohio. A transgender girl named Leelah Alcorn committed suicide after her Christian parents' "extremely negative" reactions to her identity and desire to transition since she was assigned male at birth. In her suicide note, she claims that life is not worth living because she is transgender and that she began suffering from depression when she tried to come out to her mother at the age of 14, to which his mother did not respond with support. Her parents also began to isolate her by confiscating her phone and laptop, forbidding her from using social media and seeing her friends who knew Leelah's identity, and taking her to "therapy." “conversion” abusive to try to convince Leelah that she was. I'm not really transgender. Her final words were a plea for gender to be taught in schools, for her death to be counted in the number of transgender people who have committed suicide in this year alone, and for someone to look at that number and say that there is something very wrong Finally, she begs that society simply be fixed so that another story like hers does not take place. To this day, it appears that her parents still deny her transgender identity, calling her their son and even banned her friends from attending her funeral. Although Leelah's story has received the most media coverage, it is actually not unique. It has been shown that many transgender youth tend to suffer from other mental illnesses brought on by discrimination or gender dysphoria, which essentially means extreme dissatisfaction with the gender role they were assigned to birth and by society and a desire to have a body that fits more. the gender they identify with. Additionally, family rejection, discrimination, and violence have actually contributed to large numbers of transgender and other LGBTQ-identified youth experiencing homelessness in the United States, approximately 20 to 40 percent of 1.6 million homeless young people. Many social services and homeless shelters often fail to serve transgender homeless people in a culturally appropriate manner and often deny them shelter based on their gender identity, inappropriately housing them in a sheltered space. housing of the wrong gender and fail to address the issues facing homeless transgender youth. and adults. Just before Christmas 2008, the Salvation Army in Austin, Texas, denied shelter to transgender woman Jennifer Gale on the grounds that her genitals did not match her gender. She was found dead, sleeping on a sidewalk in front of a shelter run by the Armyof Salvation, following a heart attack caused by abnormally cold weather, reaching temperatures close to zero. Now that we have two of these points out of the way, I will now address why I disagree with some of the language used in the articles "Transgender People" and "What Does It Mean to Be Transgender?" and discuss how language affects transgender speech. First of all, these two articles seem to emphasize the idea that there are only two sexes and two genders which not only erases the existence of non-binary trans people but also intersex people. To elaborate, the idea that there are only two genders is called gender binarism, so those who do not fit into any of the categories of male or female, nor the gender binary, are said to be non-binary. Now, before you act non-binary, there's a modern, made-up online trend or something. Many cultures throughout the world and history have accepted the idea of ​​a third gender. In South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is a group of people called Hijra, who are people who were assigned the male gender at birth but have a very feminine.expression, in other words they present themselves in a very feminine way but they are recognized as a gender other than feminine or masculine. The Bugis of Indonesia actually divide their society into five genders which are oroane, men, makkunrai, women, calabai who are comparable to transgender women, calalai who are comparable to transgender men and bissu. To be considered a bissu, all aspects of the genre are combined. It is a cultural belief that all five genders should coexist harmoniously. In Japan, the third gender is called X-gender, in China, yinyang ren are people who possess an equal number of feminine and masculine qualities, which generally means gender non-conforming individuals. In Samoa there is a subculture called fa'afafine who were given male at birth but do not identify as either male or female, but dress as a woman. In Germany, a third gender has actually been recognized on its official documents according to The Humanist in 2014. Even in Native American, First Nations, and Aboriginal culture, there is the idea of ​​a third gender called "two-spirit." Although the term two-spirit was coined in Winnipeg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept itself has been around much longer, according to the 2009 Canadian Dimension article Two Spirit in Indigenous Culture . Two-Spirit generally comes from the belief that a Two-Spirit individual has two spirits within them, a man and a woman, and that they often do the work of a man and a woman and have relationships with partners of the same kind. sex. Additionally, in many tribes such as the Navajo, Mohave and Lakota Sioux, two spiritual people were highly respected and believed to possess special spiritual powers, according to an article titled "The Native American Tradition of Acceptance" published in 2005 Written in a 2010 Liberty Press article, Native cultures and many indigenous nations have traditionally had alternative genders, but when Spanish and French missionaries and settlers first discovered these beliefs and practices, they were. considered barbaric and led to the death of practitioners because they did not adhere to Judeo-Christian beliefs. This forced the Two-Spirit movement underground. European contact also led to the decline of respect for Two-Spirit people, replacing reverence with European views that homosexuality is sinful and repugnant..