These real-life stories of trans teen athletes are incredibly mundane, and that's awesome

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Originally published at: These real-life stories of trans teen athletes are incredibly mundane, and that's awesome | Boing Boing

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This is really true for most aspects of trans people’s lives, when we’re allowed to live them. Because we’re just people. Some people have blue eyes, others have red hair, and a very small number of us have a gender identity that doesn’t match our chromosomes. It really doesn’t have to be viewed any differently than that.

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Make transness mundane again? :thinking:

But seriously, the amount of fear that a small group of folks just trying to go about their lives in peace have caused some violent assholes is really confusing to me (also enraging, of course). Trans folks are just… folks! Just trying to get by and live their lives without becoming the center of a shit show… I don’t know why that is so difficult to wrap one’s head around, but apparently, it is.

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I first met a trans person in 1990, though I was aware they existed. Even after that I only very rarely heard about trans people in the news until around 2010, and most of the time it was because I was specifically looking for LGBTQ+ issues. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, from my perspective, the coverage exploded, most of it falsely portraying trans people as a threat, after Obergefell and conservatives realized that same-sex marriage was a losing issue that they couldn’t reliably use for fundraising anymore.

I realize life for trans people wasn’t easy before that but these stories still speak to how their lives could be.

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I was quite heartened last night at my Friday night hockey game. It’s a bunch of old farts, but we are in a small town where the primary employment is a mill. Not Redneckistan, but there are parallels. A mostly men’s sportsball game in a small town might not be the most inclusive venue.

However, one of the players who was there last night was a trans woman. And… nobody blinked, nothing happened. She was ok at hockey (better than me) and not exactly shy about it (her jersey was basically a rainbow), but it was a complete non-issue. After the game she was bullshitting with the rest of us with a beer in her hand like anyone else. Which is exactly how it should be, though not what I might have expected.

This gives me hope. Sure, the well-funded, globally coordinated anti-trans movement has made some headway, but at the level of regular folks I think the ground is shifting for the good.

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They’ve made some laws, too. I understand that for most people’s interactions with trans folks, everything seems pretty hunky-dory in Trans Land™, but they are screaming inside their heart because lawmakers are most certainly targeting their existence. Along with that rhetoric comes the inevitable violent knee-jerk reactionist who has to be watched for, always.

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You can never quite relax all the way in day-to-day interactions, and it is fucking exhausting, before you even see anything deliberately hurtful on social media, or new attacks via the news, or some muttered slur you’re not sure you heard in the street…
I’m in the UK, at least I don’t have to worry about being shot.

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Entirely true yes. I’m not trans and don’t have the gall to assume I know what anyone else is experiencing. I personally think the ongoing, global and coordinated campaign against trans (and other LGBTQ persons) is monstrous and we need to oppose it where we can. I am still going to take some heart in the experiences of the trans people I know (such as my immediate boss, a few coworkers and some of the other upper management in my workplace).

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And you should, we need allies!

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