Growing up is hard enough, but imagine growing up and not feeling like you are in the right body. Not only are you in the wrong body, but when you try to tell someone how you feel they tell you that you are wrong. Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry became Sally” further explores this idea. Ryan Anderson gave a lecture about his book on C-Span. Around minute 30 Anderson stated that the federal court of North Carolina claims that biological sex is not what makes us male and female. A very important difference between biological sex and someone’s gender is that biological sex is the anatomy you were assigned at birth and gender is the way someone feels. A person can be male or female and feel feminine or masculine: those adjectives do not mean the same thing. It is clear that not everyone has the same beliefs and that many aspects of the transgender community may go against certain people’s religious beliefs, but we mustn’t try to silence the voices because some do not agree with them. Around minute 43 of Ryan Anderson’s lecture, he stated that large companies and people of power need to stop trying to silence the voices that complicate things. The voices he is referring to are those of the transgender community. Ryan Anderson’s book was removed from Amazon because it was causing an uncomfortable debate for many people and this large company just wanted to remove it altogether. It is wrong that companies like Amazon have the power to do that. The voice of someone who is struggling with their gender identity and someone who is trying to educate the public on an area of our society that should be more important should not be silenced. This is taking away their right to freedom of speech.
Ryan Anderson brought up some very shocking statistics about a correlation between high suicide rates and people who are transgender. The discrimination and shame that many people feel when they wish to be a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth is such a high burden that they feel they have no other choice. Society puts so much pressure on the idea that it is wrong when it is a feeling that they have no control over. In the book “Transgender Identities” by Alessandra Lemma, she continues to explore the demographic and the ideas of how society could change to help. On page 2 she states, “If transgender is understood as a natural variation, this may provide some validation to those who feel discriminated against for deviating from the binary gender norm.” If society did not discriminate against those who are transgender and were able to recognize it as a real and hard experience to go through, maybe they would be more accepted. There is a lack of education in this category because of the controversy around it. School systems do not want to be the ones to upset parents by talking about it and educating their students when it could help the students to learn about it.
In addition, CS Lewis writes about this topic as well. In the first chapter of his book “The Abolition of Man” titled “Men without Chests,” he talks about two authors, Gaius and Titus. One specific part of their book called “The Green Book” that he points out is when they are describing a waterfall. One of them calls the waterfall “sublime” while, in contrast, the other calls the waterfall “pretty”. When one of them describes the waterfall as “sublime” they are not talking about the appearance of the waterfall, but rather his feelings. He says “I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime […] I have sublime feelings” (1). A person can confuse their feelings at the time with how they perceive something they are looking at. With our new age of technology, people can communicate whatever they want whenever they want. If someone had a bad day and sees a tweet from a transgender person that they do not necessarily agree with they may then have negative feelings towards all transgender people. When that tweet had nothing to do with the person themself. Society communicates that it is acceptable to spread hate about transgender people when it is morally wrong. Someone should never be able to spread hate, but with technology being what it is today that is the new reality. Technology allows for people’s thoughts to reach people they may not have previously, but not everything is put out there is positive. Is social media doing more harm than good?
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