I am a transgender man.
Partly I wish this wasn’t my first line of introduction, and partly I am glad that it is so. Most introductions don’t start off along these lines — “I am a man” or “I am a woman” — and even rarer are introductions that sound like “I am a cis man” or “I am a cis woman.” The reasons for this are obvious and direct our attention to the gender identity assumptions of our contemporary society. Uttering the word “trans” sounds like a whimper rather than a bang in the face of the threats that take brutal forms. It smells of fear, pain, alienation, and related elements that we all try overcoming in our day-to-day life.
Yet, it’s not like our society is unfamiliar with the word ‘trans’ in other contexts. The prefix trans-, meaning ‘across’,
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