Gender Identity

Gender identity is someone's private sense and subjective experience of their gender. This is generally described as someone's private sense of being a man, woman, or another gender.

A person’s gender identity may or may not correspond to the gender stated on their birth certificate. Gender identity is not to be confused with sexual orientation, because sexual orientation is what gender you feel sexually and emotionally attracted to.

Gender expression is the way that others communicate their gender to others. This can be through clothing, interests, etc.

There are more types of genders other than male and female.

The term cisgender/gender normativity is when a person still identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth through childhood and adulthood.

When someone's gender identity and or expression are different from what is traditionally expected, they identify as gender variant/gender nonconforming or genderqueer.

Transgender (trans) people's gender identity and or expression is different from the one that they were assigned at birth.

Some transgender people were born male but express themselves as a girl, and vice versa. Others express gender fluidity.

Gender fluidity is a wide range of gender expressions that aren't directly masculine or feminine.

Not all transgender people choose to transition by modifying their bodies to match their gender identity (by going through surgery, cosmetic, and or hormonal interventions).

Male-to-female transgender people have to take testosterone-blocking agents, estrogen, and progesterone. Female-to-male transgender people have to take testosterone.

Transgender people can have any kind of sexual orientation, such as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, and pansexual.

When a child is transgender, their parents might have a hard time accepting them or understanding the fact that their child might be a different gender than s/he was at birth.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), conversion/reparative therapy is a kind of therapy that aims to make a transgender person accept the gender on their birth certificate and reject their gender identity they have chosen for themselves. Conversion therapy is also used to change a person's sexual orientation.

Many therapists and medical professionals oppose the use of conversion/reparative therapy, since it is based upon the assumption that not being straight and or cisgender is a mental disorder and that it should be fixed.

Transition therapy is a type of therapy that helps transgender people through the process of changing their gender.

There are many reasons why a parent might not accept their child being transgender. They might feel like they have lost a daughter or son in a way, or that they don’t know their child anymore.

This experience can be traumatic for both the child and the parents. The child may fear that their parents will not accept them or are afraid of rejection, and the parents may feel like they have done something wrong with their parenting or that it goes against their religion.

An inspirational teenager named Jazz Jennings was born male, but has lived female since she was five years old. Jazz Jennings is not the name she was born with, but she adopted this name once she started to live as a female. She started showing her feminine side at 15 months, and when she was two years old she started verbalizing her feelings.

Now Jazz, at 14 years old, is the unofficial face of America's transgender youth, and one of Time Magazine's 25 most-influential teenagers of 2014, according to Times Magazine and America's transgender youth. Jazz has also made a picture book called I Am Jazz that tells stories of what she went through in her childhood. She hopes that the book will help children understand what it's like to be transgender.

Leelah Alcorn was from Ohio, and she was a male-to-female transgender. This means that Leelah was born male, but identified as female. Her name at birth was Joshua Alcorn. Her story demonstrates how transgender people get treated and how they feel when they aren't accepted by their family and friends, according to professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter, transgender athlete, and LGBT activist Fallon Fox.

Leelah came out as transgender to her parents at 14. On December 28, 2014, she ended her life by walking in front of a semi truck at seventeen years of age.

Before she died, she posted a suicide note on Tumblr expressing that she hoped her death would create a dialogue about discrimination and that this would cause people to be more accepting.

When Leelah was 16, her parents refused to let her go to transition treatment, and instead they put her into conversion/reparative therapy. Her parents had sent her to conversion therapy with the intention of making her reject her gender identity and accept the gender listed on her birth certificate.

Once Leelah revealed her attraction to males to her classmates, her parents took her out of school and didn't allow her to access social media. Her suicide note also states that her parents felt like she was attacking their image and embarrassing them. Loneliness and alienation are key reasons for her suicide.

"I'm never going to have enough love to satisfy me," her suicide note says. "I'm never going to find a man who loves me. I'm never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There's no winning. There's no way out. I'm sad enough already, I don't need my life to get any worse. People say 'it gets better' but that isn't true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse."

After Leelah's death, her parents faced online harassment, and were accused of misgendering Leelah in comments to the media by calling her "Joshua." Users left a massive amount of comments on Leelah's mother, Carla's, Facebook page. "Your daughter killed herself because of you," and "The entire Internet ... can see what you have done," are some of the comments that were posted.

Both of her parents' phone numbers were posted publicly on the Internet without their consent, which led to much more harassment towards Leelah's parents, Carla and Doug.

However, social media doesn't always have a bad effect on people struggling with their gender identity. Some people say that the social media helps them find others that are feeling the same way about their gender, and they don't feel as alone as they did before.

Leelah's parents are being cyber bullied by random users on the Internet for their disapproval of their daughter's gender identity. Leelah's mother, Carla Alcorn, was interviewed by CNN.

“We don’t support that, religiously,” she told CNN. “But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”

Carla and Doug did not know how to deal with a transgender child, nor did they support it religiously. Conversion therapy is what they were taught to believe was the right way to support Leelah. To Leelah however, this was not the right way. Both Leelah and her parents suffered from emotional pain over this issue, and they both felt harassed and misunderstood.

According to The Williams Institute, 4.6 percent of the overall United States population has self-reported a suicide attempt, 10-20 percent for gay, lesbian, and bisexual respondents, and 41 percent of trans or gender nonconforming people have attempted suicide.

This article has some mentions of suicide. If you feel you need support, contact a school counselor, school psych, the local crisis line at 425-258-4357, or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8355).

For any transgender kids and teenagers seeking help, they can call the GLBT National Hotline at 1-888-843-4564, seek a school counselor, or they can send an email at help@GLBThotline.org.

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