My Story Part 144 – Social Animals

Humans are a social animal, we like to travel in packs, we like being around our friends. Therefore we fear rejection, when friends pull away from us or a stranger back away it hurts us. When you are trans you face rejection every day.

I can only speak for myself, but when I am rejected I wonder was it because I’m trans? I have seen so many trans-people having a hard time handling rejection when our family disowns us, when our friends stop calling, when at work new assignments stop coming. I had a friend who thought that at work they didn’t give her assignment that should have been her because she is trans, it turned out that they had a special job that they wanted her to do and wanted her available for it.

I was going out with a girlfriend and all of a sudden she stopped calling me and answering my calls and I thought for sure it was because she couldn’t deal with being seen with a group of trans-people. However, it turned out to be for a completely different reason why she dumped me. But in my mind I thought… it’s because I’m trans.

I think that for many of us we all carry the stigma and guilt of being trans and that it is why we jump to conclusions when we were rejected, it is our albatross that we carry around our neck.

I think it is the result of society’s not so subtle pressure to conform. I remember seeing a video of school children playing and one of the boys was playing with the girls, the other boys went over to boy who was playing with the girls and brought him back over to the boys’ side of the room. That was social pressure to conform, a not so subtle slap on the wrist.  When I was going to grad school we had to read The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson and write on a chapter that we liked and I wrote about the chapter on Conformity,

Many of the members were in fear that they would be found out by their loved ones; they are not so much victim of prejudice but more victims of not conforming to society’s norms.

I also had to read Jae Schriver’s Human Behavior in the Social Environment where writes about the Kohlberg model about how we form of our “social perspective” I wrote about it saying,

A third area that pertains to conformity is also mentioned by Schriver (1998) when he list the stages of Kohlberg model; stages 3 and 4. Where stage 3 focuses on good relations and the approval of others and stage 4 is about our desire to conform to social norms.

We learn at a very early age the cost of not following the gender norms that society has set for us. When you cross the gender norms society tries to force you back in the box, society does not like the fringes and I think that is the reason why so many of us fear rejection. It is because we see it or hear about it every day, how someone was fired from work when they came out or a trans-woman was asked to leave a bar because she upset the other people in the bar or a stranger came up to them and told them that they are damned and going to hell.

Some people call me brave when I transitioned and in many ways they were right, it does take a certain amount of braveness to stand up to society.

My Story is a weekly series of blog posts about my transition and observation of life as a trans-person.