In case you haven’t caught on, I didn’t like where I grew up. Vastly more numerous were trips to the shopping malls of suburbia, traffic-locked drives down dismal Long Island highways and long strolls past the homogeny of plastic paneled, ranch style houses that metastasized across my hometown sometime in the early 50’s. I knew I belonged, and still to this day when I imagine myself most being myself what I see is my early childhood: a slender, spectacled kid taking shelter under the leaves of sugar maples and silver pine, dappled by the summer rains of central New York.īut reality is that trips to the woods were an exception in my childhood. And I recognized myself as an equal spirit within that intricate community of life. The natural world, it seemed, was brimming with diversity, thriving on the interplay of unique creatures, each as marvelous as the next. In my childhood, I felt most at home when I was by the edge of a pond, holding a net in my hands to scoop up frogs, or a stick to overturn mossy logs and admire the mealy little microcosms underneath. On today’s episode I’m happy to say we’ll be joined by two such voices: Sam Rose Preminger and Domi Shoemaker This gulf in our understanding not only endangers the trans population, it harms all of us, discouraging marginalized demographics from working together, making it even more difficult for us to dismantle oppressive structures, and denying cisgender people the chance to love their trans neighbors.įortunately, some transgender people are stepping forward to help bridge this divide, sharing their personal stories, dispelling dangerous myths, and helping us envision a more egalitarian future for all. What we’re exposed to instead is whatever our media, political, and social leaders choose to tell us about them, resulting in a perilous gap between actual transgender people and a series of cultural stereotypes. As a result, many cisgender people (meaning those of us whose gender aligns with the one we were assigned at birth) have little to no lived experience interacting with transgender people. Yet despite these recent spikes- the transgender community is still comparatively small: making up roughly 0.6% of the global population. As new generations increasingly have the knowledge and social acceptance to explore their identities, the number of openly transgender people in our world-especially transgender youth-is rapidly rising.
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