How does transgender work?

Answer 1

Well, you get up in the morning, take a shower, brush your hair, women get on makeup, men shave. You drive or ride to work, you work, you go home. If you are speaking of being born a certain outward sex but your inner self doesn't match that physical representation, then it works by separating gender, sex and orientation. Gender is a societal role: woman, man. Sex is a physical pattern of organs: female, male, other. Orientation is what sex turns you on: male, female, other. If you do separate them, then just because you have male organs doesn't make you a man, and having female organs doesn't make you a woman.

With most people, their sex, gender and orientation fall into a basic pattern: male, man, straight or female, woman, straight or male, man, gay or female, woman, gay. Transgender relates to a difference between sex and gender. For those "most people" they feel naturally that their sex and their gender "HAVE TO" be aligned. A transgendered person doesn't live with this "HAVE TO" of matching states: in fact they don't match and this doesn't make sense to the "most people" because they don't see sex and gender separate.

Ethnicity is this way for individual peoples that are isolated; their skin color and features are only one way and without seeing another that isn't, that's all there is "but all people have very tan skin, brown or green eyes and brown almost black hair!" At least until they meet a pale blonde with blue eyes. At first it doen't make sense but they finally most come to see that being human doesn't mean you have certain color or features.

Ethnicity doesn't work well as a theme fro transgendered persons because you don't see people walking around "I may look asian, but really I'm as African as they come!" Since sex, gender and orientation go even further in a human's identity than physical appearances, the idea of a dichotomy is just unbelievable.