Repossessing Normal

queenemily’s Questioning Transphobia post on the “self-narrating zoo exhibit” really struck a chord with me. For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about an experience I had while doing yet another diversity training, a duty which I have decided ends the minute I leave for graduate school.

While I don’t have the most experience with public speaking, I’ve done a good share of diversity trainings in my day. I’m not unused to once again trotting out my story for public consumption by total strangers. But I go into every training with a policy to be honest when telling my story. Which means I do, in abbreviated terms, mention that for most of my childhood I was emotionally abused and manipulated by my mother, with serious consequences.

At one talk, however, this abuse became the crux on which the discussion turned, to the point that my cisgendered listeners felt comfortable passing judgment on my own, very personal life choices. This isn’t exactly uncommon—when other, non-“trans” factors become part of a trans person’s life experience, all previous context does an acrobatic swan dive out of the collective windows of cisgendered listeners’ minds, and the entire conversation shifts to how one’s past has “contributed to” or “caused” their transness.

In the case of abuse, both emotional and physical, it can make the ‘abnormality’ of transness communicable. Abuse gives people uncomfortable with the concept of fluid gender identities an explanatory rock to cling to. Even more, it allows cisgendered folks the perfect tool to, in their view legitimately, deconstruct personal experiences into a clinical Connect Four, with double threat bonus points if the trans person has more than one psychological issue.

Yet this deconstruction of experience has  more serious consequences for trans folks than for their cisgendered gay, lesbian, and bisexual counterparts – it is these personal experiences which form much of the argument justifying seeking medical operational procedures or hormones. Trans people in the United States and elsewhere already have to leap through numerous procedural hoops to get necessary treatment, and any hint of abuse can move those hoops up to almost impossible heights.

In a piece on the creation of the DSM V—around which a whole other controversy swirls on the inclusion of Gender Identity Disorder—Brooke Gladstone, co-host of WNYC’s “On The Media,” said “Maybe the expectation that there is a “normal” is the most insidious disorder of all.” In this, I would agree. As a whole, our culture creates the illusion of an achievable “ideal” by which every single person, regardless of their background or situation, is judged. And the lengths to which some will go to achieve this ideal can be staggering, as well as the risks one can incur in spurning them.

Personally, though, I’m not sure spurning entirely the ideal of normal is the best solution to ending the reign of the “normals.” “Normal” can never really be defeated due to the duality by which we interface with and understand the world. “Normal” is the baseline against which things can be ‘objectively’ judged.

Instead, I would argue what needs to happen in changing the qualifications for achieving “normal”-ity. And transgender individuals, if they choose to, are uniquely positioned to repossess the very idea of normality. When a trans person is first diagnosed with GID, they are categorized as “abnormal,” and other. Yet so much of the “transitioning” process (at least in America) centers around the essential element of passing, an act whose very goal is total cultural immersion and acceptance. Passing is based on nothing but meeting, day in and day out, the baseline of “normal.” In however they choose to transition, trans individuals involuntarily give up and then reclaim culturally defined “normality.”

In this sense, then, transitioning is nothing but abnormal people further cementing their own gender-based abnormality to achieve ‘normality’—contentment. Ultimately, the goal of physical transition is for one to be content in their own gender presentation, whatever it would be. And I would say, why not embrace this for all uses of normal? Instead of being an arbitrary universal standard, “normal” would be a personal descriptor of one’s comfort level at any given time. One defines their own normal.

It’s not a perfect definition by any means, but I am not sure one the creation of one would ever be possible, no matter the number of revisions, discussions, and other related attempts. This redefinition does, however, serve as a basis from which to begin the process of re-leveling the playing field of power.