globeandmail.com: Gender-bending: the original spirit of Pride
In an obvious way, transsexual rights are important simply because “trans” people are human. Discrimination and medical access are only the first thorn branches to sprout with this acknowledgment. In male prisons, rape of male-to-female transsexuals is widely documented and broadly ignored. Old-fashioned feminist organizations and all-female colleges continue to exclude “transwomen” as “not really female.”…
More deeply — and this is the heart of the Colombian ruling — the emergence of transsexual rights means that gender identity is now something about which we can all now more collectively chill out. In seeing gender as part biology but also part artifice, one can worry less about one’s own conformity to whatever a woman or man is supposed to be. One can get on with being an individual.
A sign of evolution is the emergence of a new word in the public idiom, “cisgender.” From the Latin cis-, meaning “on the same side,” it means identified with one’s birth sex — literally “not transgender,” as heterosexual is to homosexual.
I like this column.
