LGBTQ – Transphobia can hide in everyday blunders. It does not necessarily result in physical or verbal violence and is not always voluntary. On this Wednesday March 31, International Transgender Visibility Day, Lexie, activist for the rights, visibility and understanding of transgender and non-binary people, shares with us her experience and the mistakes to be avoided. through the interview above.
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The road has been long and perilous. If Lexie had to qualify her journey in relation to her gender, she would compare it to a “roller coaster”. Little, the question did not arise: she was a girl, it was obvious. It was in her teens that she lost that sense of the obvious about who she really was. “It was a very complicated path to learn again who I was”, she confides to the HuffPost.
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Added to this were the social pressure and the expectations in terms of femininity and masculinity that the young woman considers “unjust and unhealthy”. For years, Lexie wondered if she had the right to exist, if she was “normal”. A destructive period accentuated by daily transphobia: “When you are openly, socially, a trans person, it means being confronted with extremely hard things. I never expected to receive death threats or rape threats ”. However, transphobia can take other forms.
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An (un) voluntary and daily transphobia
“It is important to distinguish between voluntary transphobia, which is political, and that which is involuntary”, specifies the young woman of 25 years. For example, the choice of the vocabulary used, which may seem trivial, should not be neglected. The term “transexual” – to be banned according to her – would refer to psychiatrists who designated transidentity as a disease. When talking about a person’s transition, it should not be explained as “a man who becomes a woman” or “a woman who becomes a man”. “It’s much more subtle than that. I understand the desire to simplify, to make things accessible, but that is to distort the reality that we live ”, underlines Lexie.
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These blunders can also go through curiosity. This curiosity is “the sign of a desire to understand society” she admits before resuming that “you should not consider that your curiosity is legitimate and that you can ask anything and anyhow. ”. In some cases, this curiosity can become overwhelming, even extremely inappropriate. Questions about transgender people often relate to the same subjects: sexuality, transitions, genitals, violence suffered … “One of the things we learn when we are children, is that we do not talk to a person about their genitals! ”, laughs, more or less, Lexie. “To be respected, minorities would have to constantly justify themselves. It’s a real pressure and it’s also a dynamic of domination. There is no need to understand to respect ”.
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Ignorance can also, in a certain sense, rally to forms of clumsiness. “The fact of not knowing what relates to issues of gender, transidentities, that has a logic in our society”. She is aware of it, it requires a real will to understand and to listen. “I understand the difficulty of learning so many new things at once. But all this information, we had to learn it ourselves. Nothing is instinctive ”. Lexie evokes the “comfort” of not wanting to go in search of information and of preferring to directly ask the people concerned. However, many information resources are available, including the Instagram account by Lexie, and, since February, her book.
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“Being trans, today, in 2021 …”
It has been 4 years since she started a transition. Social first, then medical. With its coming out and transition, activism presented itself as a need. It is through her Instagram account “Agressively_trans” that Lexie deals daily with subjects of gender, transidentity, on the cultural, social, political and legislative level. More than 53,600 people follow it.
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In February 2021, his first book was published: “A story of genres”, A guide to understanding and defending transidentities. This academic essay, which deals with historical, political and social gender issues, is aimed at trans people and answers questions that may arise in the cisgender entourage.
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Through her writings, Lexie tries to share her journey and the challenges facing the trans community. “To be trans, today, in 2021, is to be a presence that is guessed, but that is still too little known”. If she were to talk to someone who might make blunders about their gender, she would say, “You are definitely going to make mistakes, but you don’t want to make a big deal out of it. The most important thing is the willingness to learn ”.
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See also on The HuffPost: Elsa, 8-year-old trans girl, asks Assembly to let her be happy
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