Ford: Fear leads to hatred, which hurts so many just wanting to live authentic lives​on February 5, 2025 at 1:00 pm

I won’t identify him because his privacy is more important than his identity.

But having known him all his life, the transformation was magical. From a shy, withdrawn, uncommunicative and seemingly unhappy person to someone still shy, but far more open to conversation and communication, he blossomed. When he realized that emotionally and mentally he was not connected to his birth gender, it was as if a heavy load had been lifted from him.

Today, at 24, after drugs and surgery, he lives as a much happier person. How could anyone deny him the relief and happiness he deserves just because he was born “wrong.”

I cannot fathom the emotional and mental pain of transitioning from one norm to the other. If it was difficult for my relative; if it took 20 years for him to be open and fully supported by his entire family, what must the pain be like for young people caught in a rigid construct of what is “right” and what is acceptable?

His parents and older brother willingly accepted the change. His brother even joked he had always wanted a brother. In a fair and equal world, his transition would be the norm for anyone in his position. No one who has spent years in the wrong body would be shamed or criticized for this fact.

But we don’t live in that world, do we? No, we now live in a world where the American president can smugly announce there are only two genders — male and female. Technically, he’s right. Morally, emotionally and realistically, he’s wrong on so many levels.

Trump makes these bullying remarks despite the very real fact, as Hamlet says to his friend: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Maybe suggesting the current U.S. president has read Shakespeare or embraces a philosophy is a waste of time.

But the fact remains that differences have not changed in more than 500 years, regardless of the rebarbative ideology of social conservatives. Those who don’t accept the vast differences that exist in our society are blind and deaf to reality.

Apparently, one of the main complaints about transgender rights is bathroom use. With full intent to be sarcastic, have these people grown up in a house with separate bathrooms labelled Ladies and Men? For those of us of a certain age, our middle-class, postwar houses contained one bathroom. Everyone shared it. The only conflict was convincing the males in the family to put the toilet seat down.

Have none of these people in a hysterical flap about “trans” people using the “wrong” bathroom ever been to Europe, where gender-neutral bathrooms are common?