The New York Times launched a new editorial series Monday called "Transgender Today," highlighting various stories submitted by transgender people in order to share their personal experiences and struggles with identity. The "evolving collection" will continue to grow as visitors are encouraged to share their own stories and videos with the paper to be featured.
The editorial board of the NYT states:
Being transgender today is still unreasonably hard, but it is far from hopeless. This is the first in a series looking at the challenges ahead. You can share your story.
Browsing the initial installment reveals stories from U.S. government employees, police officers, authors, firefighters, students, former military, and a defense contractor. "They deserve to come out in a nation where stories of compassion and support vastly outnumber those that end with a suicide note," the editors write. "Those coming out now are doing so with trepidation, realizing that while pockets of tolerance are expanding, discriminatory policies and hostile, uninformed attitudes remain widespread."
The NYT shares its hopes for what affect its series might have on future generations and the transgender community:
A generation from now, scientists will most likely know more about gender dysphoria and physicians will undoubtedly have found better ways to help people transition. This generation should be the one that stopped thinking that being transgender is something to fear or shun.
As the series kicks off, one story, featuring Precious Davis, is of special note. Davis attempts to explain that science, doctors, and parents are not in a position to properly discern what gender a baby is when born based on genitalia alone. "Gender identity," according to Davis, has multiple definitions and really should be left to the individual to categorize based on "extremely personal, self-reflective consideration:"
Like all aspects of identity, we now understand Gender to exist on a continuum, not in a binary system… There is no incorrect definition, but the problems arise when certain individuals or institutions of power insist on strictly applying their understanding of gender to all others. A prime example of this is parents and doctors choosing (too often at random) and enforcing narrow binary gender assignments to all human beings at birth, long before they have had any opportunity to develop emotionally, physically and spiritually. Today we are learning that when individuals are given the freedom to self-explore and form their own unique self-perceptions, free of constraining external labels, gender no longer functions as a literal direct correlation to genitalia, or a mirror of media representation, or a cog in the systems of patriarchy. When allowed to self-identify, human beings are demonstrating enormous capacity for variance along a wide and exciting spectrum.
