I wanted to have an area on my website that could potentially be an educational space.  I am a very blessed woman, but I have experienced a lot of discrimination and harassment because I am a transgender woman of color.  I truly believe that often when folks are intolerant it is because they are not educated about something and/or feel personally threatened.

When many of us hear that someone is about to have a child or has recently done so, we ask, "Is it a boy or girl?" We ask as if the assumption of that binary, boy or girl, is absolute.  But we know that the existence of folks being born  intersex, for example, challenge that biological assumption.  It is also important to remember to distinguish between biological sex and gender.  Someone's gender identity and biological sex might not necesarily be congruent. For example, someone born with a vagina might not necessarily identify as a girl.

When we distinguish biological sex from gender identity, we begin to understand the constructs of man and woman as a set of culturally coded signifiers that are fluid rather than absolute.  But in a world where so many things are uncertain, many of us long for what constitutes a man and a woman to be absolute.  But as we abandon those absolutes whether we identify as transgender or not we can begin to truly define for ourselves what it means to be a man and a woman.   That to me is truly gender liberation.

Stay in the love,

Laverne