Adrien Lawyer wants students to think of gender as a spectrum.
Lawyer, who gave a presentation titled “Transgender 101” at Scholes Hall, said the widespread concept of a gender binary — that is, boy/girl — does not reflect reality.
“Some people don’t think they are just one of those,” he said. “Some people think they’re something else entirely. Some people think they’re both. It just depends.”
Lawyer, who was considered female at birth but now identifies as a man, said people don’t think about how others may not fit comfortably in the gender binary and face discrimination because of it.
The actual diversity inherent in gender expression is exemplified by the lifestyles covered by the term “transgender.” Lawyer said “transgender” is an umbrella term covering specific concepts like cross-dressing, trans-sexualism, androgyny and others.
There’s a distinction between gender identity and sex, where sex is a biological category assigned at birth and gender identity deals with issues of self-expression, Lawyer said. He said even sex is not a black-and-white concept like people think, because of things like Disorders of Sex Development (DSD). He said because of gender identity and differences in the biological expression of sex, the idea that someone has to be a boy or a girl is false.
“In the transgender community, we absolutely don’t believe that,” he said. “A person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some have XY.”
Statistics on transgender people in the world are difficult to come by, but they make up a significant portion of the population, Lawyer said.
“Data is a nightmare,” he said. “We’re not counted anywhere. The Census doesn’t count us.”
Lawyer said discrimination causes transgender people to be marginalized in society. Violence is also a big problem for transgender people, Lawyer said. He said one transgender person a month is murdered in the U.S., and that last year a man murdered his 17-month-old stepson because he wanted the infant to act “more masculine.”
Lawyer said discrimination is so widespread that even the DSM-IV, the manual used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders, lists “Gender Identity Disorder,” meaning basically that a person is transgender, as a mental-health problem to be cured.
Homosexuality was listed in the DSM-III, an earlier version of the manual, as a disease until 1973, Lawyer said.
“A psychiatric illness has a psychiatric cure, and being transgender has no psychological cure. It has a medical cure,” he said. “We can’t change your gender identity. We can change your body, if you want that.”
This discrimination means it’s important not to “out” someone as transgender, Lawyer said. In a series of slides explaining how to be a “better ally” to the transgender community, he explained that a person should always be called by their preferred gender pronoun and “just because someone is trans, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to ask them about their genitals!”
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Lawyer is the founder of the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico, an activist organization that provides information and assistance for transgender people in the state. He said he was motivated to start the organization because he wanted to help other transgender people find information and get access to treatments.
“I said I’m just going to barrel through, because I’m very tenacious,” Lawyer said. “I was going to find the doctor. I was going to find the surgery. I was going to find my way, but other people don’t. Being in the community myself, I really wanted to help other people coming behind me who needed those same treatments, but didn’t know how to get them.”
Lawyer said the surgeries undergone by transgender people should not be thought of as unnecessary, because some people need the surgery to express who they really are.
“The things we do to our bodies are not cosmetic procedures,” he said. “They are corrective procedures.”
