By Meghan Serceki
A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that today 42% of adults in the United States report knowing someone who is trans*, up 5% since 2017. While this increased visibility is a step in the right direction, the same research concluded that comfort levels around and opinions of trans* people have largely remained stagnant.
Using gender-neutral pronouns and admitting that sex does not define gender are both learned behaviors. It is instilled as an implicit bias early on as the society we live in favors the cisgender heteronormative status quo. Exposure and interaction are the best ways to fight against this prejudice.
My early childhood was almost a case study in this. I was born in Northern California — surrounded by the liberal flair one would expect from the Bay Area. For four years I lived down the street from a lesbian couple. I’m not going to pretend like I remember them. That’s just it. I don’t. Apparently my 101 Dalmatians spoon was important enough to live in my memories, but there wasn’t anything different to me about them. To my four-year-old mind, they weren’t my “lesbian neighbors.” There was nothing that struck me as strange about their relationship. They were just people who lived down the street from me and my family.
What I do remember, though, is my confusion when my family moved to Wisconsin and I began hearing kids in my class make derogatory comments about gay people. They didn’t know what they were saying. I don’t think any of them had even knowingly met a queer person, and we were so young that I’m sure they were just repeating what they heard someplace else. But it didn’t make sense to me. Were they saying my neighbors were sinners just because they were in love?
Nine years passed, and I was still the “weird” one. But their implicit bias was ingrained in me by that point. When I began to have feelings for other girls, I brushed it off because I was “normal.” I felt a lot of guilt and shame over my attraction to women. I told myself that being gay was fine, but that it wasn’t me. So, it took me another seven years after moving away from that environment to grow comfortable enough with myself and with the idea of being queer to finally come to terms with my own identity.
I often wonder how different my journey would have been if I had stayed in Northern California, or if I had known more openly queer people while I was in Wisconsin. It took a lot to get myself comfortable with queerness after living without any representation of it during such formative years. I keep in touch with very few people from my childhood, so although I’m out almost no one from that era of my life knows that they went to elementary school with a lesbian. Could I have been that representation to someone else if I had embraced myself sooner?
The burden to change society’s implicit biases does not lie on those impacted by them. But in order to reject these instinctive responses to differences in gender or sexuality, people must have true experiences to replace them with. Having more people report knowing someone who is trans* is a great sign — it means that these interactions are happening, that we are building these connections and challenging the prejudices that we have been taught. Statistically, though, the number of people who actually know a trans* individual should be closer to 100%, they likely just don’t realize. So the burden lies on all of us to continue this fight. The fight to see and be seen, the fight to be accepted, the fight to be “normal,” until one day we too are just “the people down the street.”