The LGBT community is a dichotomy

I found a home in the LGBT community

The LGBT community is the first place that I found people like me. For so many years of my life, I lived in a state of confusion. To finally discover people that shared the same interests and passions was incredible. I’ve been able to make the lifelong friends that everyone said would exist, based on shared experience and camaraderie. It’s also made me much more aware of societal issues – it sounds a little selfish but it’s much easier to get fired up and engaged with anti-discrimination efforts when you know people personally affected. The UK is, honestly, one of the best places to be trans. The healthcare system isn’t perfect by any means, but they’re doing the best with the limited resources that they have. London especially has been wonderful to me. When you’re very self conscious about your appearance, one of the most heartwarming things is when you step onto a tube after agonising about stepping outside for days and no one bats an eyelid. I know some people criticise London for people being rude and unsociable, but if you’re in a position where you just want to be yourself without causing a fuss, it’s really not a bad thing at all. No one minds, or cares. I never really fitted in at school, and I don’t know if I fit in better now, but there are so many more people and the negative ones don’t matter as much once you find or make a space that you can call your own and support people with similar experiences that you care about.

IQ, Imperial’s LGBT society, has undergone several changes in this area – last year the position of trans & gender variant officer was introduced for the first time. Several other universities, such as UCL and Kings, have done the same, and have hosted inter-university events which really increases the size of the community. I think, for better or for worse, the notion of being trans is now firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. Even apps like Tindr now incorporates gender options that are no longer just the binary ones. People really try to get it, even when it’s tricky, and I’m so thankful for that. I’m proud to be part of this, and to have met so many inspiring people.

Am I happier, after going through this process? Yes. Would I do it all again? In a heartbeat.

The LGBT community is inherently flawed

The LGBT community is a misnomer. It’s a group of disparate people pushed together by societal pressure, and pressure makes things explosive. You only need to look at the agenda pushed by ‘gender critical’ feminists, or the right wing ideologies espoused by the ‘dangerous faggot’ Yiannopoulis to see that any pretence of unity is founded on a certain level of respectability politics. In wider society, plenty of people pay lip service to tolerance but do not let that extend to actually causing or being part of change, reaching the stage of ‘well, I guess I wouldn’t disown my kids if they ended up like that’ and never progressing that much farther. A community doesn’t exist because the name exists. It exists because you fight for it, because you stick up for the people you care about and love and hope they would do the same. It exists because it’s all some people have.

The trans community itself is a fundamentally malformed construct, formed from people with nothing in common save a shared experience of dysphoria. The intent of the vast majority of trans people is to eventually disappear from this group, to ascend to the point where they can live in society without ever once thinking about their past. For this reason, any community that exists is made up of the early birds hunting for worms, and those a few years down the road that aren’t quite able to ascend out of it yet.

It’s a place where there’s the constant looming shadow of suicide and violence, where people go missing and noone quite knows what happened – did they ascend, tap out of life, were they caught on the street and beaten to death? It’s a place where you’re just a craigslist ad away from finding sex work from some closeted forty year old who subverts his homosexual proclivities by saying ‘traps don’t count, right?’. This sex work being a stand in for a more steady job, denied by institutional discrimination that doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of hiring a potentially mentally ill trans person, with the funds going towards rent and the medical treatments required to one day be able to reintegrate with society and deal with the self hatred and dysphoria. It’s a place that is mine, and I will fight for the continued survival of everyone in it. Am I happier now, after going through this process? Maybe. Would I do it all again? I don’t know if I ever had a choice.