We live in a world where everyone is constantly being judged based on our appearance. When it clothes and shoes you can change, what about your gender? Your sexual orientation?
A question hit me last week during my BM Kertas 1 paper. We were asked to write a sentence regarding the word 'sampah masyarakat' . What would I have thought about the word? Probably pretty much the same as everyone would. Drug addicts, transexuals, ...etc. I always thought these people deserved better treatment to be confident as a human being.
A transexual is a person whose gender identity does not match the sex that was assigned at birth. Some transexuals get medical treatment; by surgery or hormones, or both in order to bring their body back into alignment.
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| A chance to be themselves |
-Some don't. Some prefer it that way. People have to realize that there is no cure to this. They were born with cross-sex hormones. In Biology class, we came to know that this was a birth defect, occured by an error of the amount of hormones in the womb. During critical times of when the child's brain is forming, the cells receives a wrong gender signal which fails to produce an otherwise perfect baby. They are equal people only that they feel a consistent and overwhelming desire to fulfill their lives as members of the opposite gender. Some are extremely feminine while others opt to be as masculine as possible.
In recent years, transsexuals have been featured on television talk shows; especially those who manifested the physical traits of what most men consider to be beautiful. They have been targeted by ultra-conservative hate groups as representing the essence of evil in our society. The Internet is filled with information concerning them. In Sunday’s Star 19th June Insight column, Rouwen Lin quoted Cheryl Leong, founder of OutDo Malaysia, “Many people, especially those who are not out (being haven’t accepted their sexual orientation) , struggle with their sexuality. They often feel like they are the only lesbians in the world because they do not know of any others.”
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Why did Bono decide to be so public about this most private of transformations? He says he didn’t have a choice. “I’ve learned that if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will, and they’ll do a bad job of it,” |
Yet, regardless of the tremendous curiosity that they provoke, no single group of people inspire such strong reactions amongst the general heterosexual population. The point is that they are a reality, they are people, and they are in primary relationships with others who fully accept and love them. To understand this, imagine that you are, just as you are right now, but that all of a sudden you have a body of the opposite sex. The whole world thinks you have always been this way, from birth.
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Even so, you know who you really are. Everybody treats you like how you look. You are not allowed to do most of the things you like, or that are normal to you. You are not treated the same, and when you try to be yourself, you get punished. When you try to act like how you look, you find it is a lot more harder to do than you imagined, because it is not you, and you don't understand it. Worse, you know how your body should be built. You know what parts should be there and what parts should not. You know what it should feel like, but it does not. You have to go the 'wrong' bathroom, sit, stand and do everything else 'wrong'. Everything is wrong and you might feel like a freak all the time. Your whole life will be one misery and disappointment after another. If you act like yourself, people will hate you, if you do act what you look like, you will hate yourself.
And all the time this is going on, your body just plain feels horrible. And it will be the society's fault on pressing this on them. For calling them 'sampah masyarakat' when all they really are is human.
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| Every human being deserves the right to live the way they want to. |
Do we, 'normal' people , give the right to judge and descriminate people who have no other choice than to live the way they do? Do we give them the 'look' when they walk past? What runs through your head when they do? What would you do if you were in their shoes?
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| When humanity is the least of the human trait. |
