LGBTQ+

USC

In today’s society people use stereotypes to generalize social groups, however most stereotypes are incorrect and are very harmful to the social group. I will be writing about the transgender/genderienty social group. In the transgender/gender identity social group most of them get misgendered and stereotyped.

Most people tend to confuse someone's sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Even though they all vary around the same topic they are all different from each other. Someone's sex is what their chromosomes and genitals are, could not add up to what they identify as. Gender identity is what you see yourself as, are you a man/boy, trans/genderqueer, women/girl.

To be transgender you have to have dysphoria, dysphoria is where you feel a great disconnection with your body to your brain, you do not feel comfortable in your body. Most cis people will never understand how difficult and challenging it is to not be born in the right body. It really affects your mental health, most transgender people do have depression or anxiety from being transgender. Transgender people can get hormone injections and surgery to help them pass as their gender in public. Transitioning can help with a lot of the persons dysphoria but they will still have some because they will never be fully male or female.

Stereotypes do effect this group quite a bit because gender identity is how people see you and when people see you they automatically stereotype you and judge you. A stereotype that male transgenders, meaning they were born a woman and have transitioned to be a man. They experience people assuming them to be butch lesbians, but in reality they are male and they are straight. And for female transgenders most people assume them as being gay. When transgenders are misgendered it can hurt them a lot, through my research and my knowledge I have discovered that even tho a male transgender dose their best to pass by having short hair, wearing men's clothing, and wearing a binder they still can be misgendered. Cis people can also be misgendered for example, if you were a female with short hair and you get misgendered and people call you a male it can really hurt because you are female, and this can also happen with males with long hair.

I feel like most people misgender people because they are too shy to ask for their correct pronouns. People are also very uneducated when it comes to the topic of gender identity. I mean when I was a kid I had no idea that girls could wear boys clothes and boys could wear girls clothes, if you did it felt like you were breaking the law or it wasn't right to because the stereotype that boys need to wear boys clothes and girls need to wear girls clothes was very put down on us as kids. Another thing that is very confusing is that you can be female and be masculine, and you can be male and be feminine, but they are not transgender. Another thing people identify as Non-binary meaning they don't identify as being male or female, however non-binary masculine, non-binary feminine, and non-binary trans people exist. Also there are people who are non-binary but one day they can feel more masculine than feminine, and vice versa.

If we as a society start teaching kids that they can dress however they want and be who ever they want we could have less kids and people experiencing very harmful mental illnesses.  

Cites:

LGBTQ+ Pod Cast

Article: Transgender Stereotypes Could Explain Discrimination

Article: Transgender People New Targets of Hateful Political Ads