"Our lack of knowledge makes us reject and disqualify what we don’t understand, and we do it from a hegemonic position which we think entitles us to look down upon and feel above what’s different. We are thus prone to humiliate, mistreat, blackball and discriminate against people," says JR, Mariela Castro, director of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).
Mayito looks at the noisy line and grabs his teacher’s hand tightly. With the school’s homeroom period just minutes away, no one even suspects how much suffering these first few steps holds for him every single day in his life as a student.
He knows he will have to get into line in the end, a daily humiliation his psyche seems to accept no more than the pain of wearing boy’s clothes and short hair and coping with the prohibition of playing with girls. He must bear the way the others make fun of his gestures, his father’s disapproving stance, the anguished look in his mother’s eyes, and his own feelings of guilt.
A few years from now, Mayito will probably be a high school graduate for whom an application to the university or a good job is likely to be out of the question. By then, his undeniable female identity attached to a man’s body might very well be cause for derision, so much so because, at his own risk, he will have adopted a woman’s name, taken nonprescription hormones, and challenged the world with his attire. He will dream of undergoing surgery to rid his body of those manly traits that force him to behave as someone he’s not.
But it could happen that by that time Cuban society will have decided to shake off those prejudices, as it has many others, and managed to understand that transsexuals are not sick but ordinary people who only need society to recognize their gender identity –as a male or a female– even if it mismatches their sex organs.
Should that be the case, the new Family Code and other legal standards could prove to be a transsexual’s best allies and a basis for different names, widespread acceptance, understanding and love. Between science and prejudice.
From the scientific viewpoint, transsexualism has been defined as the lack of consistency between a person’s genital anatomy at birth and the construction of their identity as a man or a woman, a process which starts since childhood but can only be confirmed at the end of puberty, when the individual is at least 18.
In conversation with JR, Mariela Castro, director of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), assured that attempts to alter gender identity have always been part of human history.
"It’s not a mental disorder. There were treatments in the past to adjust a person’s mind to his/her body, but since research has proved beyond any doubt that those procedures were highly traumatic, today’s health strategies are focused on making the individual’s outward aspect and gender identity agree with each other," she points out.
Ignorance often leads up to transsexuals being deemed transvestites and/or homosexuals and called amoral, antisocial, weird, maladjusted, transgressive, etc., but they’re actually human beings whose particular characteristics distinguish them from most others.
"Our lack of knowledge makes us reject and disqualify what we don’t understand, and we do it from a hegemonic position which we think entitles us to look down upon and feel above what’s different. We are thus prone to humiliate, mistreat, blackball and discriminate against people."
Click Here To Continue Reading
Mail to a friendCOMMENTS
- There Are No Comments Yet
