Being Transgender Research Paper

What it means to be Transgender Imagine being seventeen years old with your entire future in sight. Suddenly this is all brought to halt due to violence fueled by complete ignorance and hatred. “In 2003 Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager from a small town in Northern California, was murdered by a group of young men who beat her to death with a shovel after discovering that she had male genitalia. The attorneys representing the young men argued that their clients’ actions were justified by Gwen’s ‘deception’ in not disclosing her transgender identity to them” (Paisley, Minter, Juang 1). This is just one example of the many hate crimes that have been committed against transgender people over the course of many generations. Crimes such as these …show more content…
Being on the internet, and watching transgender YouTubers tell their coming out stories can also create a misconception that every transgender person has known since they were a small child. Although it easy to believe this, it must be taken into account that there are people who do not discover their identity until adulthood. As journalist Nadia L. Dowshen says, “some transgender people feel ‘different’ from the time they’re young kids. Others start sensing it around puberty or even later” (1). These revelations often times make individuals start to question and feel an overwhelming confliction with their emotions. Negative emotions and feelings can be influenced by a person’s environment and the people they are surrounded by. These emotions if ignored or not treated can create much larger long term psychological and emotional issues for the individual. Many transgender teens and even adults suffer in silence with emotional and other various mental health disorders that go untreated. Not always knowing from a young age, struggling with emotional conflictions and often times being left to suffer in silence is just a part of what it means to be transgender in today’s