Who or What Is a Transgender Person and Why Should Anyone Care?

• Author: Ally Windsor Howell
• Profession: Former practicing lawyer from Alabama
• Pages: 1-15

To paraphrase American playwright, performer, feminist, and activist Eve

Ensler, transgender persons are immigrants into the world (read culture)

of women and men. And immigrants are always hated, mistreated, and not

appreciated when they  rst arrive.

Like other societies, the United States uses a binary system of gender

in which being either male or female has great consequences. This binary

system and its corollary system in which a “normal” society is made up of

only couples comprising one man and one woman are the subject of much

study and disputation. The most noticeable example of this is the rancorous

public debate over same-sex marriages. Some say transgener persons, gays,

and lesbians are not “normal.” But to quote my favorite twentieth-century

philosopher Erma Bombeck, “‘Normal’ is just a setting on a clothes dryer.”

But there is also another debate about sex and gender, one that is not get-

ting the same television and print media attention as the same-sex marriage

debate. It centers on the issue of whether transgender persons are male or

female for various legal purposes.

1

Who or What Is a

Transgender Person and

Why Should Anyone Care?

CHAPTER 1

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