On being accepted as a person

 Sometimes a new perspective comes from unexpected influences. Suffice it to say that the past years I have spent plenty of time thinking and writing about what I think the relationship between me, society and reality is. Yet it's so hard to see clearly when you have your nose pressed virtually into the tarmac of some aspect of reality. To regain this global perspective, you have to get back up onto your knees, onto your feet, so that you can finally take that look around you. Make sense of what happened.

When I got confronted with Dave Chappelle's newest Netflix special 'The Closer' and decided to give it a whirl to see what the fuss was about, it hit me in a way that I had not seen coming. The comedy show starts off coarse, with very uncouth jokes that are sure to offend anyone with a disposition for easy triggering. Yet when Dave starts digging deeper into his experiences with the LGBT community and especially his friendship with a transgender person: Daphne Dorman and her struggles with making sense of life. [1]


What hit me the most about this story was that Dave Chappelle does not believe that a transgender person who starts off male can become a biological woman. Gender is a fact, in the sense that biological sex (gender) is something that at this point in time cannot be altered. And yet none of this has any bearing on these transgender people. He has his views, others have theirs, and yet he doesn't have a stake in the LGBT community. Instead he is more than happy to respect others for the people they are.

The key point here is that one does not have to agree with the other person's views and opinions in order to treat them as a person.


We cannot expect that everyone around us understands the larger parts of what makes us into the person we are, never mind the infinite number of small details, but the one thing we can expect and ask for is to be respected as a person. Someone living their own life and going through their own human experiences.

The liberating and perhaps cathartic part of listening to this part of Dave's show was in how it made it obvious that I do not care about this LGBT community either, and never have. What was instead happening to me was the very human experience of coming to terms with my intersex body, amidst the strong desire to - just once - feel that I was being accepted as a person. My frustrations and perhaps jealousy when I was spending so many years of my life on getting nowhere with the struggle to get answers about this curious body of mine, even as in my eyes this LGBT community got all the help and attention they could ask for.

When you feel invisible and mostly ignored. Even when appearing on talkshows and in the media it didn't feel in hindsight that I was there as a person, but more as a curiosity. Who truly cared about me as a person?

Certainly not the doctors who dismissed me as being 'transgender', and who tried to push me into that direction. A direction I didn't want to head into, because it didn't feel right and didn't make sense, and yet it appeared that nobody was interested in my opinion. I felt so terribly alone and frightened for all those years.


Now, years later, with a body has well and truly asserted that it was - in fact - always that of a hermaphroditic intersex person, I have been able to at least put a lot of those questions to rest. It's easier for me to look at what remains at this point. As I get back up on my knees, and onto my feet, I can see with clarity now how everything related to gender and biological sex ties together. The main source of confusion for so many years. Now it's clear to me how the brain is just this neutral entity that has no specific preference for a particular arrangement of genitals. Which is a good thing since I was worried for years that I might have to pick a set to have removed.

But above all, that my brain, and the person inside it is just that: a person. Something that transcends basic things like gender and sexual preferences, skin colour and the languages one speaks. In learning to accept myself as a person, I have also learned to accept others as such. EAch of them individuals with their own lives and experiences.

While I may not agree with everyone's views and opinions, and cannot understand everyone's motivations, that shall never take away the basic notion that every person is deserving of sympathy and respect. You owe it to yourself to respect yourself as a person, as much as others deserve it to be respected as such. Respect and sympathy do go both ways, after all.


Maya


[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer