transgenders and vegans

The most shocking statistic I took away from Myers’ presentation this morning was that one in two hundred people are transgender in the US. That implies that 0.5% of US citizens are transgender. While that percentage seems small, 0.5% of 330 million is 1.65 million. Wow. 1.65 million transgender people in the United States, but still there are so few stories about their experiences. I had so little perspective about issues surrounding transgenderism. People, in general, only care about issues that can directly impact their lives. The other day, I was reading an article about biases that drove anti vegan hatred. In an interesting way, I think people’s reaction to veganism is comparable to transgenderism. In today’s world, there is more and more evidence suggesting that our mass consumption of meat not only has negative health effects, but the brutal treatment of animals is unethical. We all know that, but people’s eating tendencies, for the most part, are not affected at all by such news. We all know the horrific processes that go into producing our beloved hamburgers and hotdogs, but I don’t think anyone is praying to God to cleanse their sins for consuming meat. Why? How do we justify consuming meat and still feel like a good person? It turns out that the human brain is incredibly adept at protecting our realities from external challenges. Since we grew up eating and loving the taste of meat, our brain uses psychological tricks to preserve our meat cravings. Our traditional view of gender and sex, which has been formulating and developing our whole lives, are deeply ingrained in our subconcious. We experience cognitive dissonance when we think about the existence of transgender people —our brains naturally expel this type of dissonance— since they challenge our fundamental understanding of gender.    

That cognitive dissonance helps explain Ron’s parents’ reaction to his transition to a male. “I know you don’t think I really am a boy. Maybe to you this is a phase I’m going through. Or maybe to you I’m just mentally ill and need to be fixed” (200). Personally, I never understood why many parents would freak out if they found out their kid was homosexual or wanted to become transgender. Maybe it is because I grew up in a world where being homosexual and transgender has already become much more normalized. Whereas my parents grew up without any experiences with people having non traditional genders. That is likely the case with Ron’s parents who experienced substantial cognitive dissonance when their own child’s gender became unfamiliar to them.