No, on both counts. From Assigned Male Comics.
These two are being combined, because they are both short and related. They're also probably the most straightforward of the two, as I don't have to get into our changing understanding of biological sex or the politics of lesbian dating, as in the first two of this series. In fact, if you've been reading along so far, you can probably answer the titular questions for yourself - but I wouldn't be a very good blogger if I left the bulk of my post as an exercise for the reader, so here we are.
As in previous installments, I'll be tackling today's topic in sections, but this time they'll be straightforwardly addressing the statements in the comics one by one.
Trans People Shouldn't Hide
Who They Really Are
So, two things: one, when we're presenting authentically, we're not hiding who we really are; and two, to the extent that we ever do hide, we do it for our own safety.
Quick bit of trans history: trans people are who we say we are, and getting that fact recognized by the medical, psychological, sociological, and legal communities was a major factor in moving from the Gatekeeper model to the Informed Consent model. And for those who are curious, no, this is not a slippery slope* to trans-racial, trans-age, or trans-species/otherkin "identities" - that's another topic, though, so I will see you down in the notes if you're interested.
Fact is, everyone has a gender identity, in addition to the one you were assigned, and these can match or not: if your gender identity matches your assigned gender, then you are cisgendered; if the two do not match, then you are transgendered. If you are cisgendered, you might not be aware of your gender identity; heck, you might not even feel it at all. There hasn't been a lot of study into cis people's gender identities, because research is 'spensive and it doesn't seem to be causing them problems (by definition), but I've talked to many cis people who will cop to "feeling like" the gender they were assigned: my brother JD, for example, feels like a man. Being a man is kinda central to his identity, and if everyone were to suddenly erase or reverse that part of him when speaking to or about him, he would find it distressing (source: email correspondence and private conversations).
Some people report not feeling like their gender, though, yet still identifying with it - and that's fine. Not everybody's subjective experiences have to align, and insisting they do is the fallacy of the typical mind. What's more, some people are nonbinary: they don't feel like the gender they're assigned, and moreover feel positively not like any gender at all (or kind of both, or somewhere in between, as in demiboys and demigirls). Other folks still are genderfluid, their gender identities changing back and forth throughout their lives. These are also trans identities, as they are not aligned with the gender assigned at birth.
Being transgendered in itself isn't a problem, and if you're wondering how to explain this to kids, then it's easy, as evidenced by how my siblings and friends explain me to their young children: "D is a girl, and she always has been, but we didn't know at first because she didn't look like it." The problems that cluster around transness are primarily to do with dysphoria and societal transphobia, neither of which is inherent to transness, but both of which can have profoundly negative impacts on trans folks' lives, as evidenced by the remarkably higher rates of substance abuse, self-harm, and suicide among us.
Putting it all together, trans identities are real, and just like cis identities, we don't "just identify" or "just feel like" our identities, we are our identities. So to say that "trans people shouldn't hide who they 'really' are" is to attempt to invalidate trans identities, which contributes to societal transphobia, which as mentioned has a material negative impact on trans lives. So don't do it.
I also mentioned that, to the extent that trans people do hide, it consists of inauthentically presenting as their birth-assigned gender for the sake of their own safety. This is because trans people, and trans women of color especially, are disproportionately likely to be murder victims. The "trans panic" defense, wherein a man who murders a trans woman claims that she "tricked" him and so he killed her, has not only been successfully used but is also used when straight men knowingly dating trans women have their partners outed to a peer group and feel pressured into doing something murdery about it in order to preserve their straight cred. So, understandably, many trans folks "go stealth" to avoid this violence, despite the toll on their mental health in doing so. To then turn this on its head and say that trans people living authentically are "hiding who they really are" not only invalidates our identities but reverses the dynamic of what is usually a desperate gambit to avoid violence at the expense of one's own mental health.
Wouldn't It Be Like Lying?
This one is short because see above. But to recapitulate, trans people are being honest when they present authentically, and to the extent that they are dishonest, it is only by presenting inauthentically, and is in order to avoid violence and other forms of societal transphobia.
Can't They Just Be Gay?
In the first place, some trans folks are gay, and some are straight, and some are bisexual. Importantly, when assessing a trans person's orientation, it's important to take their identity into account when doing so: I'm a trans woman, and I'm into women, so that makes me a gay trans woman. I'm not a straight man because I'm not a man at all. There is, like, a whole other thing here relating to TERFs, which I'm not gonna even touch for now (maybe I'll make a series on TERF-busting?).
The bottom line is that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things, and they are independent of each other, The End.
Isn't Being Trans a Bit Homophobic?
Trans folks admittedly can be homophobic, because trans folks are human beings who have flaws and prejudices and are capable of evil just like anyone else. For my part, my transness gives me a great well of empathy to draw on when considering others' struggles: I know how difficult my life has been, and while I'll never live another one, I can at least try to empathize with others, listen to their stories, and check my privilege when it pops up. That's all that can be reasonably asked of anyone, and sometimes I screw it up (I had a bit of a screw-up recently that's going to necessitate a significant edit of an earlier post in this series, but I'm still in the learning phase on that and so I don't want to get too much into it here).
The point here is that, since gender identity and sexual orientation are independent of each other, and gender identities are valid, being trans in no way invalidates or even competes with homosexuality. There are some cultures that are paradoxically open to transness moreso than homosexuality, seeing transness as a developmental abnormality but homosexuality as a deviant choice - that is homophobia. But it does not inhere in transness, it's a thing all on its own.
To say that trans folks should just "be gay," or to paint transness as homophobia, is cisnormativity: the idea that cisness is right and valuable, and transness is wrong and not valuable. Cisnormativity undermines the basic human dignity of trans folks, and provides the aforementioned incentive for us to risk our mental health if we can "pass for cis" by imposing costs in terms of finances, social status, and personal safety. So, y'know, please don't be cisnormative.
As this is the end of this series, please comment or email with questions or comments, and I'll respond as best I can. Cheers!
Notes
* - Transgender identities are not a slippery slope to trans-racial, trans-age, or trans-species/otherkin identities for the simple reason that gender identity is about you and the other things aren't. For someone's racial, age, or species status, you don't need to consult the person at all: these facts are rooted in geography, time, and ancestry (more or less respectively, with some admitted overlap) and can be determined without ever talking to the person. In this way, race, age, and species are not about the person themself. Gender identity, however, absolutely is about the person themself, because even when assigning the person's gender at birth we look at the individual we are dealing with (and not, say, at their parents or at a clock). So the slope is not slippery, and validating trans identities as a culture in no way opens the door to those other "identities," QED.
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