I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
If I say I am I get it.
I am a person, shoved in a gender box
Stuffed into an orientation cage
Packed into a one-zero-one-zero-one-zero binary of sex
I was born as a girl, but I feel like a boy
Just imagine being born in the wrong body.
Once you hit puberty, you feel like everyone else
got the instruction manual,
and you got a blank piece of paper.
This is what my life is like.
Ok, so transgender. Lemme explain.
A transgender person is someone who feels like
the opposite of their biological sex.
Acting and looking like their biological gender
feels a bit to them like wearing their
pants on backwards or their shoes on the wrong feet.
It just feels weird and wrong.
I explained transgender,
but the questions I always get asked are
"What's the difference between transgender and transsexual?"
"What's a transvestite?"
"Does that make you gay?"
Well, transgender people feel the oppposite
of their biological sex, and
a transsexual is someone who has
had the surgery or taken hormones.
A transvestite is a person
who derives pleasure from dressing in the clothes
of the opposite sex.
And no, that does not make me gay.
People dont realize how much ignorance and bigotry
there is about transgender people.
If I wore a dress today, I would get comments like
"crossdresser" or "faggot,"
because now when I wear a t-shirt a jeans, I get
"Are you a boy, or a girl?"
and I smile, and I nod, and I say, "Yes."
Because transgender people are just like you.
But we are breaking free of that
box, that cage, that one-zero-one-zero binary.
Because even though statistics say
that transgender people are discriminated against
more that anyone else in the GLBT community,
that 40 to 60 percent of transgender people
attempt or commit suicide each year,
and that by June 26, 2009
there had already been four hundred and thirty transgender murders
in the United States,
we are coming out in confidence.
We are supporting each other.
We are pushing aside the dysphoria
to help one another.
The road is long, but you can help by understanding
Because we are all humans.
And though I may be jealous
of you or you or you
for your biology,
I still love everybody.
And you should too.
So appreciate the gifts you are given.
Because someone who loves me very very much
got a gender
And all I got was this stupid T-shirt.