Dear Cisgender People,

I’m unsure you even know that is what you are. Being cisgender, or cis, is simply being comfortable with and using the gender given with your sex. 

What I am sure of, however, is that you know what being transgender–or trans–is. However, there may be some of you who are so sheltered from the real world who are reading, so I’ll give you the rundown: Being transgender is simply having a different gender identity to what is assigned with your sex at birth.

Until now you may have heard a few names in passing–our names–Elliot Page, Leelah Alcorn, Harry Allen, Marsha P. Johnson, Anjali Ameer, and Justin Vivian Bond.

We lay there, constantly the butt of jokes. Constantly, people refuse to separate gender identity from sexuality. Constantly, society mocks trans women who aren’t “feminine enough”, trans men who aren’t “manly enough”, nonbinary people who aren’t “adrogynous enough”. 

We are transgender. We do not owe you anything.

Day after day, we get misgendered and dead named. Day after day, we are turned out of our houses. Day after day, we are forced to crumble to the hand of stereotypes, of the ideas of what being a man and woman are, the concept that gender is binary.

Yet still, we rise. 

We continue to fight for our right to be in a bathroom we are comfortable in. We fight the war in order to be who we are, to live our lives as ourselves and not some notion that hasn’t changed since the sixties. 

Every time someone uses our correct pronouns, there are hundreds more times people scoff and ignore them. Every day it is “thank you, ma’am” when you aren’t a woman and “thank you, sir” when you aren’t a man. It is “sorry, I will do better” and then nothing changes.

Dogs get better treatment.

If the owner were to tell you that their golden retriever is a girl, you instantly correct yourself without any struggle. Yet when we correct you, we continue to get ignored. We continue to get mocked–we continue to get swept under the rug, told that we are confused, that we are going through a phase, that it is because of trauma that we aren’t who we are. 

We are told that gender is binary, that this is black and white. Yet the world isn’t black and white. So why is gender perceived that way?

Every day, one of us becomes homeless. Every day, one of us commit suicide because we had enough of the bigotry, enough of the “harmless jokes” about the “LGBTQIABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP” community, enough about the jabs, the mockery, the slurs that you so casually throw around, the lack of acknowledgement, the lack of responsibility for your actions. 

It has gone too far. So? Today, right now, we have had enough.

We are transgender. We don’t owe you anything. You owe us respect. Do better.