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Myla Sayer
Professor Eric Robertson
English 1010
1 December 2014
Genitalia Does Not Equal Destiny
Every person is brought into the world in a body. Despite the body parts a person may or
may not be born with, the body is the one basic thing that every person has in common. How
each individual identifies with the body that they are born into is another thing entirely.
One example of gender misidentification is Laverne Cox. Born with the body of a man,
Cox didnt even know the true difference between boys and girls until third grade. She had
always assumed that once puberty hit, she would start turning into a girl. However, her reality
was much harsher. Her teacher at the time told her mother Your son is going to end up in New
Orleans wearing a dress (Cox). The statement sounded so shameful to her that she started to
push down her feelings of wanting to be a girl. What she wanted more than anything else was to
be a successful and famous performer, which she felt would not happen if she associated with
being transgender.
Coxs family was religious. By the time she was in sixth grade, she was going through
puberty and her attraction to boys grew significantly. In church, she learned that a boy liking
other boys was a sin. She began to imagine her grandmother in heaven looking down on her and
being disappointed. The thought devastated her so much that one night she downed a bottle of
pills that she found in the bathroom and went to sleep hoping that she would not wake up. She
attempted suicide because she felt like she could not be who she was truly meant to be.

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Cox had no one to talk to about her worries. She did not have friends at the time and she
felt that she could not fully rely on her twin brother or mother due. She never knew her father.
She was constantly being bullied for being feminine. The bullying was bad enough that she had
to run off the bus each day to avoid getting beaten by other children, sometimes without success.
Things remained the same in her junior high school years when she tried embracing androgyny.
Trying to identify as gender-fluid did not feel nearly as right to her as was identifying as female.
Years later, after becoming a full-fledged woman, she finally says that she is happy with
who she is. She is a successful and famous performer, just like she aspired to be and she is not
ashamed of herself in any way. She is the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an
Emmy Award, which she achieved for her role as a transgender woman in the series Orange Is
The New Black. Her twin brother even played her character pre-transition in the show.
Laverne Cox and other people like her are an incredible inspiration to other people in the
transgender community. People like her, who achieved their dreams despite not having
traditional views on sexual orientation and gender, are the best role models transitioning people
could come across. They are the people who have gone through the entire process, surviving
prejudice, shame, trauma, depression, and other terrible experiences to become who they believe
they were meant to be.
Traditionally, people tend to believe that body parts generally define who you are as a
human being. However, as Cox states folks want to believe that genitals and biology are like
destiny! When you think about it, its kind of ridiculous. People need to be willing to let go of
what they think they know about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.
Because

that

doesnt

necessarily

mean

anything

inherently

(Cox).

Such

gender

misinterpretation is exactly what is affecting a significant number of the transgender community.

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Each person is trying to figure out in their own right exactly what it means to be a man or a
woman, as they try to figure themselves out as a whole. Despite our varying genitalia and our
differing opinions of them, we are all still people and we all deserve the same amount of respect.
My point here, that all people are the same despite their different body parts and feelings
regarding them, should interest those who identify themselves as transgender. Beyond this
limited audience, however, my point should speak to anyone who has non-traditional views on
sexual orientation and gender.
I am no longer ashamed to admit that Im different, although it would be a lie to say that I
always felt that way. I used to be self-conscious about every single tiny detail of myself. Like
every other high school girl, I would do my makeup and dye-destroyed long hair and worry over
what I would wear each day for hours. I would constantly fawn over boys for being attractive
and daydream about what a relationship with any one of them would be like. Looking back on
those days now, I never felt right acting that way. I always felt as if I was ignoring a part of
myself, becoming someone superficial just to appeal to others.
In my sophomore year of high school, I thought I may be bisexual. I would occasionally
think about girls in a romantic manner, as I would with boys. Once I started really thinking about
sexual orientation and questioning it, it made me realize that although I found many people
attractive, I never actually thought about any of them with any sort of degree of love. My body
would react, my mind didnt. This led me to mislabel myself as asexual for months before I
looked into the matter more and discovered that I was actually aromantic because I had never
really had any kind of romantic feelings of love or adoration for anyone. My epiphany helped me
to discover more parts of myself, but it still did not make me feel completely better. It still felt

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like I was missing something about myself, something even more important that my sexual and
romantic orientation.
By the middle of my junior year of high school, I gave up entirely on my appearance. I
could not stand wearing makeup, doing my hair, and dolling myself up any more. As a few days
without makeup went by I started to feel significantly better about myself. Soon I also started
tying up my hair, hiding it underneath the only beanie I owned. It felt insanely right. For nearly
seven years I had wanted short hair, but I never fully understood the reason why. I had always
had long hair, so I had assumed that I just wanted a change, although for some reason it had
always felt like much more than that. After a while, I ditched my tight fitting clothing for
oversized t-shirts and sweaters. I started to really look at myself in the mirror more, not at my
physical appearance but at myself as a human being.
After a while, the realization finally hit me. I felt wrong in my body, not wrong in my
appearance. Everything I had done up until then had just made me hate myself more. I had gone
completely against who I felt that I was actually meant to be by trying to become like every other
person born with a vagina. But truthfully I was ashamed of my genitalia. I didnt want a vagina. I
didnt choose to be born with one. I was unlucky at birth and happened to be born into the wrong
body. I was disgusted with myself as a person because I was born with the wrong body parts.
Once I discovered the reason why I had never felt right, it was as if I had been freed from
a huge burden for the first time in my life. Afterwards, I cut my hair short and swapped out all of
my girly clothes for hoodies and more t-shirts. Instead of wearing bras to make myself look
bustier, I wore sports bras and a binder to make myself look as flat as possible. I adopted a
masculine nickname among my friends. The more I behaved and appeared like a male, the more
I started liking myself as a person.

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In the two years since my self-discovery began, I have been more accurately able to
define myself. In regards to how I view my body, I have no doubt that I am transgender, since I
severely prefer male genitalia to the female ones I was born with. In regards to gender however,
even though I do view myself as more of a male than a female, I actually fall under the agender
category since I dont fully identify with either gender.
Most people that are close to me have caught on at this point about how I feel about my
body, but there are exceptions. My close family, for example, still think that my behaving and
dressing like a man is just a stage Im going through. There are millions of people around the
world who are unwilling to accept that not everyone is comfortable in the body that they are born
into. Why do people find it so hard to believe that because they didnt get to choose their gender
at birth that some people dont identify with the gender that they were born as, simply because it
does not feel right to them? Why is it so wrong to become the people that we feel we should have
been in the first place? A persons beliefs and the way in which they associate with their gender
does not make them any less of a person.
The general publics arrogance and narrow-minded way of thinking is what makes so
many transgender, gay, and other non-traditional identifying people hate themselves for being
who they are to the point that so many of them self-harm or commit suicide. Why is it nearly
illegal to express yourself in things that really matter and define who you are as a human being?
Why cant people simply learn to respect others beliefs since their lifestyle does not involve
them in any way whatsoever anyway?
If a person feels as though they do not belong to their birth gender, they should be able to
legally change it on all of their legal documents without having to have undergone sex change
surgery. If they are willing to go through the legal process and pay for the written change, then it

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means that they truly see themselves as the opposite gender. Also, very few people have access
to the amount of money that is required to undergo a sex change, since the government has
deemed it cosmetic and does not provide any financial aide to the individuals who want to have
the surgery.
Although in the United States it is currently possible to legally change your sex
designation on state-issued documentation, the process borders on extreme. Three states (Idaho,
Ohio, and Tennessee) outright refuse to change the designated gender on birth certificates no
matter the circumstances. Of the states that do allow the change, court orders for both sex change
and name change are generally required. There are many other requirements to be met before a
sex change on a birth certificate is allowed, such as proof of sex reassignment surgery,
specifically for the genitals but some cases also for the top and letters from both a surgeon and a
medical doctor, and sometimes from a therapist. In many of the states there are also the added
hassles of having to amend the original birth certificate and/or issue a new one to the individual
in question.
The process for changing the gender designation on drivers licenses is extremely similar
to that of birth certificates. As stated by researchers in Feminism & Psychology:
The state requirements for gender/sex change on drivers licenses were, as a
whole, less stringent than those for birth certificates. We found that only
Tennessee explicitly did not allow gender/sex change on DLs. However,
interpreting this to mean that changing DLs would necessarily be easier would be
precipitous because a BC documenting gender/sex change was a requirement in
24% of states. Requiring a BC for a DL change therefore mandates all the steps

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required for a BC, even if these are not explicitly listed for a DL. (van Anders
181)
The general requirements for obtaining a sex change on a drivers license besides
requiring the change to have already occurred on the birth certificate are the exact same as those
for the birth certificate itself, although there may either be slightly more leniency in some
categories, such as obtaining a letter from a surgeon. Despite the fact that not many states require
a letter from a medical doctor to change the sex on a birth certificate, it is required in almost
three-quarters of the states for the change to take place on a drivers license. There is also the
additional category of proof required that the person has lived as the gender full-time.
No matter how you look at it, sex reassignment surgery is almost always required for a
sex change to be allowed on any kind of issued documentation, which is not fair to those who do
not have the ability to pay for the surgery. If the state governments insist on making sex
reassignment surgery the deciding factor on whether or not sex can be changed on issued
documents, then they should be forced to pitch in at least a decent portion of the money required
to undergo the surgery. It would be incorrect to say that transgender people do not want to have
sex reassignment surgery, but it would be correct to say that the surgery is simply way too
expensive for most people to be able to afford.
How a person identifies with their body should not be for the government to decide, but
should instead be on a personal basis. If the government has the right to prevent many in the
general public from changing important natural parts of themselves, then the general public
should have the right to prevent the government from doing many more things to make up for
their losses. You cannot call a country free if the people are not even allowed to decide for
themselves who they are and the gender that they want to be identified as.

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Works Cited
Changing Birth Certificate Sex Designations: State-By-State Guidelines. Lambda Legal.
Lambda Legal, n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.
Steinmetz, Katy. TIME Cover Story: Interview With Trans Icon Laverne Cox. Time. Time, 29
May 2014. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
van Anders, Sari M, Nicholas L Caverly, and Michelle Marie Johns. Newborn Bio/Logics And
US Legal Requirements For Changing Gender/Sex Designations On State Identity
Documents. Feminism & Psychology 24.2 (2014): 172-192. Academic Search Premier.
Web. 25 Nov. 2014.