A New Societal Order

I am still trying to ascertain the amount of damage done to the psyche of people who live within cultures with no outlets for authenticity. Even transitions only became a thing over the last 75 years or so but before that no one had ever been able to.

Hence gender non-conforming, transgender and transsexual people (certainly in the west) survived somehow knowing that even cross gender expression was severely frowned upon. At least in many native and eastern cultures there was tolerance for a third gender. The Judeo-Christian west meanwhile survived on the hypocrisy of secrecy and we went well into the 20th century with only pressure relief valves such as drag balls, secret clubs for married men to indulge their need for cross gender expression and stealth transitions. All the while the official image was that society was the picture of heterosexual and binary normalcy.

Christine Jorgensen in a sense broke the egg in the 1950's by making headlines and jolted people into the reality that those like her might have always existed. Bolstered by the work of Magnus Herschfeld and Harry Benjamin we slowly brought the public into awareness until we came to a point where we began to perturb and the right wing needed culture war red meat. The transgender tipping point of 2015 then was but a deceptive blip on the radar.

That the cat is out of the bag is certain and now we leave western culture to catch up to where more enlightened ones are. Even if things are never perfect for gender variant people and perhaps never will be, we at least rid ourselves permanently of shock value while we establish a new societal order.

If nothing else, the generation of my children gives me some hope.