According to Johnson, there are many groups of people who identify themselves as transgender. Transgender is just an umbrella that consists of people who challenge gender normativity, which include people who claim to be Transmasculine, transfeminine and transsexual, genderqueer, Two-spirit, female to female and cross-dressers. Transgender people do not identify with their gender of birth and used medical procedures or surgeries to align themselves with their desired identity. However, in any context, transgender is considered problematic since many people do not accept or are not familiar with the concept of transgender (Johnson, 2). An example is when black people, being transgender is a sigh of whiteness and complete erosion into westernization by the whites. Also, black society considers transgender people as weak and unaccepted in the community. For some people, transsexual and transgender are the same, but some consider transgender as a political position that seems to undermine the medical establishments that pathologies transness. Generally, scholars in transgender studies try to eliminate the standard norm where people define gender in alignment with the physical characteristics of a person. Some scholars argue that the term ’transing’ is used in many transgender contexts to undermine gender’s discreteness. At some level, transgender studies help in understanding culture since it addresses a non-normative identity and coins down a name that can be used to address this identity (Johnson, 3).
In transgender studies, the words cisgender and cissexual are used to resist how a man or a woman can mean a transgender man or transgender woman by default. The prefix ‘cis’ is used to show that things are on the same side. If someone’s morphology matches with his or her sexual identity, she or he is said to be cissexual while a person whose morphology matches the gender is said to be cisgender. The definitions emphasize how people frequently define gender in relationship to a binding to the society, but the categories in gender and sex are performed and constructed. The labels cissexual and cisgender show that there are trans persons who retain their gender identities, despite going through procedures to make a physical appearance to change their selfhood. The two terms are also significant in explaining how various privileges work in society. People who receive cisgender privileges have a morphology that aligns with the community’s expectations of a particular sex. Some opportunities of cisgender people include having proper identification from the government that accurately represents a person’s identity, avoiding being asked questions about one’s genitals, and avoid violence in places such as prisons and homeless shelters. Notably, Cissexual people are denied some rights by the society, since people do not easily accept them as they walk the streets like normal people. This make it hard to create friend or have a normal relationship with another person.
According to Johnson, Cece Mc Donalds is persecuted for being transgender, and the people who offend her are not charged. In her case, her sexuality greatly impacted her life since it made her get imprisoned because of defending herself against people who were trying to harm her for being transgender. After being assaulted and killing one of the people attacking her, Mc Donald is arrested and jailed while friend to Schmitz, who was also in the attack, was left free by the court. This shows how the government is biased to transgender people in society by how they handled the Mc Donald case ((Johnson, 3). Accept from Mc Donald’s case, there have been many transgender people faced injustices, but the system refuses to grand the justice. Of all social institutions, the government is the least expected to engage in such activities.
