Maeve Higgins: Transness points to exciting future but the backlash has been vile

Transgender people may be the catalyst for cisgender people starting to look beyond the physical and explore the interior, the community, and the elements that make us feel and think, places where transness points to a beautiful and exciting future, writes Maeve Higgins

LGBT+ activists and their supporters rally in support of transgender people on the steps of New York City Hall in October 2018. Transphobia is rampant in the US, there is a brutal and concerted effort to disappear trans people. File photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

NATURALLY enough, I don’t remember my birth, but I imagine my parents and doctors did the whole ‘it’s a girl’ thing. 

It was easy to tell from my body that my sex was female. As a child, I felt pretty much like a girl, meaning society both dictated and affirmed my gender identity, and that wasn’t confusing to me because it aligned with the sex assigned to me. This saved me a lot of trouble because as the years passed — cue the saxophone, please — I became a woman.