I'm Samy Nour Younes
I am an actor, a transgender activist,
advocate
I started my activism career
at about 2012
mostly organizing peer support groups
but from there I kind of bled into
working with more political grassroots activism groups
especially in the D.C metropolitan area
and then when I moved here to New York in about 2018
I started working with those types of groups as well
I like to educate people on the history of gender diversity
and the trans rights movement
as a way of contextualizing why the current fight for transgender rights is so crucial
a lot of people like to talk about
especially if they never met a trans person before
and you know with the sudden rise of trans people in the media
and representation
there's this prevailing notion that
'trans rights is a new thing'
or 'a new trend'
it's really important to educate people that
'No, this is actually just us scratching the surface'
of a movement that has been butting for a long time
and why is it important for now to address transgender issues
there is an emerging but very solid field of
trangender studies that looks at addressing transgender issues
including transgender history
the subject of transgender history is pretty complex
because what do we talk about when we say transgender history
'Transgender' as we understand it now is
both an identity and umbrella term
so as an identity, if you are assigned a particular gender at birth
and then you identify with another
you can be understood to exist within the transgender umbrella
as we like to call it, or within the transgender community
which also includes identities like 'non-binary'
'gender queer', 'androgynous', 'gender fluid'
there are a lot of terms to describe people
who don't necessarily conform to 'male or female'
the opposite of transgender as we understand it now
is cisgender
if 'trans' is the prefix that means 'across'
'cis' means 'from within'
or 'in this particular spot'
'transgender' if you think of it as crossing gender
'cis' means 'within'
and that is to describe somebody who is assigned a particular gender at birth
and continues to identify with that gender
so if someone is born
and doctor say 'it's a girl'
she grow up and she's like 'Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm a girl'
she's a cisgender girl
versus someone like me
who I was born
doctor said it's a girl
I said 'No, I'm a transgender man'
and that's how we distinguish the two
the term 'transgender'
only gained widespread use in the 1990's
before which point we were using different words
that we would now find outdated or offensive
so if we take a lens towards history and look for transgender people
and we don't have these hard-fastened guidelines of
'Oh this person said they're trans, so we know they're trans'
how do you identify transgender people
trans academics and people who studied trans history
generally will not assign the trans label to
to anyone who didn't use it for themselves
unless there is sufficient context to come to the conclusion that
a person lived or identified as a gender other than that
which they were assigned at birth
when you have societies that have embraced multiple genders
to assume that transgender which
really indicates crossing one gender to another
that's really not possible in another society
so you wouldn't go around calling all
other gender variant societies transgender
but what you would do as a trans historian
or someone studying trans history
is you would think to connect transgender people to
this enduring legacy of gender variants throughout history
and that is their approach that I like to take
because the idea that all through out time
all societies have assumed that there is a man and a women
and nothing in between
is factually inaccurate
it's a relatively bourgeoise notion
that came about among other things with the spread of colonialism
this idea of 'We're going to make everyone in the world conform to
western european ideals'
before that, there were quite a few populations that acknowledged gender diversity
in establishing a transgender historical canon
we don't just look for transgender people
we look for trangender practices
which is to say, as I have just described
when you look at people throughout time who
if they haven't used the term 'trans' to describe themselves
but you find them living and behaving in
accordance with the gender other than the one they were assigned at birth
we would consider that a 'transgender practice'
in order to establish that legacy of gender variants throughout history
we connect that to populations like, for example
in Indonesia the Bugis society
which on one of the three major ethnic groups of Indonesia
they still exist
today they are largely Muslim in faith
but they still acknowledge five gender identities
with some of them corresponding to what we would call
cisgender man and woman
to for what we would consider a trans man and a trans woman
and a middle one called the 'bissu', if I'm pronouncing that right that
it's difficult to define in western terms
it's not necessarily intersex
it's not necessarily androgynous
but it is this sort of fluid gray area
the Bugis society, as well some other societies
really acknowledges gender fluidity that is not necessarily determined by
physical sexual characteristics but by spirit
and that bissu is sort of in the middle
if we put male and female on a continuum, that's where they would be
more commonly known example is the hijra in India and Pakistan
it's an all encompassing word
that has come to mean, you know, eunuch
or hermaphrodite in the past
a lot of hijra would not use the term eunuch to describe themselves now
and in fact, a lot of modern day hijra would also call themselves trans
generally speaking a hijra is a person that was assigned male at birth
but now lives, identifies, presents
and also carries out traditional functions of a woman
especially as it comes to hindu ceremonies and stuff like that
so in the past the hijra sort of held a
ceremonial position
in terms of carrying out Hindi rites
many African countries acknowledge gender diversity as well
and again a common thorugh line
through a lot of these gender diverse populations is
that gender variant people
served a huge traditional purpose
and a huge spiritual and religious purpose
within their local communities
they were often thought to be spiritually elevated
especially if they were thought to be
able to perceive multiple sides of an argument
you know like, if only men saw this side of an argument
and only women saw this side of an argument
a third gender person would hypothetically be able to see them all
or at least that was the belief in certain populations
now among these populations and other examples that I haven't touched on
societal attitude towards gender identity shifted with the spread of colonialism
religious missions imposing European values
influenced local legislation that criminalized dressing or living
in a manner that was considered at odds with the sex assigned at birth
moreover accounts of gender diversity in other populations
at least that survived to this day were often written by
"explorers" or "religious missionaries"
or essentially from the colonial perspective
so the information that they leave behind is
usually skewed in favor of colonialism
as means of saying, you know
'Oh, look how backwards and primitive these people were'
and now we're imposing civilization on them
and as a part of imposing civilization on them
that means we have to stamp out this gender diversity
because it is considered indecent
when it comes to the community we call 'the transgender community'
our language and understanding of them have evolved over time
Magnus Hirschfeld who was a prominent German researcher
of gender diversity was the first to coin the term 'tranvestism'
but there were other people doing research and using other terms
to describe the same phenomenon
that includes 'third gender'
that includes 'transvestism', 'transsexualism'
'Eonism' which was named after the historical figure of the
Chevalier d'Éon
who is a French diplomat and spy
-I do not speak French so
my French is not that great-
but is noteworthy for living the last
three decades of their life as a woman
and claiming publicly often that they were both male and female
which has led many scholars to speculate that
maybe the Chevalier was either transgender or intersex
by the end of the 19th century we were not using those terms any more
but for a period of time we were calling it Eonism
to describe what we now know as transgender people
because a lot of my activism focuses on the American transgender community
that's where the bulk of my knowledge lies
but throughout American history, we have cases of people
living as a gender other than that which was assigned to them at birth
One example I gave at my TED talk was of women who presented as men
so they could go fight in the civil war
there were, I believe, in estimated
200 or less of those such cases
and in most cases, after the war
many of these soldiers went back the their lives women
dressing in a manner that was incongruous with your birth sex was
considered outlawed so you would be imprisoned
you may be fined
you may be assaulted or killed
so along with these legislations
people essentially were forced to assimilate
in order to protect themselves
and as a result
societal attitude towards people who were once considered sacred
shifted to viewing them as 'dirty'
or as 'immoral'
and that is something unfortunately carries through until this very day
without people from these communities alive to
as it was happening
it's very easy for people to collectively forget
how we once treated them
or even to forget that they existed at all
and that actually makes imposing a much more rigid binary system very easy
unfortunately
even within the United States
there are places in which it would be criminal
to be transgender
because-and this varies to state to stat
every state, even every city has its own laws-
but there are still states that have criminalized
'dressing as the opposite gender'
that's still on the books whether or not it's enforced
the same thing with whether or not you can be hired or fired
based on your sexual orientation and gender identity
that really varies per state
there are some states where you can fire someone for being gay
bisexual, transgender
and so it's really going to have to start at the legal level
of decriminalizing transgender people
because that, sort of, is what gives people
who are gonna discriminate against trans people,
the fire to go ahead and do it
in terms of denying them housing, denying them a job
denying access to health care
pushing them out of public facilities that they might need to use
that's where it all starts
another thing that's gonna have to happen is education
and that is not necessarily the same as representation
I think some people think it is
according to a recent GLAAD servey
estimated 84% of non-trans Americans
claimed to know a trans person in real life
those numbers might be wrong because maybe
there are someone in their life that they don't know about that is trans
bu for 84% of people
their exposure to trans people is through the media
and if you've got maybe a couple of people on television
playing characters
that's not necessarily educational
so we're really gonna have to step up our effort to educate people
worldwide, not just nationwide but worldwide
on simply what it means to be transgender
start there and dispel a lot the myths
that are currently circulating around the trans community
we are only, in the United States, only about 0.6% of the population
that number might be higher or lower because that is all based on self-reporting
but I don't think it's significantly higher
at best we're maybe 1% of the population
but we're still very much a minority
and so
I think people need to keep that in mind
even as they see this rise and trend in the media
it's not like we're suddenly everywhere
we're still a very small community and a very at-risk community
and that gets compounded by issues
such as socio-economic status
race, whether or not someone identifies as a transwoman
rather than a transman
transmen are often targets of sexual assault
as are transwoman
transwomen are often targets of violence that ends up being fatal
especially transwomen of color
transgender men have higher rates of substance abuse and suicide
in certain communities
all of that starts with making sure they get the proper care they need
there is sort of another
you know, one of the many myths surrounding trans people is that
you know
we are 'mentally ill'
and that 'being trans makes us depressed'
I could ask anyone I know and they would tell you
we're not depressed because we're trans
we're depressed because we cannot even get out of bed without
some attack on our legal rights or, you know
a transwoman can't walk down the street wihtout being called a man
or being touch so someone can determine whether she's a man or a woman
that street harassment is also very common among trans people
and that's where a lot of that mental health issues come from
and again that is something we can hopefully stave off
with better education around sensitivity for the transgender community
we have to remember that when we're tackling gender equality
that also includes transgender equality
