Day after day, I get up and I say, do it again! do it again!

Corroborating evidence of my assertion that it is the mundane assaults on trans folks that are most exhausting appeared on the CBC News website July 27th. A trans woman related her frustration at trying to get an ID card that matches her gender, and her encounter with a government functionary who asked whether she’d had “the surgery”. Whether it’s transphobia or not knowing your job, this is inexcusable, but not surprising. Being trans means being poked at, day after day. Poke, poke, poke. No wonder we’re such an angry lot.

Note too at the bottom of the article the short video of Dr. Joss Reimer, head of Manitoba’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, apologizing to trans folks for ‘wrong, inappropriate and disrespectful’ wording related to a question about gender on the COVID-19 vaccine consent form. The video doesn’t say what the question was but Manitoba’s original form had four boxes people could pick from when designating sex: male, female, intersex and unknown. After objections from non-binary folks who didn’t see themselves reflected, this was changed to three boxes designating sex: male, female and X, which some people still objected to, claiming X isn’t a gender. (It is, actually, as some non-binary people fought for the right to use it.) The true issue was that the province wasn’t clear about what information it needed and for what purpose, and their apparent lack of awareness that gender and sex are not interchangeable. Trans people worried that they wouldn’t have access to the vaccine if their health card gender didn’t match their vaccine consent forms.

We live in a cisgender world. It will take time for them to catch up. In the meantime, steel yourself for lots of frustration and annoyance. In the words of Ray Davies and the Kinks – who I’ve celebrated before on this site – “Back where you started, here we go round again, day after day I get up and I say, do it again! do it again!”