It’s the 21st century and I think it’s time that we really become accepting of our transgender community. There should be no more labelling, no more criticisms and no more categorizing based on who you are. It is the beginning of a new year, and with this new year, let’s start really opening our arms to the community we have, and not just saying that we do.

For a long time, decades even, the LGBTQA community has been under fire. People haven’t been accepting the fact that people aren’t sticking or abiding by the one social construct of heterosexual, cisgender, or binary gender identification. People don’t want to understand that there is more than one gender, or more than heterosexual sexual preferences available in the world. There needs to be an understanding that while yes; hetero relationships and partnerships have been the "norm," or rather what society has asked us to accept, and with the primarily acknowledged genders being just male and female, this is not how everyone should function. If someone is comfortable in a skin that they weren’t born with, or loves the skin that they're born with but wishes to identify differently, then shouldn’t they, as a free member of society, have the right to express themselves? That is the problem we are facing in today’s world, and something needs to be done about it.

As a straight young woman growing up in a Western society, even though I am from the Eastern world, I have come to see the differences in understanding the transgender community. The country where I am from, there is no concept of transgender. It is seen as a mistake, a transgender is seen as a pariah and immediately ostracized from the community. This is not to say that they are not existing in my country. They are, but they have a name given to them, a cruel name, and that is unjust. We as humans have a tendency to assign a stigma, and to automatically categorize everyone and fit them into a box based on our opinions of them. If we are taught that the world is universal, and we are all God’s people, whichever God or divine power we believe in, if we believe in one at all, then we should be able to accept people who want to truly express themselves.

Just because they may not seem to fit into your category, does not make them less of a person than you. Why does one need to be labelled as “he” or “she?" Why cannot we be labelled as “us” or by our names, and given the respect of honoring whatever pronouns we choose to go by? The names that our parents gave to us, or the names that we chose for ourselves because they tell us who we are? We are all people. How we choose to act is up to us, and it is not for others to define us as.

We need to accept that the transgender community is a growing community. They are people too, and they need our support. We are all people, and we all have insecurities and are vulnerable at the end of the day. As someone who knows and loves people who find it hard to identify to one gender role or one sexual preference, it is not fair of us, as a global community to ostracize people trying to find their way in this world. We all have a purpose in this world, and I think a joint purpose is to accept a community that is growing and evolving. Transgender folk are people too, and it’s about damn time we started treating them like we should treat each other; with love and respect.