BEAUTIFUL

The film Girl is about a transsexual ballet dancer. The film very nicely portrays what it's like to be a girl who happens to have a penis. How a body that can express something as beautiful as ballet can also be the source of so much pain and suffering for a transgender person.

TIMES CHANGE

Why make a big deal out of everything? When it's so individual, I mean. That is, this whole journey we're on, in our bodies, within ourselves and in relation to others. Being trans is like being brown-haired or lame or freckly or chubby or tall. In our particular culture, in this particular time, transgenderism is a suffering. Here it breaks the norm, unlike in Maori culture, for example, where LGBTQIA people were highly valued just a short while ago.

ANGLE A PROGRAM AT THE EXPENSE OF MANY

Uppdrag granskning's (swedish program) show about transgender health touches the surface. Stirring the pot to create reactions and get ratings. I don't know why progress has to come at the expense of someone's well-being. But that's the way it is anyway. Developments are happening now in terms of hormone treatments, care within trans healthcare. Thousands of people are waiting for treatment for what feels like a congenital deformity that prevents them from existing.

More people who regret their gender reassignment are coming forward.

But for all those who suffer and need respect, acceptance and support, life has become more difficult. Those who are not accepted by their families, who live with severe anxiety about their bodies on top of existential suffering, that is, the question of why they are different, why they are "wrong".

ACCEPTANCE NOT MORE POLARIZATION

Imagine if Uppdrag granskning could have investigated the question of why one should have to feel wrong. Why the boy Leo felt he would rather walk with pain in his bones than develop a woman's body, or why someone should feel ashamed for having made a sex change - or regretted a sex change.

AS IF PAIN IS A CATASTROPHE OR SOMETHING UGLY THAT NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP, WHEN PAIN IS THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD

As a transgender person, you want to correct your body because it is miscoded, as a deformity of any kind. It is uncomfortable to live with body parts that you associate with deformity, suffering, oppression. Some people feel raped by their own body.

EVERYBODY STRUGGLES WITH SOMETHING

Suffering is suffering, everyone suffers in life. Suffering in itself is not strange. We all struggle with something. For trans people, it's the body and everything that goes with the body in terms of identity and relationships.

The anxiety of misplaced body parts is terrible, I know.

NOBODY'S PERFECT

But I think that anxiety could be alleviated by more tolerance in society. More: 'Well, you're trans, well, that gives you something to think about. What are you having for dinner?" Some guys have boobs and some girls have dicks. It's the soul that matters, isn't it? Imagine if 11-year-old Leo, the subject of the Tv program, had been given the message that he was perfectly fine and just as much a boy even though he was about to start getting boobs. (By the way, most men have breasts, almost all of them have a little extra tissue there.) He's just as good, just as nice, just as valuable, smart, healthy, strong, as other kids.

THE BANK OF EXPERIENCES

For those of us who are trans, gender identity and the exploration of it is part of the journey of life, part of our very bank of knowledge and experience. (Something our souls are called to do, I would think, while other people's souls need to climb other kinds of mountains.) If a young person starts a sex change but then finds out that it doesn't have to be done, he has made a journey of his own, after all. They have bravely sought and tried something out.

THE TREATMENT

For most of us who are transgender, treatment and surgery will feel necessary for quality of life. It's just like any other condition people have developed treatments and medications for. You want to be free, to wear what you want without extra baggage and to feel like yourself when you look in the mirror.

YOUNG AND DESPERATE

Young transgender people are suffering badly today. Those of us who are older know that it is possible to survive gender dysphoria and life in a deformed body all though correction treatment is an enormous relief. But young people easily become desperate and think that the suffering will last forever. In my opinion, it is not the appearance of the body that matters, but the soul that lives in the body. Even if the body is a burden, the soul is always whole and beautiful.

THE SOUL

People talk about diagnoses and medicines, but not about the soul. And although treatments help, they don't cure all suffering. I'm not saying you have to like your penis or your breasts, but I wish we could put aside the suffering of the body and look more at the soul, because it's beautiful.