Here is Why Your Gender is NOT an Imposition on Others!
You feel like an imposition—Dr. Z explains why you're not and why educating them enables their ignorance.
You carry a feeling of imposition—as if your trans or non-binary identity is an imposition toward people around you. This feeling comes from a sense of responsibility you have for educating, explaining, or making people feel comfortable about your identity. Here's reality: You are NOT an imposition on anybody else. You're not imposing with your own identity at all. You're just living your life.
But you feel like you're carrying a heavy burden when people struggle to accept or support you. If you feel responsible for people's lack of understanding, lack of knowledge, ignorance about gender issues—like it's your job to explain—you're actually enabling their ignorance.
Dr. Z's metaphor: Everything felt smooth and ironed out before you came out. Now with you being yourself, the smooth fabric has gotten wrinkled. It should feel wrinkled because you're changing—status quo is changing. But those people want you to run around with a hot iron ironing out every wrinkle. You feel "oh my god my identity is an imposition, I've wrinkled this fabric, I gotta iron it out." When you run around trying to iron wrinkles by appeasing them, making them comfortable, explaining, educating, teaching—you're enabling them and their own chance for growth.
Watch to find out why the best thing you can do is be yourself and live your life (that will challenge their notions—they'll have to work on those things, not your responsibility), why they're actually an imposition to YOU (in today's world it's so easy to Google "transgender" or "non-binary"), and why people need to broaden paradigms about others even if they maintain strict paradigms about themselves.
