Transgender, Non Binary, Dysphoria and Forgiveness - The Global Forgiveness Initiative

Many of our challenges in life come from our interactions with other people. Some challenges we face also come from inner conflicts, particularly if our sense of self is challenged by social pressure such as what often happens for transgender people. Indeed life challenges can be magnified for a transgender person, or indeed anyone whose sense of Gender Identity does not fit with the gender they were thought to be at birth.

Forgiveness: learning how to forgive others and learning how to forgive oneself, is highly relevant to transgender people. Developing a capacity to forgive can mediate between us and life events, and how we experience them, to help reduce stress and distress from the vagaries of life. There is the need to forgive those who just cannot, or are stubbornly unwilling to, accept the perspective of the transgender person. There is the need to forgive those who deliberately, or simply out of ignorance, feel the need to challenge the person’s change in Gender Expression. There is the need to forgive those who inadvertently, or deliberately, refuse to treat a transgender person with respect, by continuing to treat them according to their sex at birth rather than their gender identity.

These issues are compounded by the fact that the transgender person knows only too well the unpleasant reactions and resistance they may face in making changes to their gender expression. This can cause someone going through gender transition to hold back from making such changes, and perhaps only very reluctantly asking others to change the pronoun they use for them and so on.

This is understandable in the light of the discrimination and harassment they may well experience when they tell other people about the changes they are going through. The transgender person needs to forgive themselves for any understandable hesitation in not being as bold or courageous as they would like to be in their gender expression. They would also need to forgive those who are simply blind to the challenges of being a transgender person. In addition, they need to forgive those who do not pick up on the subtle hints the transgender person has been offering them, thereby forcing the transgender person to come right out and explicitly say things in situations where they would rather not.

Gender dysphoria, a sense of unease, unhappiness to even depression that a person may feel owing to a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity is also affected how others relate to us. Our sense of connection with others can be threatened if we feel that we are misunderstood in a fundamental way. We may feel that we are just not “seen” or “recognised’ somehow. However, this too can be alleviated by applying forgiveness methods to our relationships so that we can at least help reduce the ways in which resentment comes between us and other people.

If the transgender person is very introverted, and therefore tries to avoid attention, then this can compound the issues. An introverted person changing their gender expression can find themselves facing not only much unwanted attention, but some of this attention can be uncomfortable or even confrontational.

Of course, a person realigning themselves to what they feel is their genuine gender identity can ultimately find a sense of peace and freedom as they settle into feeling true to themselves. They may feel really good about themselves for being a much bolder and stronger person than the realised owing to how well they faced the challenges they have gone through. However, there may be some lingering wounds that can be cleared up by learning how to forgive and letting go of the past.

The challenge many people face is that they want to forgive and move on, but they just don’t know how to do it. They may also be afraid that forgiving someone means that they have to have keep an abusive person, that they would rather have nothing to do with, in their life. However, you can easily learn how to forgive by downloading the free ebook, The Four Steps to Forgiveness, via the links on this page. (You don’t even have to enter you email address to get it as the book is available via Immediate Download). You will not only discover how to forgive simply and easily, you will also discover that “Forgiveness can include ‘Goodbye.'” and that forgiveness sets you free.

After all you don’t just have a gender identity; you also have a deeper identity which has nothing to do with the type of body you inhabit or its inclinations. This non binary perspective goes beyond gender issues whether you see yourself as cis gender, transgender, or genderqueer, to the nature of reality itself as being non dual and suggests that at our core we have a non duality based awareness. The sages through the ages have hinted at the true identity that we all have and they tell us that the answers to our deepest questions are within. Forgiveness is included in the teachings of all the revered spiritual leaders of the human race since ages past. Just click on one of the links on the page and try forgiveness for yourself.