I don’t understand transgender people.  There, I said it.  I am a straight, white, privileged female, and I cannot understand how someone is born a female but identifies as a male, or vice versa.  I can’t wrap my brain around it.  Never, in my life, have I questioned myself in that regard.  I had my first crush in kindergarten, (Bobby Rossi, thank you very much,) and my first real crush in the fifth grade.  (Oh, Danny Andreeff, how you broke my permed hair with an overbite awkward heart.) It was always boys.  There wasn’t a question, never a real curiosity.  I didn’t have to think about it.  I was a girl, girls like boys, that was pretty much it.

But bear with me here.  Because there are a lot of things I don’t understand.  They include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Being a cat.
* Having a penis.
* Being African-American.
* How gravity really works.
* Being really rich.
* Being truly poor.
* Not having family that loves me.
* Why Kim Kardashian is famous.
* Tumblr.
* Why my cats are assholes.
* How a man walked on the moon.
* Why children get cancer.
* How ten minutes when I’m in a spin class can feel like eternity, but ten minutes before my alarm goes off is a nanosecond.
* Why McDonald’s diet coke is far superior to any other diet coke.
* That people actually believe Donald Trump could lead a country. (Sorry.  Had to throw it in there.)
* How a parent can harm their own child.
* Where the extra socks go to live after they’re put into the washer, never to be seen again.
* How the internet works.
* How the telephone works.
* Really, how anything electronic works.
* Being disabled.

The list could go on and on and on and on.  But here’s the thing.  All of those things?  Happen.  They are real.  They are true.  Some people understand them.  Some people make them their life’s work.  They EXIST.  They are reality.  Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t make it untrue.  It doesn’t make things not happen.

We used to think the world was flat.  We used to think women weren’t capable of voting.  We used to think it was okay to enslave an entire race based on skin color.  We used to believe that we were untouchable, that no one could ever use our own planes and training against us.  We used to think only gay people got AIDS.  Guess what?  We were very, very, wrong. 

To denounce something because we don’t understand it – is that not the absolute height of all arrogance?  “Well, that doesn’t make sense to me, therefore, it’s impossible.  Case closed.”  That’s like insisting two plus two equals five, or that Mars isn’t a planet.

So no, I don’t understand being transgender, any more than I understand standing up to pee.  And I’m not going to lie, I’m glad for it.  I’ve never had to defend being who I am, defend who I love and have to explain why.  I can’t imagine having to do so. 

But that doesn’t mean that population doesn’t exist.  It doesn’t make them less real, or less than anyone else.  People are people.  And most people?  Are good.  Even the ones you don’t understand.

And they all deserve to go to the damn bathroom in peace.