Provocation number 4

Not everyone is born and raised in an environment that is welcoming and open to their own private feelings when it comes to who you are as a person. Not everyone is born in the majority group and so they have access to less support groups, making them feel challenged and as though they are alone. Someone who is a straight able-bodied male does not face the same challenges as a bisexual male, or a transgender individual does in their daily lives. The first is able to live life within the normative narrative that society has come to expect; the other two do not have this luxury, they are outside the “norm” and do not have the support of a general majority. “I heard nothing about transgender and transsexual people; it seemed that folks who lived outside the gender binarydidn’t exist in my world. More accurately, I was the only one.” (Clare 2001) Those in the majority are accepted and do not have the pressure from a society that is not understanding enough to view or see things from their own perspective because they have never had to face the same things. 

We learn by experiencing and growing through the events that take place within our lives. Because of this our grasp of understanding can sometimes be limited because we were not introduced to the situation and feel scared by how foreign it feels. This fear overcomes us and rather than accepting those who are different from us, society instead views them as somehow flawed and labels them as such. Viewing someone who has had to face a different set of challenges does not make them wrong in someway or “dis”abled by what makes them different. Rather than embracing these differences we put limitations and pressures that otherwise would never be faced, creating an artificial challenge for someone who already has had to face things those in the norm have never had to consider.

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