Deborah Lipp

There’s this guy I know, J. I’ve known him about a year, I guess. Likeable, a little shy, very sweet. Something about him always bothered me, though. His too-high voice seemed like an affectation, his curled-in posture seemed diffident. He just struck me as off somehow.

So a few weeks ago, he mentions, in the course of explaining this situation he’s in, that he’s transgendered. And I thought, “Oh!”

It was like, whoosh, the air went out. J. became normal to me. “Normal” because there was nothing off about a transsexual having a high voice or a chest that looked, well, post-op. The perception of abnormality came from not knowing, not being able to put the pieces together.

So that’s interesting. If we have knowledge, we are better able to perceive difference as normal. If we don’t have knowlege, we fall back on normativity; within cultural normativity, transgendered people (especially FTM) don’t exist, and therefore there was something “wrong” with J.

It’s amusing to note that he seemed more normal being transgendered than he did without that datum.

About a week later I was in the mall and I saw a dwarf and I thought, “Wow, she’s tall.”

I am friends with a family—three sisters, one of whom passed away recently—of dwarfs. (I apologize now if the word “dwarf” offends you; this is the term my friends use and taught me to use.) When I see dwarfs, especially pseudoachondroplastic dwarfs, instead of thinking of them as odd or different, I think of them as looking like my friends (this type of dwarfism has a characteristic walk and posture, and I tend to recognize people largely by stance).

So I feel warmly when I see dwarfs. Is this patronizing; a form of bigotry? I hope not. In general, I think you can’t help noticing extreme size difference, because it’s how the eye scans. I think I see someone who triggers a warm memory and that’s all there is to it. I suppose if I knew many dwarfs, some of whom were nice and some of whom weren’t, the memory would be neutral and the experience would be more normative. But I digress.

The point is, she was tall. For a dwarf. I didn’t see her as small, I took her as herself, in context, and noticed, in that context, that she was unusually tall. She became tall when I could see her as herself, just as J. became normal when I could see him as himself.