A tale of two people | Heather Newman | TEDxSchriever

A tale of two people, of two different people. If I was creative I would've named them with some fake names, but then I would've had to remember them, so we're going to call them Person 1 and Person 2, really creative. Person 1 is a 25-year-old white female who grew up in New York and went to private school for most of her life. Person 2, also 25 and white, identifies as male and went to public school. Based on income alone, she'd probably be considered in the mid-to upper-middle class, whereas he grew up in the lower half of the middle class. He was an all-around good athlete, playing basketball, soccer, hockey, football; anything the school had to offer. And she was an elite athlete, focusing on fencing. She was recruited by the Airforce Academy Defence Division 1, and after a year and a half at Penn State he started his first active duty job. She's a project engineer for an acquisition squadron, and he works in interpersonal violence prevention. She's married to her best friend from high school, and they're planning on having kids in a couple of years. He married the beautiful woman he started dating in college and would have kids yesterday if he could. After the airforce, she's considering becoming a chartered financial analyst and joining the family business. He's currently studying to become an EMT. Do you feel like you have a good idea of what these two people may be like? Maybe what they look like? They should, because in reality they're the same person. And they're both me. Person 1 is how the world tends to view me based on what they hear or see. And Person 2 is more how I view myself and how those closest to me may see me. I'm 25 years old, white, and every form of identification I have says I'm female. The problem is I never felt much like a girl, growing up. For as long as I can remember, I felt I should've been born a boy, and there was nothing I could do about it. At this point, you may correctly identify me as transgender, but with that comes a lot of assumptions about who I am, what I want, and how I live my life that may or may not actually be true. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of transgender no surgeries, not even changing your name or your pronouns. Because while some transgendered people choose to do one or all of these things, none of them are a prerequisite for identifying as transgender. Personally, I've no intention of undergoing hormone therapy, having surgeries, or even changing my name or my pronouns. To address some of these other apparent contradictions in the columns: I grew up in Upstate New York, I went to private school for most of my life, on financial aid, before I transferred to public school for high school. I dabbled in a lot of sports in middle school before settling on fencing around 8th grade. And I did that on an elite level competing for the U.S. for five years. I was recruited by the Airforce Academy and after four years went to Penn State for my master's. I've taught some of you in the audience. I am married to a beautiful woman, who also happens to be my best friend of nearly ten years, and as bad as I want kids, we are going to plan on waiting until I'm out of the airforce. At that point, to be honest, I don't know what I want to be. I am currently working on becoming an EMT, but I would like to have two, three, or maybe four kids, and it's hard to support a family of that size on EMT pay. So I'm looking at other things like becoming a chartered financial analyst and going to work with my wife. As I described to you these two people initially, you begin to build a picture, without me necessarily even asking you to, of who they are. And we do this automatically. Because until I tell you that they're me, you've never met them, you don't know who they are. But based on the twelve labels I've assigned to them, you make a judgement about who they are, you decide who they may be. In a sense, each column describes me, but neither one tells the full story. If you really want to know who I am, you need to know what's in both columns. But even more importantly, you need to know the stories behind those columns. Why did I choose those words? Why is that the 'me' I show to the world? In the article '10 Pieces of Advice from LGBT Millenials to Those Coming out Late in Life,' Carrie Poppy put it well, saying, 'We're asked when we come out to choose a label that can identify to others quickly a Rolodex of information about ourselves, which is really just a bunch of stereotypes.' And the problem with doing this is that it is based on assumptions about what it means to identify with those groups, or what it means to maybe know someone in one of those groups. Usually you're not forming those assumptions based on first-hand knowledge. We tend to do it based on stereotypes. The problem with doing this is we don't necessarily know anything about the person we're making assumptions about. We do it based on very little information about who they actually are. Just because two people share a label doesn't mean they necessarily share a story. And yet, we find ourselves on a regular basis making assumptions about people based simply on the labels that they choose to identify with. As an exaggerated example, nearly half of the world identifies as female. Assuming that all Muslims, Christians, gun-owners, gun-control advocates, Democrats, Republicans, Caucasians, African-Americans, cops, members of the LGBT community - we could go on and on - are all the same simply because they identify with the same label. I don't want to sit here and tell you this is all a bad thing and we need to stop. Because the reality is that, even if you made a conscious effort to, you couldn't. As humans, this is something we do, labelling and categorizing on a regular basis in that caveman part of our brain that's always trying to keep us safe. It's something we do automatically, usually without conscious thought. So you can't really stop altogether. In 2009 I was discussing the potential repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell with some of my fellow airmen. And one I didn't know all that well said, 'If I found out someone on our squadron was gay, I would kill them.' Like I said, I didn't know him that well, and to be honest, at that point in my life I wasn't out to anyone. I couldn't be 100% honest with you and say I was out to myself. But hearing him say that triggers a reaction in that caveman part of your brain that's trying to keep you safe, and it made me realize that, gay or not, I was in an environment where somebody would be willing to kill me over a difference in choice of labels. And I do this not because I'm ashamed to be gay or because I'm not confident in who I am, or even because I don't want to answer their follow-on questions. I do it because while we've come a long way with acceptance, we still have a long way to go. We still live in very divided times. So while my conscious brain is trying to have a conversation with this new person, and learn about them and tell them things about me, that caveman part of my brain is running a million miles an hour, trying to dissect everything about this person's tone, choice of words, body language, to decide whether or not I'm safe in that situation, and how much I can safely reveal about myself. And while most of that processing happens at a fairly unconscious level, who proudly serves in our airforce, without feeling like I may be putting myself or my family at risk by doing so. Sorry. But the only way we're going to be able to do that, the only way we come close to being in a world where I can do that, is if we can start to see our labels as things that unite us rather than divide us. As part of your registration today, many of you have identified on your name tags communities you're a part of. And walking around today, and at lunch, you may have noticed a number of people here with whom you share at least one community or label. And that can be a lot of fun, because it gives you the opportunity to break ice with someone you've never met. You can talk to a total stranger about a shared experience. I'm one of them. Among all Americans, about 166 million of us were assigned the female sex at birth. Of all American women, about 10 million are from New York. About 7,000 of us currently serve in the Armed Forces, 2,200 in the Air Force. Of them, 440 are officers, about 100 of which received our commissions from the Air Force Academy. Twenty seven went on to receive master's degrees as Junior Officers. And to my knowledge, I may be wrong, I'm the only one who got that master's degree from Penn State. We are. Each of the 7 billion of us on this planet can make one of these trees of our communities and subcommunities. Each of the 7 billion of us on this planet has a variety of experiences that make each of us unique. And that diversity makes life interesting; it keeps us engaged with the world around us, it stops us from living out the book 'The Giver' in real life. And diversity is not a foreign concept to us; we hear schools, jobs, companies, and teams talk about their diversity all the time. We see a lack of diversity causing issues like #OscarsSoWhite. And it's not uncommon to hear people say things like, 'The colour of their skin shouldn't matter,' or 'I don't see gender.' On the surface, these seem like good things, like positive statements. But if you really think about it, what you're saying is you don't see a part of my identity. And if you don't see a part of my identity, but the only way we can draw on the most powerful aspects of diversity is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, diverse. Even within the smallest subcommunities we have differences in experience that make each of us unique. And by opening those dialogues and talking about those experiences, we allow ourselves to learn from the experiences of others without ever having to experience those things ourselves. We have this vastly powerful tool of experiential learning in front of us, and yet, we aren't using it to its fullest potential. As we conclude our session today and after you leave TEDxSchriever, I challenge you to find those in your communities and talk to them about your experiences. What do you have in common? What do you not? What can you learn from each other? Deserving of respect, even if you disagree on everything, and you can't understand each other. And that's a fact that, as a world, we would do well to remind ourselves of more often. Thank you.