Earlier this month, Penn State Abington offered a talk about transgender life, discussing what makes someone trans, as well as promoting visibility and acceptance of the trans community. Whether one is trans, knows someone trans, or simply has an “talkative” uncle on Facebook ranting about how anything more than two genders is some kind of liberal conspiracy, this is an issue that touches many of our lives.

The first speaker was Sophie Kandler, a trans activist, respected writer and Penn State alumna, having received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education from the university. She made it clear that nothing was off the discussion table.

“I am going to be a poor dinner guest. I am going to bring up politics; I am going to bring up religion. I may say some things that you find offensive,” Kandler said.

While she did speak about her own journey, the majority of her talk was devoted to clearing up common misconceptions about

gender identity and sex.

First, she launched into the history of transgender persons, who have existed since the dawn of human history, from documented cases in ancient Egypt to the Native American “Two Spirits,” viewed as so important to the culture that Gen. Sherman viewed them as targets for elimination second only to the buffalo in order to wipe out the Native American tribes.

Despite this, said Kandler, modern media seem to shine a very negative light on transgender individuals.

“We’re either comic relief, or we’re the evil ones.”

She concluded her talk about transgender history with the importance of Caitlyn Jenner in making transgender individuals more visible.

Then, she deconstructed the notion of gender as a binary. Picking two individuals from the crowd, Kandler declared one the epitome of femininity and the other the epitome of manhood. The point of this was to illustrate to the assembled crowd how very many people could fit neither definition perfectly.

“Not every woman is a Barbie doll; not every man is a Navy SEAL.”

The next part of the talk involved Kandler showing the numbers. According to her, there are more than 22 million transgender people on earth, and more than 900,000 in the U.S. alone.

She also showed data attacking the notion that transgender identity is chosen. According to Kandler, one is transgender or not based on fetal development, making it more akin to mutation than choice.

In addition, if one defines gender solely by chromosomes, with men being XY and women being XX, one still cannot claim there are only two genders, as there are 36 possible variations of this chromosome pair.

Later, Kandler provided some sobering statistics. More than 41 percent of transgender individuals had attempted suicide. While this is the official number, Kandler suspects that there may be many transgender suicides unaccounted for, as these numbers were taken by survey.

“You can’t survey the dead,” Kandler emphasized.

After this, Kandler turned the floor over to Melissa C., who has lived her Truth for over a decade. Melissa elaborated for several minutes about her own life and struggles to discover who she truly was. This, except for a brief question and answer session, ended the talk.