If your daughter was born with a single leg but said that she was supposed to have two, would you think any less of her? If your brother was born with an abnormally weak immune system, but longed to be able to rough house like other little boys, would you criticize him? 

The answer to these questions seems obvious—you wouldn’t think any less of someone you love simply because they were born differently, but unfortunately members of the transgender community aren’t always met with such understanding. 

Unfortunately, transphobia is so prevalent that in 1998, Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a trans woman decided to dedicate November 20 as Transgender Day of Remembrance in honor of the men and women who have lost their lives due to hate crimes. 

This year, the transgender community has made major strides withCassidy Lynn Campbell becoming the first transgender Homecoming Queen, and a new bathroom law allowing transgender children to use the school bathrooms according to the gender with which they identify. While these may steps in the right direction, it does not change the fact that some parents continue to fight to keeping their children sheltered at the expense of shaming and isolating other children. Nor does it overshadow the disproportionate number of transgender teens living on the streets due to their own family’s lack of acceptance. 

When talking about issues of homelessness, it is naïve to overlook the fact that the fact that while they make up only a relatively small percentage of the population, 20 to 40 percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth identify as LGBT.  This is especially concerning considering that almost one third of transgender homeless people report having been turned away from shelters due to their gender identification. 

Clearly at this point in time, not everyone can easily accept the fact that someone with a penis claims to be a woman, but if we want the next generation of transgender youth to grow up without fearing unsafe at school because of their gender identity—as a startling 90 percent of transgender do according to a 2011 study—changes need to be made now. 

So what needs to be done?

Well for starters, we need to stop viewing transsexualism as a mental disorder. 

Gender dysphoria, the psychological term for transexualism, appears in the current manual of mental disorders, the DSM-5—in the same book as pedophilia and schizophrenia. 

Although the latest edition has moved away from the term, “Gender Identity Disorder,” its very classification as a mental disorder helps propagate stigmas that lead to very real consequences for transsexual and transgender individuals. 

Even Jack Drescher, a New York psychiatrist who was part of the American Psychiatric Association's work group on gender identity, which revised the latest manual of mental disorders, the DSM-5 recognizes how little it resembles the other mental disorders included in the manual. 

"Usually with a mental disorder, we try and change the person's mind," he says. "This is the only mental disorder where the treatment is changing the body. In a typical mental disorder, we try to make those symptoms go away. Here the treatment has emerged to align the person's body to match their gender identity."

In 1973, homosexuality was finally removed from the catalogue of mental disorders, freeing gay and lesbian men and women from the threat of therapy and institutionalization to reverse their “disorder,” a clear marker of changing attitudes. 

It’s about time that attitudes the trans community change as well. 

Contact Executive Producer Sara Newman here. Tweet her here.