Wow...I started a great thread!
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Wow...I started a great thread!
Because of some good stuff in my past, I have a number of trans friends who don't escort and live what you would define as normal lives as best they can. In that sense they are no different from my gay and heterosexual friends.
But the reality of trans life that both Wendy and Miranda have shared passes most of us by - the daily self-doubt, the fear of being denounced by family or friends, the crushing lack of self-esteem and above all the certainty that your body in no way reflects the person that you know yourself to be. It's a hell of a life.
What Janet Mock's article points out is that, despite gradual and in some cases dramatic gains for the T element of LGBT, there are still entrenched vested interests in the media, politics and, more sadly, in certain racial and religious demographics which are too ready to condemn, preach hatred and thereby implicitly condone the ongoing violence and prejudice against trans people.
This latest incident is just the tiniest tip of a huge iceberg.
I think of these girls as a girl with a benefit, How many guys have had a gg finger his ass while getting a blow job? A sexy ts with a cock is just a little bigger than a couple fingers! and sometimes the Ts is a lot sexier!
I think a lot of men do not understand the huge privileges they have just by being men and cisgendered at that. Transwomen have even less privileges than ciswomen; as they say in Thailand, men first, women second, kathoey (trans)...way down there. And that is in a culture that tolerates transsex.
Cisgendered people never have to worry about going to a public convenience or a shop changing room, marked for their gender, and being thrown out for being in the wrong one. Nobody shouts 'hey fucking guy' when they walk down the street, We don't get held up at airports or refused bank loans because the gender on our documents doesn't fit our appearance, and then of course there's those lovely chaps the guardians of law and order, who routinely abuse transwomen in particular.
Yes, we all have to put up with jerks, but transfolk get ALL the shit that the rest of us only get a part of.
I think, particularly for a woman who has lived as a man before transitioning, and thus had possession of all the male cisgender heteronormative privilege, the whole atmosphere is incredibly undermining and hostile. Even girls living in deep stealth are not immune.
I hate it when guys on here start giving out about what a girl has done to her look, or this or that or oh my lord SRS...You know they have enough to deal with.
Some people think transsex is increasing; I don't. I think it only appears to be increasing. I think where it is suppressed, it goes underground, and where it is supported, it reaches a level and stabilises. Most estimates put this around 1-2%.
So if we love transwomen we have to support them; (and we also have to forgive when they cut loose with their tongues because they've just had it this week).
re: the first paragraph above: that's one reason why I've never been that big of a hip-hop fan, even in its early '90s heyday of consciousness rap (very little of which even addressed this subject, and the few who did speak publicly about this, like P.M. Dawn, were criticized and even attacked physically for it--all other rappers either openly approving or silent about it)
The second paragraph raises this question: could it be that such art forms are in themselves at least partly a method of justifying participation in the arts in general for men who perhaps believe at some level that "art/music/poetry/etc. is for women and sissies?"
Good post Kelly. I've also wondered about the mental stability of those trans-women who call the very men interested in them "queers" and that sort of thing. It certainly shows that these women think very lowly of themselves and of their sisters (after all, if they consider the men who like them to be nothing more than gay men--regardless of sexual practices and genital attraction--then such women evidently consider themselves and their sisters to also be men), aside from running off the very men who might be the loves of their lives--and of course, some men are more serious and willing to commit than others are.