I feel the need to reflect on what happened on Friday evening…and was still happening when I awoke this morning. Needing some emotional immediacy, let me first add what I posted in WYFP on Saturday evening:
What is this place?
A diary about discrimination against a black transdude (warning 580+ comments) ended up being a forum for bigoted views about transpeople. We're perverts and "rapists by deceit"...and apparently it's okay for people on DK to say such things. If we complain, we're the bigots.
I seem to have gotten lost somewhere.
I should be going now. I have to get "born a man" tattooed on my forehead.
I came here with the idea that this could be made into a safe place for transpeople.
Five years later and it has become apparent that I have failed. And I doubt if five more years will have any effect either.
So what is the point?
As a side not, I really hate it that Text Edit keeps trying to correct transpeople to "tradespeople". No respect, I tell you.
Basic to understanding transgender people is the notion that people are not their chromosomes. Yes, your chromosomes do set up a template for how you will develop, but central to being a human being is that we have minds. Homo sapiens. Thinking man. What happens in human brains is important.
And who knows, maybe there is even a genetic cause to the different way we think. Female-to-male transsexual people have masculinised brains, apparently. On the other hand, brains of male-to-female transsexual people are not completely feminized, but are rather halfway between male brains and female brains in the amount of white matter in four specific regions in the brain. But we still feel female.
According to Ivanka Savic-Berglund of the Karolinska Institute in Stockhom, believes those four regions may be associated with notions of gender. One of them…the superior longitudinal fascicle…connects the parietal lobe (involved in processing sensory input) to the frontal lobe (involved in planning movement) and "may have implications in body perception".
An different study of transgender people (Warning: pdf…see page 25 (Kennedy and Hellen)) from 2010 found that 46 of 121 subjects realized their gender variance by age 5 (the mode) to age 8 (mean = 7.9). 76% were aware they were gender-variant before they left primary school (in England). Yes, all children normally start becoming aware of their gender identity between ages 3 and 4 and it develops over the next two years or so. Simultaneously, they are taught that gender is an invariant social category, so one of the major feelings transkids experience is the feeling of not belonging…of being out of place in our own bodies…of being Other.
The reason for pursuing these studies is so that transsexual children might get diagnosed and treated earlier, so their lives don't have to begin to stink like rotten fish before they get something done about who they are. New research indicates that a diagnosis based on the amount of myelin (the neuron that makes white matter white) in MRI scans of the brains of sleeping infants "by two or three years of age".
But why should it matter. The people who disrupted my diary from Friday are the experts:
it is a scientific fact that males have xy chromosomes and females have xx. Trangendering doesn't change that.
--Ianb007
Laying aside that transgender is not a verb, so the word "transgendering" doesn't exist, Ian and the others miss the fact that biology is not all genetics…and that genotypes are suggestions, not requirements. There are XX men and XY women, for example. And there are a host of other combinations of sex chromosomes, from XXXY to XXY to XYY to XO and combinations. And you know what, few people actually every have their genes tested in order to learn which configuration is theirs.
Yes, they are relatively rare…but so are transpeople. That doesn't make us less than human.
We don't deserve meme's right out of Focus on the Family and the like coming from so-called democrats/liberals here at Daily Kos. Where is the respect in these statements:
A transman is an altered female made to resemble a man as much as modern science will allow.
--USArmyParatrooper
No, a transman is a man.
That would be the respectful approach.
So Joe Pervert can apply for a job like women's locker room attendant, insist that he considers himself female, and sue for damages if the employer refuses to consider him?
--Wham Bam
We have laws against perverts and what they do. Why should transpeople be punished for what people believe a pervert would do (which I can only believe is what the person who said that would do if they had the opportunity).
Wham Bam also disagreed with the rules we follow to transition, as set forth by the
World Transgender Association for Transgender Health. A copy of the
pdf in English is
here.
Your rules need to take into account ordinary perverts.
I suppose that was meant to mean "as opposed to you extraordinary transgender perverts".
The assumption that transpeople transition in order to perform heinous acts is so demeaning that I don't know if I have the tenacity to remain coming to this place.
Some people perform heinous acts. Transpeople should not be punished for the actions of those people.
And finally (but not to imply that was all the nasty shit in that diary) the following came up a few times:
If a transfemale meets a guy with mutual romantic interest, does she have a moral obligation to tell him she used to be a man?
The implication is that the person who wrote that believes that any sexual encounter between the two people, one who has a penis and one who has a vagina, would be gay sex because the person with the vagina is still a man.
Hunh? Why not just require that transwomen have "MAN" tattooed on their foreheads?
Why don't transwomen always tell straight men their status? Because we don't want to be beaten to death (see Angie Zapata), defenestrated (Fedra's story) and/or immolated. We learn from the actions of others. Transwomen would be much more open about who we are if men didn't insist that sex with one of us would mean they are gay…which they can't have…and so attempt to "wash away that gay" by murdering us.
Here's an idea: fix that.
And because of that disrespect that was dished out…and because of the people that defended that disrespect and even uprated it, we're the mean people in all this? We're the bigots because we won't stand still and just accept being demeaned?
What?