Questioning Transphobia
A hot subject. Questioning Transphobia is a must in your links. Below an abstract.
All too often, trans people are vilified, demonized, and excluded from considerations of basic humanity. Cisgendered people – when they realize they’ve seen a transsexual or transgendered person – will not hesitate to interrogate us about the shape of our genitals, challenge our competence to make decisions for ourselves, and hurl bigoted slurs at us. We have to fight for civil rights that are assumed as a given for cisgendered people, because who we are and what we do is not respected and often reviled. No Designation defines “transgender” as :
“Transgender or Trans – Traditionally defined as a person who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, I prefer to shift the focus away from assigned gender and define transgender as a person who’s gender is not universally considered valid. That means that someone, somewhere, will tell a transperson that they are not the gender they say they are. (ex: a transman is someone who identifies as a man and that there would be someone out there who would tell him that he isn’t a man)”
In other words, our gender is (as transgender and transsexual people) not respected, invalidated, insulted, and hated. We are denied personhood because our gender is not heteronormative enough: Proper men do not want to become women, and proper women do not become men, never mind the nuances of transgender identities, from two-spirits to androgynes, to ftm-spectrum and mtf-spectrum people who choose not to go all the way. We have trouble finding jobs and when we do Social Security is required by federal law to out us to our employers (in order to fight terrorists, you see).
