It’s funny how she insists that she KNEW there was going to be prejudice, she just didn’t realize how all-encompassing it would be. Maybe she should have paid more attention to what women have been saying, and believed them. Really believed them.
Still, it’s good to get the perspective of someone who is used to being treated like a man detail exactly how bad it is to be treated like a woman. And maybe that’s what it’s going to take: enough people transitioning to expose the extreme difference in treatment in every aspect of life.
I don’t know if I could find it again (will post if I do), but I read an article about a trans man who needed to use a university computer lab while working on his degree. He was off for a year while he transitioned, so people he wasn’t acquainted with didn’t generally know.
He joked he was amazed by how much his computer skills improved post-transition. All of a sudden women were asking for his help every time they had a printer problem, whereas before they wouldn’t accept his advice even when he volunteered it.
OTOH, it’s one thing to hear and listen and another to viscerally experience.
It’s hard to predict just how awful something is, if you haven’t witnessed it personally. We can listen, believe and empathise, but the first time it happens to us is always a gut-punch. It’s called being human.
I have a trans friend and she was saying that she was so concerned about what men say about women because she KNOWS what they say about women. And that really freaked me out.
I’m interested in this idea of trans people as sort of spies for the opposite sex but I’m pretty sure if I were trans that I wouldn’t really want to be perceived that way. I didn’t ever press my friend to speak any more about her experience being perceived as a man.
(b) No superintendent of schools, his administrative designee or any principal shall dismiss or suspend any licensed employee in any school district for referring to any individual student’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth despite the student’s preference to identify as the opposite gender after undergoing stages of transition as a pansexual, transsexual or transgender, whether through sex reassignment, gender identity transitioning, hormonal therapy treatment or other philosophical processes. Additionally, no superintendent of schools, his administrative designee or any principal shall require any licensed employee to comply with any directive to use a student’s preferred method of reference against the employee’s sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction, as protected under the provisions of the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” authorized under Chapter 62, Title 11, Mississippi Code of 1972.
The best way I’ve heard it put is “trans women did not grow up with ‘male socialization’, they grew up with closeted trans girl socialization, which is not the same thing”
I totally get that. (Edited ro add: which is why I never asked my friend to share more than she voluntarily did; I knew that was not comfortable for her to be experiencing.) Still, what I wouldn’t give to know what men talk about when they believe there are no women around to hear them.
I haven’t been to 'Fest, but from what I’ve heard, the situation was more complicated. But there was a large anti-inclusion contingent. I went to Camp Trans one year, and it was depressing how many people had red Defend Womyn XX shirts in the 'Fest line.
