For What It's Worth...

[Hazumu]

I was privvy to a training session for lawyers.  One of the topics was estate planning.  The lead presenter gave a hypothetical situation:

"Say for instance that you have a will naming Joe as a beneficiary.  Now say that Joe has changed his sexual orientation and he's now Jane..."

As I was only a technical facilitator, It was no where near my place to correct the presenter.  But it shows that few 'normal' people understand what TS/TG is, and are still working off the assumption that , for example, I'm a 'super homosexual'.

Shows like 20/20 on Friday night help -- a little.   But 20/20 by itself will bring our society nowhere near the tipping point we need.  We need that kind of educational program, only we need many more, and shown many more times, to bring American society to that tipping point -- especially with people out there who will actively resist such an effort because of their own primal disgust and revulsion.

More importantly, I think, we can all work to educate those around us.  Some of them will educate those around them, and on and on.  And blended with that, the shows like 20/20 can put down better roots of knowledge into our society.

I would hope that some day the lawyer who said that would get it correct and say

"Joe has changed gender identity and she's now Jane"

without any prompting or correction.

I can hope...

Karen

[Ms Bev]

I hate that mindset.  I deal with it almost every day at work.  In a collection of otherwise articulate, educated people, how on earth could they be so ignorant?  Hell, my mother taught me tolerance of all kinds of differences when I was a child 50 some years ago.

Out of curiosity Karen, what were the legal implications?

[Doc]

It just shows that most people think about sexuality all the time but almost never think about gender-identity at all. Whoever discovered water was not a fish. I remember a cultural anthropology class and watching in horror as half the class began saying things along the lines, "But it's okay to be gay in our culture now, so why did Tula do all that to his body?" When I explained that gender identity and sexual orientation are not the same, they'd just repeat the question. Eventually the prof made us move on. Probably I heard one or two of those cute little pops happen when people's heads explode, but maybe not.