QuoteIn the young newly graduating women I'd wager that the difference in salary accross the board for a similar number of hours worked in similar jobs is slight at worse.
You can say that its not fair that they've got this advantage over older women who carry within their career path the previous cultural bias; but times changes and hopefully, its always for the better.
As I said, I don't doubt that TS's who are disowned by their parents and kicked out at a young age suffer greatly cause they've got little education and got to fend on their own. But does that experience correspond to the experience of most TS's? While we don't have a census to confirm it; I would not be surprised that these days it does not.
Actually Keira, we seem to agree on the points you have made. Educated women as a whole do much better overall, and especially within the TS women's group. But, if you look at the whole female poplation of working age, the results are still skewed toward wage discrimination being prevalent in the US at least, at this time. If the trend continues, it maye even out. You also have to remember that the US is way behind many other nations in the wealthier nations regarding education funding. As many people here could attest, in the US, if you are not born into a family of means, you had better be tenacious if you want to obtain any kind of degree, and even more willing to pay back a mountainous debt if you qualify for a loan program.
I know many women that earn a good wage after graduation, but live near poverty level while they pay back their loans. These are highly educated women I am referring to here. Conversely, those that pay their way through college often take years or the better part of a decade to receive their degree if they work fulltime while they go to school. And these women tend to suffer from long-term illness more frequently, because the first thing that is neglected when a person is short of money is healthcare. We do not have national healthcare in this country.
On that point, if you take a person that is suffering from GID, and I have known many, and force her first, to work her way through college, possibly without access to medical care, than she may have to wait five to ten years to obtain her degree. Without access to healthcare, she may even have to go without transitioning if she cannot afford HRT, or take black market drugs, which cause even more problems down the road. Then she may have to put off surgery while transtioning while she pays off her loans, while saving money for surgery. If that takes another say, three to five years, we are talking about a person with a serious stress problem working and going to school while waiting the better part ten to twenty years to have surgery.
Is it any wonder so few make it there, or commit suicide in the process? I don't think so.
Lastly, women have been competing on equal footing in the same jobs as men for decades now. I am a dyke, and so are most of my friends. We work just as hard, and get just as physically tasked and "dirty" as our male co-workers, if not more so. We have to do a better job than all the guys to even get noticed by management. This is the reality if you talk to most women in this country. There is still an undercurrent of institutionalized misogyny, just as their is still institutionalized rascism in this country, especially the farther south you live.
Trying to get back on topic, if you think about how those factors affect people of colour born TS in the south, well, those poor wretches have it harder than most. Factor in a lack of healthcare, and you have people in sexwork dying of aids. They cannot even see the glass ceiling from where they start.
I take issue only with this part of your post:
QuoteYou can say that its not fair that they've got this advantage over older women who carry within their career path the previous cultural bias; but times changes and hopefully, its always for the better.
Simply put, life is not fair. There have always been have's and have-not's. It is part and parcel of capitalism. I would only hope that if you are lucky enough to be have been born white, in a country with national healthcare, and access to education, that you might have some empathy for all of the women that have none of those advantages. As my 81 year-old Mother always says, walk a mile in someone else's shoes before you compare yourself to them.
Laura, your numbers were right on target. Thank you for taking the time to guesstimate.
Since this kind of surgery has been going on for only about 30 years or so, and only been seen as routine for the last ten, and taking into acct. that the numbers have been increasing exponentially with ahe addition of Thailand as a center for surgery, then:
even if we round up to 2000 surgeries per year over the last decade, that is still only about 20K post-op women. The previous decade probably saw half of that number at best, or maybe 10K? And the decade before that, even more so. Let's say, 5K. Even with those generous numbers, we are looking at a grand total of less than 40,000 post-op women, if everyone were still alive.
Taking into acct. that most people in the earlier years of this phenomenon had surgeries at a much older age than today, you can bet that at least some of those people have passed away by now, or are reaching that age. Which would reduce the number even further.
One thing that your list did not take into acct. is the fact that surgery in Thailand is a thriving industry, so I don't think these numbers properly reflect post-op women from either Thailand or the rest of the Pacific rim where this lifestyle is more accepted. My guess would be that there are more doctors in Thailand alone, performing this surgery, than in all the lists you can find on Susan's or any other website. People in this country only go to a select group of top surgeons overseas, but there are many more performing in that country on strictly nationals, rather than foreigners.
Which brings us back to the number most often thrown around by most doctors in the US.
That it is believed that there are only about 20,000 post-op women in the entire world.
That number may be low? But when you consider that the population of the planet is like 6.5 billion people, and if half of them are born appearing male, or 3.25 billion, than even if there were 100,000 post-op women on the planet, that would be 3 one-thousands of one percent?
That is incredibly rare.
If even 5% of the male-appearing population had GID, or 162 million people, and 100,000 had surgery, that would be six thousandths of one percent of all people with this form of GID. If it were one percent of the same population, than it would be three tenths of one percent.
Anyway you slice it, it is a pretty rare situation to find yourself in. It would be like if you were the only person with that status being in the average movieplex. Since most people seem to congregate in one area, the chance of meeting another person with your condition, in most of this country on an average day would be pretty unlikely.
Completely different than the situation we find ourselves in the lesbian community. Odds are that in the next generation or so, you will be hard pressed to find ANY butch women, since most all of them will have transtioned and had top surgery.
I may be amongst the last of my kind.
