This Is Why Trans People Rarely Speak Up When We're Misgendered

[Shana A]

Laura Kate Dale
Video game enthusiast

This Is Why Trans People Rarely Speak Up When We're Misgendered
Posted: 10/02/2013 12:30 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-kate-dale/this-is-why-trans-people-rarely-speak-up-when-were-misgendered_b_4030525.html

I'm sitting here writing with tears running down my face. In the last 72 hours I've received more death threats, rape threats, abuse and hatred than I can count. I'm transgender, and on Sunday, Sept. 29, I found my name spreading across the gaming community for identifying the man who'd misgendered me.

...

Having walked past the stage repeatedly over the weekend, I knew the format. Every hour they were giving away a game console on stage. Each time, they brought six people up on stage: five men and one token woman to prevent sexism accusations. When they asked for volunteers, I was the first picked by the presenter to come up on stage. Jackpot.

He pulled four men up on stage with me and then started insisting that they needed a woman up on stage too. Were there any women in the audience who wanted to take part? My heart sank instantly. Despite my presentation, he was insisting to the audience that nobody on stage was female. I felt sick.

During the time I was on stage, he referred to me more than once as male. Once he realized his mistake, he switched to "er, that person" rather than use female pronouns like he did for the other woman on stage. Everyone else was either "gentleman" or "young woman." I'm just something that he was afraid to try to address.

[Jessica Merriman]

GRRRRR! Take me with you next time. He will be transgendered when I get done with him. OOPS, sorry! I am calm now. Please forgive the little outburst, just NO ONE messes with my family. Sorry for the experience, but thanks for your grace in dealing with it. You have class.

[Shantel]

It was an unfortunate and thoughtless incident. What is really more exasperating then the incident itself is the hateful piling on by the inhuman predatory waste that trolls the Internet looking for a potential victim to shred and destroy. These cowards hide behind the facade of some rather deviant form of self-righteousness and tweet their venom under some anonymous nom-de-plume knowing that they can do it because their real identity will go undiscovered. This has happened to me, though on a much lesser scale. It is the reason why Susan's is my only Internet social network and because it is reasonably safe within limits. Twitter account? No, not ever thank you!

[Danielle Emmalee]

GRRRRR! Take me with you next time. He will be transgendered when I get done with him. OOPS, sorry! I am calm now. Please forgive the little outburst, just NO ONE messes with my family. Sorry for the experience, but thanks for your grace in dealing with it. You have class.

Just in case you thought otherwise, posts in the News section are generally just articles posted about transgender people outside the site, not the experience of the people that post them on Susan's.

That's not to say that Shana doesn't have class of course

[Jessica Merriman]

I know. We are all family though, here or there.

[Gina Taylor]

I know. We are all family though, here or there.

I agree 100% with Jessica! Those that stick together will fight together!

[suzifrommd]

We need to learn to ignore internet trolls.

What the presenter in the article did was cruel and bigoted, and he should have known better.

The internet trolls, OTOH, have people in their lives that have long since tired of the intellectual guano that pours from their small minds, and the only outlet remaining to them is the internet.

[Adam (birkin)]

Sounds to me like the presenter was trying to play off his mistake. It makes me angry though. I have had it happen a few times where someone refers to me as female (when I was passing almost all the time), and I corrected them, saying I wasn't a woman, and I get the "OH I KNOW LOTS OF TRANSGENDERS." You know, how hard would it be to say "I'm sorry, I didn't look closely enough?" instead of assuming that someone is transgender, first of all, and second of all, continuing to refer to them improperly as if they're unworthy of just being...well, normal. Normal in the sense that no one would ever refer to a cis person as the wrong gender if they realized they made an error. If anything, they tend to overcompensate because they are embarrassed.