I don't think this is an incendiary topic. But I do think it is one worth talking about in the community more. Allow me to quote a small excerpt from a hateful email sent to me by my number one hater:
"I have heard you say in meetings in the past how you don't like being around Transwomen, or Crossdressers and that you only see yourself as Trans Sis. How can you say you are for "Unity", when you feel that way. I don't go around wearing a t-shirt saying "I'm Trans", but one thing I know that I will never forget who I am and where I came from and I support Unity for ALL !!!"
It is true that I often feel out of place in trans* gatherings and that this reality has, at times, caused me to walk away from them quite literally in tears wondering why the trans* community seems to have no place for me. It's also true that I have absolutely zero understanding of what crossdressing is about. And it's true that I tend to fit in and socialize most easily with cispeople. How these things turned me into someone who doesn't like trans* people, I don't know. But I do know that all trans* people are different. And this community has to have room for everyone.
Another quote, this time from my TDOR remarks this year:
"So I say again . . . it does not matter who you are. It does not matter if you are from Maryland, DC, Virginia, or the moon. It doesn't matter if you identify as a transman, a transwoman, genderqueer, a gender ->-bleeped-<-, she male, crossdresser, cisgender ally, detransitioner, retransitioner, multiple transitioner, a person of trans experience, or a person who doesn't quite know exactly what they are. It doesn't matter if you are a person of color or lily white. It doesn't matter if you pass or if you think passing is a bad word. It doesn't matter if you are "out and proud" or if you are deep in stealth, living your life by blending in, or if you are out there living in fear. This community is big enough to embrace you—all trans* people of all kinds and all of our allies too."
I published an op ed on a similar theme shortly after TDOR. As a consequence of those two things, I have been under attack for about a month now by one of the state's major prominent trans* advocacy organizations. They have blasted me on Facebook, in the press, and I've had people call me to let me know that their Executive Director, a prominent activist who is well known nationally, phoned them to tell them that I suffer from severe mental illness and am erratic and a "broken shell of a human being."
It's been like that since I first came into the local community not too long ago. The same person who made the phone calls attacked me during support meetings (!) for the fact that my male presentation was too androgynous. Then when I started seeing falsified documents show up in my case files at work with my name on them and started having to take some pretty potent antidepressants just to cope with how I was being treated at work, she told me I probably just had a bad attitude and found it impossible to believe that any sort of discrimination was going on. I felt like a little bug getting squashed by this nationally renowned figure. Now that I no longer speak to this person, I have had others critique me for "bending to pressure to conform to gender expectations" and "being too much like a woman." And, of course, I still have people like the one I quoted above who seem to think I am some kind of traitor.
These things hurt. And I'm not unique in being on the receiving end of them. I've seen them happen a lot to others. I've been the person who interceded to stop them happening to others. And there have been times when I am ashamed to say that I was too tired, too wounded, or otherwise in a space where I found myself not speaking up for others to whom it was done.
If I hated trans* people after all of this, I suspect that people would forgive me. But I don't. I just hope that people listen to what happened to me and see what happens to others and learn to make the trans* community safe for all trans* people. A place where there really is room for all of us. And the only way I know to do that is to fight exclusion by embracing. We each can fight against the put downs and the exclusion and the in fighting by just refusing to participate.
I believe that many of the people who exclude other trans* people! who find them to be not trans* enough or too trans* or whatever else, do so out of their own wounds and insecurities. So the best way to fight against it is by preventing wounds where we can, healing them where we cannot. So the best weapon against someone like that truly is to walk up and give them a big hug.
