The problem is that they believe we are men. They do everything in their power to show that. . . They go a length to show that we're just really demented freaks that are only like this because of some >-bleeped-<ed up >-bleeped-< that's happened to us. . .
Hi, Folks!
The above is a partial quote from a very perceptive post by Riley Skye on this thread:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php?topic=173697.0.This is something I've often noticed. Probably everybody has. The fact that cisgender people seem incapable of realizing that we're not cisgender. We're actually transgender. They're simply not equipped to cop on to the fact that we're fundamentally different from them.
It's an odd sort of problem we have. If women are campaigning for equal rights, everybody knows what a woman is. If black people are campaigning for equal rights, everybody knows what black people are. But when we campaign for equal rights, we're handicapped by the fact that people don't actually understand what we are. The result is that they oppose our rights because they don't understand our needs, they don't understand the justification for our demands.
No reason to allow a transboy to go to school as a boy. He's really a girl. No reason why a transwoman should be granted a place in a female group. She's really a man.
I just had a bit of a debate on another forum with a guy (gay or straight, I don't know, but in any case, cisgender) on the subject of transwomen's use of female loos, changing rooms and lockers. Now his main argument was the fact that pre-op T-girls still have male equipment, which fact will make ciswomen uncomfortable, given the amount of sexual harassment, assaults, etc., that they're often subjected to.
I pointed out to him that the flaw in his argument was his conflating of transgender women with cisgender men. We're not talking about the same sort of people. The chief threat to cisgender women in this world is cisgender men, not transgender women. And who's the main threat to transgender women in this world? Well, it seems to me it's cisgender men.
When it comes to the loo, etc., we transwomen constantly get lectures from cisguys about the danger we pose to ciswomen, when in fact it's cisguys who are the main danger to trans and ciswomen alike.
And I also pointed out the fact that if it's really male equipment that cispeople fear, why then do transguys face so many problems when using male loos, changing rooms and locker rooms? I've long had the impression that transguys actually have more problems in this regard than we transwomen have. We're not really talking about a fear of male equipment here.
I think what we're really talking about is what Riley Skye is pointing out: cispeople cannot see us as transpeople. They see us as sick, perverted versions of themselves, badly in need of "a cure". So it's not just when we want to use the loo that they get upset. It's when we want to do anything at all--like go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to the pub, whatever. Because whatever we're doing, it's sick and needs to be stamped out.
This is, of course, a very bleak view of the situation I'm giving here. In reality things are often better than this. As more and more of us get out in the world, more and more people begin to get a feel for us. They do begin to grasp the fundamental difference between us and them. And once they grasp that, a lot of them are OK with us because they see that we're not really a threat to anybody. There are lots of decent people in this world. They're the ones we're gradually winning over to our side.
