Quote from: Elwood on August 20, 2008, 11:48:14 AM
God, I love people. Men and women. I might not like my body myself or being physically a woman, but that doesn't make me hate otehr girls. I don't see why so many transguys hate all girls.
I didn't know that a lot of transguys don't like women. Is that true? That seems odd to me because I've read that most transguys are straight...so I guess the straight ones don't hate women? Have you read any explanations of WHY these guys hate women?
Geez, I might have more in common with those guys than I thought. I mean, I don't hate women anymore, but I did for a long time. I guess I didn't really hate all women, but I lumped them together and didn't feel comfortable around them, didn't understand them, didn't trust them. And, try as I might, I simply could not see what men saw in them. Being able to see them as sex objects, believe it or not, was actually a step forward for me.
And I really truly hated myself. Well, I was a very confused and angry person in the past. Imagine living and growing up as a trans gay boy under the following circumstances:
I was a little kid when Stonewall happened.
There was no modern Internet.
There were, quite literally, NO positive media images of gay or trans people.
In fact, there were barely ANY images at all of gay or trans people.
Practically the only gay movie characters in existence were merely implied to be gay, and they were either completely unhappy or they died (think about it--one of the few explicitly gay movies,
The Boys in the Band, came out when I was seven and a half, and that's not exactly a positive portrayal of gay life and identity; and I wouldn't have been allowed to watch that movie anyway, not while I was living under my mother's roof).
Parents carefully ignored Liberace's fruitiness and condemned anybody else's feyness.
The Women's Movement was still gaining momentum, the Gay Rights Movement was merely a whisper, and there was no trans movement.
In the environment that I was familiar with, mothers rarely worked outside the home, fathers made all of the money, and fathers had the lion's share of the power. Even if I hadn't identified as a boy, I would have felt contempt for mere women because the society in general had contempt for women. I know that this still exists, and I know that it was much worse before my time, but it was still pretty bad in my day.
Sex ed classes, at least in my neck of the woods, focused on reproduction and VD, and barely even mentioned safe sex, sexual desire, or even the sex act--and NEVER mentioned anything beyond hetero and gender-binary sex.
There were no TV commercials about "feminine products."
Saying words like "penis" or "vagina" in front of your parents could land you in the bathroom with your mouth full of soapsuds (clever lads like me just never said the forbidden words. And I never saw a penis or knew what one was, until I was molested by a neighborhood teenager when I was seven or eight).
The only types of gay characters that a kid like me could find in movies and TV had to be FASHIONED from hetero shows that focused on homosocial bonding (which explains why I liked Westerns and war movies so much) or shows that involved obvious male pairings (although there was a precedent for queer takes on
Batman, you would not believe what my imagination could do to
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.!).
Until I was eighteen, I literally DID NOT KNOW that gay people existed. When I was eighteen, I still did not know that trans people existed. When I learned about trans people, they were all MTFs and were often portrayed as exotic freaks and isolated cases. Until I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I did not know that FTMs existed.
And, of course, I was an intellectual sf geek hermit. Not sure whether my gender-sexuality stuff fed into this, but I was always a shy kid and spent a lot of time alone, reading books and watching classic
Star Trek reruns for the umpteenth time ("HOW many times have you seen this episode?" my mother would groan on a regular basis).
Given the above circumstances, I now find it unsurprising that I had some very twisted ideas about sex and gender when I was a child, an adolescent, and even a young adult. I thank the Greek gods that I have moved beyond almost all of it. And I am thankful that, whatever mess this country and various regions of this country might be in right now, other gay and/or trans kids don't have to grow up in the sixties and seventies.
Wow, I really have come a long way since I was eighteen!
