Spacial, it seems to me that you've internalized a lot of negative, anti-trans bias from the dominant, mainstream culture. I understand that your life has been hard, and I respect that - I have two silver teeth because I was beaten up for being queer. I know what it's like.
I also understand that this is like so many other arguments within oppressed minority populations between people who want to cooperate with the dominant culture and people who don't.
However, I can't help but be enormously unnerved by your willingness to bend to the insecurities of gender-ignorant and gender-insecure people. Talking about the "sanctity" of gender-binary bathrooms implies that trans people are somehow unclean, that we violate sacred mores by our existence, that we ought to accept substandard lives - like the one you yourself have had to put up with - so that the cisgender folks don't have to deal with the awkwardness that is trans people.
And you know what? We do violate sacred mores - the sacred mores of the gender binary on which this society is built. That is fact, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, and it means that sometimes, we have to make other people uncomfortable in order to live our lives at an acceptable and tolerable level of comfort. There's just no way of getting around us.
Why demean yourself by talking about the concerns of "family values" groups as if they have any grounding in reality whatsoever? Those people think being transgender means being diseased, perverted, sick and twisted! Those people hate us and fear us, because we make them feel insecure, we undermine the foundations of their "traditional" patriarchy. That they are incredibly uncomfortable with trans people - in "their" bathrooms or anywhere else - tells me not that they have "legitimate concerns," but that they need to grow up and stop seeing life as a battle between the Real Americans and the evil outsiders (i.e., anyone who's not white, right-wing, Middle American and evangelical protestant). If people were comfortable with gender variance, there wouldn't be a "bathroom problem" in the first place. It's not like they have to watch us relieve ourselves! That's what stalls are for.
I find the idea that having a "TG persona" is "fashionable" laughable and ridiculous. Just because some subcultural artists here and there like to use trans imagery or themes does not mean that being TG is in any way fashionable or popular. I am an art student in San Francisco, so I should be in a pretty good position to say that transphobia exists even within "fashionable" and countercultural art circles. In fact, there's plenty of it in punk rock. Always has been.
Much of your rant seems to be aimed at genderqueer and intentionally nonbinary trans people such as myself, whom you seem to view as "posers" of some kind or insincere. Need I even mention how insulting this is? You clearly have had a difficult life as a result of being trans. Guess what? So have I, and so have many young, subcultural queers and trans people just like me. The idea that we're just using gender identity as a convenient way of "annoying the normals" is preposterous. I have made major, serious sacrifices in my life because of my gender identity.
I also find your disparaging comments about punk, your disgust with other people's sexuality, and your appeals to "normalcy" very telling. The idea of young gender-variant people being "perverted" and "creeps" shows the extent to which you're uncomfortable with gender variance yourself.
I don't want this to get any more emotional or heated; I understand that I'm perhaps going a bit far myself. However, I just have to make it perfectly clear that I am not genderqueer for a bit of a laugh, and neither is any gender-variant youth I know. Stop treating us like we're the boogeymen and phantoms of right-wingers' transphobic nightmares. We're not.
EDIT: It seems that Spacial has deleted the post I was replying to.
