Today in Transphobia
Posted by CaitieCat at Tuesday, July 20, 2010
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/07/today-in-transphobia.htmlI'm not sure what to say about this one. I don't even know if it needs a trigger warning (just in case: TW, transphobia).
I look for the tiny bits of good in the article: that transgender women are able to find employment that they couldn't before. If it means someone's not forced into* the sex trade, this is good. The comment section is surprisingly not headdesky (as of this writing; there are only 19 comments as I write this). The post itself isn't horridly objectionable.
But at the same time, this practice simply reinforces the transphobia that makes it even slightly effective: it's only the "shame" of having a transgender person walk up to your door and knock that's in play here, and I have a hard time feeling that that's a good thing in a more general sense. And can it be long before one of the transgender women here comes into a situation of violence? Wouldn't be the first time tax collectors had run into that problem, nor trans people. Mixing the two seems like a recipe for disaster, particularly in a country in which Important People can get away with even more violent contempt for the "lesser" than many. Note that the article points out they stayed away from one tax defaulter, because the person happened to be an important minister.
