Quote from: Zumbagirl on January 17, 2013, 06:39:58 AM
My neighbors have a 22 year old daughter and she and I are on really good terms, but she is hardly a conformist. I think she is a closet lesbian in fact based on her choice of friends.
Their generation is fantastic. Each new generation has gotten better on this, but my sense is that my (nearly 19-year-old) son's generation is far more accepting, even among the more "normative" of them, that gay is okay, and that trans people are just people. Maybe it's partly that I get to know those who are my kids' friends.
Consider that he has gone to school first as openly lesbian, dating openly, talking openly (maybe sometimes more openly than some may have liked, but he was never overtly shamed or ostracized for doing so). In girl mode he took two different girlfriends to his two proms (while I was a sort of beard for a friend at my senior prom -- she was a good friend, but I was doing her a favor "protecting" her from the advances of a date whose sexual advances she wanted to avoid). I'm frequently envious of this generation, but mostly I'm happy for them, that they're likely to avoid a lot of pain. I'm sad that this isn't true for everyone, and that places like the Tenderloin are still often magnets for those who come from families that feel it's okay to reject their children, and cast them out with no supports. He's now at a program openly as a transman in transition, so far only doing his best to present as a transman, which is not simple and won't be "passable" until he has top surgery. He'll be going on to a scholarship in 3D animation later this year, and has the potential to enter a field where the demand for workers is high, and no one who has any sense cares whether he's trans, a drag queen or anything else. (Plus he'll have the benefit that on average, transmen earn more than women).
The status of women, and the bias around sex work is still very real, as are the risks, and it's probably wise that you avoided it whatever your personal reasons... but it does remain one of the options that many find more attractive, in some of its forms, than the alternatives available to them. This remains a long-term struggle, and not one that's drawn in black and white.
I really do think, Shawn, especially if you're living in San Francisco, that you need to worry more about yourself and not try to change anyone else, at least for now, except in small and non-judgmental ways. A trans support group in the Tenderloin is going to contain drag queens and sex workers, at least for the foreseeable future, and some of them may, without realizing they are false models, imitate things they saw on Springer and other forms of exploitation entertainment. That has to be their journey to navigate, not yours. I do hope that at some point US culture might change, and that there will be more positive support systems for people whose families abandon them, (and that such abandonment will become less and less socially acceptable over time, and families will come to more lovingly support and accept their trans children, and come to understand why some kind of transition for them is essential, and not a sin or a form of "freakishness" to be shunned.
I made a distinction between drag queens and sex workers only because at least some drag queens, at one point in time, at least, used to make a point of drawing some very clear lines between their performing persona and anything overtly sexual. Can't say I know everyone, or that this has or hasn't changed with the times, and with a gradual opening up of options and choices that might lead some to express themselves differently today than they did back in the Stone Butch Age.
