Quote from: echo7 on June 26, 2017, 09:14:53 AM
They are proud to be considered a '3rd gender'? Personally, I would never be satisfied being considered a '3rd gender', regardless of my beauty or ability to pass.
The entire point of my transition is to be fully accepted as a woman, not as 'something else'. Is this the way that transgender women are treated in Thailand? Maybe it's not as nice there as I thought. 
Echo7, the big issue to be
fully accepted as a woman, not as 'something else' exists because you are assimilated into a culture that strongly believes in the gender binary mythos. That mythos is primarily a Western European cultural construct with roots in a specific set of theologies. Other cultures do not suffer from this as much, with biases largely added recently through colonial efforts from cultures that do hold this belief.
It is entirely possible to be a woman, and be accepted as a woman, while acknowledging ones unusual origin via a transgender pathway. Not all cultures demean women with unusual origins. Those that do seem to have a generalized mysogyny, with unusual origins such as a transgender history being an excuse to display that contempt or prejudice.
I am a woman, and am fully accepted as such within certain subcultures. Others reject me, and I reject them, questioning their validity and mysogynist underpinnings.
I am a woman, and my transgender origin is just a medical issue, very much like one of the millions of women who have had a total hysterectomy and like me, find themselves taking estradiol via a prescription. My medical endpoint will have me anatomically identical to these women. They and I are not
'something else' due to the lack of a uterus or cervix. A woman with total androgen insensitivity is still a woman, in spite of that XY chromosome set instead of XX. They are not 'something else' and may not even be aware of the medical nature of their origin.
