Quote from: tekla on December 13, 2010, 12:32:56 PM
The idea that you should automatically be friends with other trans-people is as prejudice...

I doubt that.  I would think that even though its not going to be automatic, that two trans persons share something that:
a) very few people have,
b) that very few people understand,
c) that even fewer really care about.

I know I've made friends with a lot of people based on a hell of a lot less.

I agree.
My best friend IRL I only met because we are both trans and we share a mutual friend who thought we should get togather mearly beacuse we are trans.
We hit it off very well and we have pretty much only being trans in comon.

Quote from: GinaDouglas on December 12, 2010, 10:38:36 PM
The idea that you should automatically be friends with other trans-people is as prejudice as the idea that trans-people are freaks to be stayed away from.

I encounter this often in a non-trans circumstance ...

When people learn about my nationality, they tell me about some acquaintance they know belongs to the same nationality. After describing their acquaintance, they ask me, "you must know him/her, don't you?". 

Change "nationality" in the above two sentences to ethnicity, linguistic group, employer/company, trans status, etc. You get the picture.

They assume that just because I am X, I must know or be friends with everyone else who they know is X, even if the category X (as in the case of my nationality) could comprise a group of hundreds of millions of people, including hundreds of thousands locally.

For example, if you know my next door neighbor and you learn that I live next door to your acquaintance/friend, would you assume that my next door neighbor knows me? That assumption would be untrue. I have never met my next door neighbor despite living here for 9 months now. I do not know most of my other neighbors either. In fact, I do not know any of them. I have met and interacted with a few, but that does not mean that I know them.

The question which seems prejudicial to you is probably just an over-generalized assumption which human beings use to make their own lives simpler. Imagine if you had to get to know each person individually without making any assumptions about them based on stereotypical generalizations of the categories they might belong to ... you might end up accomplishing a lot less per day than you do at present. Especially in the US, I have noticed how we have idiot-proofed almost everything. Things are designed for the lowest common denominator, so that everyone will survive. To assume that everyone has the intelligence or the time or the patience to not make generalizations and assumptions is to expect too much from everyone. Generalizations help us ignore a lot of detail that is not particularly relevant to our own lives.

While it might offend us that other people do this, I have observed that most of us make as many generalizations as everyone else, although we are often more conscious about making gender-specific generalizations.