retail politics, the trans version

[sistawendy]

You may remember that a few weeks ago that I went to a rally against Initiative 1552, a so-called "bathroom bill" that puts bounties on the heads of trans people, including children. I took home an anti-1552 sign and put it in one of my front windows.

You may also recall that building manager P has been around my lake place lately to replace my water heater. (Yay!) But what you definitely can't recall is that P noticed the sign and asked about it, so I told him what I just told you.

I'm happy to say that P thinks 1552 is piffle. What I'm less happy to say, though, is that he said something like, "You look fine," as if that's material to the question of whether I should be beaten to death for using a public women's restroom.

I didn't point out that it isn't material. Was that wrong? The calculation that I made in that split second is that it isn't. I'm trying to spare myself and everyone like me one of those aforementioned beatings, and I need all the help I can get, including that of an octogenarian building manager, who is, all things considered, not a bad guy.

Comments

[matrixmann]

I see in the US these are always pretty hot topics that one never seems to get to boil down; though I can't get it, even in a logic way, how people get upon this and what they actually are afraid of.
Are they afraid of being molested from a direction that they would never expect?
Well, then happy feeling of what every woman needs to deal with regularly. Be it that she's pretty (all want her) or be it that she's ugly like Gollum or fat (all throw ambivalent talk towards you to hurt you in the groin). Men who don't look right to some or are overweight also have to endure this.
So - what's actually the point?
And when they want to be left alone, just think: Doesn't want everyone to be left alone and not molested for whatever reasons?
In that point all transsexuals have something very much in common with every other persons.

I don't get it why this doesn't occur to people and why they make a drama out of it? Are there no other more urgent problems to waste brains on?
Does this bathroom crap prevent anyone from starving or what? Does this generate world peace, create jobs and make everyone live in a prospering America? I don't really get it...

[sistawendy]

Are they afraid of being molested from a direction that they would never expect?

Yup. It's ridiculous, or it would be if it weren't such a canard. There have been no incidents of this, and plenty of documented incidents of trans people, especially trans women, getting assaulted in public restrooms.

So - what's actually the point?

I'm not the first to observe that the people who are trying to make life difficult for trans people now are the same ones who were trying to make life hard for LGB folks earlier. They've lost that fight, legally and culturally, so now they've picked what they think is an easier target to garner support. And there are reasons to think we are an easier target: we're much less numerous - about 5% of the LGBT community - and we have the smallest per capita income of any LGBT group.

I don't get it why this doesn't occur to people and why they make a drama out of it?

As a way to get votes, fear-mongering works. What worries me is that most people don't personally know anybody who's trans; most people do know someone who's LGB, which made their struggle easier. The morally mediocre majority can't have compassion for someone unlike anyone they know personally. Transgender people are going to have to make an extra effort to come out to everyone, even though it's even more dangerous for us than it is for LGB people.

[matrixmann]

I think I don't get the concerns for that reason - everyone's gotta face molest in his life here or there in any kind of way, you always need to think of a strategy how to meet this. If it's your big nose, your fat ass, fat stomach or your ugly face or whatever... There's always anything somebody doesn't like. So, why not making up a strategy if someone tries to flirt with you who really don't want it to? What's so difficult in saying "Ah, no lovely, you're not my type of preference"?
...It seems more like laziness.

I think the long term political advocation for the LGBT community, the way it had been done, has given a little power to those who want to discriminate - for the right reasons, in my opinion.
LGBT is very much associated to people being like "not normal". People not like your ordinary neighbor that lives next to you, but like people who can only live as artists, who wear bright clothes, are obsessed with sex and can't just a follow a usual job.
This image has become like a common image within the LGBT-associated subculture scenes that even keeps influencing them constantly - and by that: it also keeps these stereotypes sticking around.
If someone comes to reject that habitus, I can understand that. As I don't know what being bright all over the day has to do with being gay or transgender or whatever. That's a cultural thing.
Also, I have my doubts with presenting lGBT as a social standard that statistics in the population show it clearly isn't. If you have like, say, 20% of all people living in a country that can be put into this group of people in whatever way, then you overrate it if you make their asserted subculture a continuous burner in media, sex education at school or sole part of political campaigns like it's a thing that affects 50% of the general population. That much it's become present, so I can understand it if people who don't feel addressed by it get pissed because they're sick of needing to listen to it.
Not even to say that - I don't think it's right what some radical part of the community around gender identities does, trying to deconstruct your natural feelings of what gender you belong to and making it artificially a topic even for kids in general. Kids need images and frames to orientate on to find who they are by their own opinion, and if you take them away from them, aimlessness and feelings of mentally having no home is what subtly or obviously result from that.
Not a very good base to build a personality upon...
If there are people being pissed by that, I can even understand that too for that reason.
The radicals who developed a big financial and social power and define their own lifepurpose only through their activism overshot this thing.

I can imagine, the hard deal for people to get how it is to be trans is just how that is from the inside.
People who aren't affected by that, and who also are not LGB, they grow up with an image about the world and themselves that fits with their own desires and character features. They barely ever get to make an experience where they discover this understanding about the world and oneself is not that self-evident and it doesn't need to be factually correct or compliant with their own needs.
Literally... when the daily matrix you live in is fucked and wrong.
This is a feeling the majority doesn't grow up with and doesn't have to live with as adults, and therefore they have their hard times imagining what it is like and can't figure their ways how to deal with people to which it is just like that.
But this is exactly how it is like to be trans. (Trans as trans is meant; not some sort of like "creature in between the sexes" that advocation also propagated for a quite a long time already.)