more heat than light wrote:Hexx wrote:Or is it just the idea that a
secret man could be in there? They went through years of treatments (and surgeries) and made life altering choices that would expose just to sit next to Bev from accounting the bog. strawberry floating men, right?
So much this. The trans discussion always heads straight to 'sex perverts' for some people. If I really wanted to go and hang about in the girls toilets there are easier ways to go about it. So I've heard.
The thing that always confuses me about the fear surrounding trans women in cis-female only spaces is the total ignorance regarding the likelihood that, if there were any real danger, it would be presented just as much by other cis women. As a woman, you are probably as likely to be attacked or raped or abused in some other way (given what kind of gooseberry fool happens in vulnerably public spaces like that anyway) by other women "born as" women, for example, a lesbian (just to play on the denigrated fear of the individual aspect here), or a sexually disturbed woman, or a strawberry floating murderous banana split with anger management issues or whatever. The idea that even a small majority of trans women are perverted sex offenders is even if that were 1% true downright wrong. I can't see any justification outside of this than sheer fear.
And with that, besides the obvious expectation that men will abuse women in shared facilities... do we even need those? I've been plenty of places with unisex toilets (and some places in brighton with one or two unisex toilets and male/female toilets - one of which I was involved in putting into place) and I haven't seen or heard of an increase in sexual offences.
btw Cal, having any length of prolonged sexual relationship with a transsexual person doesn't automatically qualify you to discredit almost everyone else's views without, well, making any kind of point at all, no matter how much you embolden the statement.
mic wrote:Also, why do you all know so much about this subject? I'm reading my arse off here!
Well I for one and apparently some people in this thread have engaged at length with LGBTQ and transexual individuals because they are interested in understanding
them, not their
perspective on them. It's a sort of cognitive empathy, and I don't need to do any reading (i.e. consult non-fiction - although I would not recommend the internet for that) to practice this. If someone tells me they are a woman but want to become a man, or they already feel they are one, I shut up and listen to them because their is nothing in my experience that is constructive input, other than a few experiences of being bicurious or, probably,
not entirely heterosexual. By knowing I can't really relate to them because I am not them, I automatically qualify their experience because I am far behind the minute façade presented to me at that point to possibly relate to them better than they can explain themselves to me because, well, I was born with a dick and I call myself a man. So, that's a pretty big disqualification for assuming their knowledge is not interesting or valid, because
I know better already;- that is the core of the discrimination problem - people assuming they know it all when they know extremely little about the views they not only have, but purport to have on behalf of others, and that those views are irrevocably correct.
That and I was born in Brighton which pretty much means you are 10% gay because of the high content of lime in the water and proximity to parades here, and it wouldn't be a big stretch to suggest there's a higher likelihood of being exposed to
gayness.