Who has it Worse? – A Rant

I don’t normally like to rant. I’m trying to improve the world–to add to it, in other words, and not to increase the darkness already so widespread. And ranting never adds light.

But I can’t hold my tongue today. I was reading a comment thread on the wall of one of the FB groups to which I belong–a group trying to make things better and easier for trans people worldwide. The original post was about something unimportant to this rant. The comment thread, however, took a turn that made me really pissed.

I haven’t seen so-and-so gain acceptance while bashing such-and-such

The gist of it was whether FtM trans men have it worse that MtF trans women, in terms of employment, discrimination, etc. It quickly degenerated into “We have it worse because of this, you don’t understand what we have to go through”, etc. Here’s what I had to say:

One thing we CANNOT afford to do–if we are to present our trans community as united or worthwhile, is show the world we’re just as messed up as the rest of it is. We HAVE to be better than that, or we will NEVER get the one thing we ALL want–acceptance.

I’m just an infant in this slice of population–I haven’t been burned like many of you have. Not first hand. But I have seen a lot of self-pity and blame and lashing out to others WITHIN OUR OWN COMMUNITY that it makes me sad for ever finding my own acceptance.

As I said, I’m just an infant here. I’ve been “out” less than a year…how can I hope to EVER find acceptance in then world if I seriously doubt I’ll find acceptance even in my small segment of the trans community?

EVERYONE has obstacles and blocks to overcome or break through. Ours always are worse to us than everyone else’s are to them. Knock off the self-pity and work on removing your own obstacles, then–oh, here’s a wild thought!–help someone else overcome theirs.

“In Your Face” Has A Place

I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints recently about something, and they’ve been bugging me. The gist of it that there are two schools of thought regarding how vocal and visible we (the TG/CD/TS etc.) should be .

Once school holds that we should live our lives quietly, staying under the radar, so to speak. Making progress via quiet integration into society, essentially.

The other says we need to let people know we are here, we’re here to stay, and we are not just going to sit down and shut up.

Let me state for the record that I don’t believe these two methods of progress are mutually exclusive. I believe they complement each other.

I have crossdressing friends who go out and party and dance and shop and model and eat at restaurants–in short, people who are out in society, often in very short dresses. They are not trying to pass as women, they’re trying to be accepted as crossdressers. And it works.

Last Friday night I was out with them. What happens is we get together for some socializing and a quick meeting, then whoever wants to goes out to a club or someplace to dance, listen to live music, have a drink or two, etc. During our initial get-together, someone invariably starts a conversation with one or more of us. Friday it was two young women staying at the hotel with their choir group, who were given permission from their chaperones to come talk to us if we said it was okay.