Michael (ftmichael) wrote in glbt, @ 2008-01-18 10:29:00 |
|
|||
Current music: | Virgin Radio |
Transbigotry?
http://www.bilerico.com/2008/01/transbi
Transbigotry?
Filed by: Guest Blogger
17 January 2008 8:30 PM
[EDITOR'S NOTE:] This post comes to us from Mercedes Allen. She lives in western Canada and blogs at Dented Blue Mercedes.
Mercedes Allen
When I was about three or four years old – enough to be talking but not enough to be in kindergarten – my mother carried me through the lineup to the tellers at the bank. I had never seen a person of colour, and so I’d been awed to see a tall fellow with that “purple”-deep colour of skin. I turned to my mother and said, “Oh, Mom, I’d never let myself get that dirty.”
My embarrassed mother kindly explained that some people are simply born with darker skin, and that ended my experience of personally-felt racial bigotry. A few years later, I learned from a close friend I’d made from Trinidad that skin colours sometimes come with cultural differences. It never occurred to me that any one skin colour or culture was any better than any other.
But I did also learn quickly that others didn’t necessarily share that same blissful innocence. As much as it clearly puzzled me when people expressed their contempt for my friend, it was certainly apparent to me that their contempt was very real. Even in Canada, where hatred was nowhere near as entrenched as it was further south, racism thrived.
I’ve also experienced it from the receiving side, twofold, one from the perspective of being Métis, in a culture where Natives are largely despised. In this situation, shame is taught implicitly, where it is intimated that a person should take refuge in their French last name, or resort to referring to their nationality as “mongrel” rather than identifying themselves as Métis. While I have since learned to be proud of my culture and now mourn not having been able to learn more of the traditions associated with it, it was still a painful experience hiding and pretending that nothing was amiss.
My other experience of bigotry came from being transgender. Even though it took me several decades to finally transition, the feelings were always there, and every crass joke that people made about men in dresses or every condemnation of “those perverts” served to drive me further into hiding, further into shame and further into the nightly suffocated struggle that almost culminated in suicide many times.
So if we learn so intimately how painful it is from the side of the victim, why is bigotry so easily foisted around in our own community?
Every so often, someone turns up the tune, “I’m Not a Fucking Drag Queen,” popularized by the movie, Better Than Chocolate. When I’d first heard it, the song was cute for about the first minute that it took before I started wondering exactly what was wrong about being a drag queen and why we should despise being associated with them. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with defining oneself and pointing out when assumptions made about transsexuals based on the behaviours of others are fallacious, but I fail to see why it needs to be done at someone else’s expense.
Yet, there is an enormous rift between many of the transgender communities where this self-defining takes on darker overtones: transsexuals trying to differentiate themselves from crossdressers and drag performers, crossdressers who feel that people who would undergo surgery to change their bodies are extremists and delusional, drag performers who embrace being gay and who feel that their compatriots should just wise up and do the same… there’s an ongoing factionalism that in many communities continues to drive wedges between us.
It does not stop there. At the grassroots level, our communities often ostracize people because they choose to be non-operative (because it isn’t consistent with the “one true way” medical model), or because they have spent some time in the sex trade, or because they play in the leather community (even when they display a healthy differentiation between fantasy and reality, and are clearly transgender in the latter). FTMs and MTFs sometimes feel that they have too many different needs to belong in the same support groups, and intersex people often balk at any association at all with anything transgender, some of whom have never experienced dysphoria and might have been lucky enough to be assigned the right gender at birth.
It’s not unusual to see homophobia rear its ugly head when debates flare up between those who work with the local GLB folks (I mean the ones who seriously try to be supportive, not proven nemeses like the Human Rights Commission a.k.a. HRC) and those who call anyone who does so a “traitor.…” And then there’s the support meetings I’ve sat through where people complain about or tell unflattering jokes about “Pakis.” Or the “drunken Indians” comments said with no care that someone in the room is Métis.
If one had any doubts:
"… Susan has said all along that she’s not like other transgender people. She feels uncomfortable even looking at some, ‘like I’m seeing a bunch of men in dresses.’" -- The St. Petersburg Times, about Susan Stanton
"'… like I’m seeing a bunch of men in dresses.'"
"’But I don’t blame the human rights groups from separating the transgender people from the protected groups. Most Americans aren’t ready for us yet,’ Susan says. Transgender people need to be able to prove they’re still viable workers — especially in the mainstream."