I rarely blog angry. This is an exception.
One of the pieces of volunteer work I do from time to time is education on gender issues and gender identity. I've been out of touch lately-- ridiculously busy (since Sunday night, I've had exactly one evening at home this week, and for that one I was so tired I fell asleep at my computer while trying to get some work done).
So I after having just read Robyn's piece on what happened Friday night... I just have to say something:
It's easy to treat transgendered people as outcasts, as subhuman, as twisted or freakish. It's easy to do this because it's always easy to take the coward's way out and to treat the most vulnerable among us with contempt and disgust.
And honestly, that's the sort of crap I expect from mainstream society. There's a kind of sickness that comes with feeling as though your identity needs to be reinforced through the suppression of that of someone else. And that's basically it: people who feel a need to attack those who are transgendered are, essentially, no better than those who feel a need to attack same-sex marriage. It is not just morally wrong to engage in such bitterness, it is psychologically incoherent.
We are making small progress on these issues, but it is incremental at best. In the meantime, as a society, too many of us are content to leave transpeople isolated, marginalized and on the fringes. This has to stop, and if we can't stop it here, we've got a much bigger problem stopping it on the national level.
So this is where things stand for me: anyone who dares to attack the identity of one of us, attacks us all. Anyone who attacks people based on their race, their gender, their gender identity, their sexual orientation is sick, repulsive, disturbed and pathological, and I am so done with putting up with this crap on any level.