People are ignorant

http://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf/2013/05/story_of_olmsted_towhship_homi.html


A friend of mine showed me this article. And I did a little bit of reading. First the article itself, and then the comments section. Good lord were the comments a time and a half to read.

It amazes me that people can be so ignorant and discourteous to each other. The social stigma and bias against a person whose transgendered is remarkable, and so many people --including some of the ones commenting-- are so blatantly prejudiced that it's simply remarkable.

It just seems like some people just don't understand the difference between sex and gender. Is it because of the area they grow up in? Is it a lack of education? Is it just constant reinforcement of a gender dichotomy that makes them believe that they're only two genders in the world? Bullshit.

I live in a pretty liberal state, and one that has a lot of the better laws in place for trans-people. And it's really great because I know transgender-ed people and they're really nice. There's nothing 'freakish' or wrong about them. If someone believes themself to be born in the wrong body, and then seek to correct it, what's wrong with that? I don't see how its different then someone being born with some type of birth defect, and then getting it corrected. Again, there is nothing wrong with it.

But people in the comments keep arguing, some deliberately going out of their way to call the victim of the article a man. There was one particular comment that capitalized every reference to the victim and made sure it was using HE or MAN. What an asshole. There were a lot of good comments from people  I can assume are either educated or part of the LBQT community itself, trying to educate the neanderthals that sex is between the legs, and gender is between the ears. It amazes me at how resistant people are to the concept.

In an anthropology class I took 4 years ago we learned about the Fa'afafine, who are the third gender of Samoa.  I remember being fascinated as my ideas about gender were blown out of the water. I remember thinking, wow, that's really cool. Other cultures can deal with up to 7 different genders (or at least that's the most I've heard so far), and its fine. If the USA  is so great, then why is it so far behind on basic things such as equal treatment of homosexual and gender dysphoric people? Is it really that hard to be a bit more aware?

Now to be completely honest, I hate that everything always has to be politically correct all the time. You can't say this, you can't say that etc etc etc. But with some things, it's really important. A simple thing like referring to a transgender woman (male-to-female) as he is what's called a micro aggression. You might not realize it because you just slipped up, but to them it defeats everything. If a transgender person's goal is to be stealth (pass in their preferred gender) then something like referring to them with the wrong pronoun destroys some of that self confidence they've built up. You might not realize it, but those kinds of things hurt.

I find most of the comments on that article horribly bigoted, insensitive, and completely off the mark in some occasions. Instead of trying to understand what's wrong with what they're doing, many people just start backing into a corner and trying to hide behind things like ignorance or some pseudo science. One person went so far as to say that it's not a disease so how could it be a diagnosis? Uhm. Well, Dr. Attempting to be smart, Gender Identity Disorder is a recognized issue in the psychiatric community, the reason treatment exists in the first place for it (HRT [hormone replacement treatment] and such) is because after seeking help from counseling and psychiatric services, you get the diagnosis of it and start treating.

Its awful how foolish, ignorant, and plain insensitive people are to important issues like this. Only recently have homosexuals really started to gain some amount of foothold into being accepted in the world and they're still facing opposition from idiots and assholes everywhere. I feel for these people and I really do wish that we could educate people better so that incidents and bias's like the ones expressed in the article and its comments didn't happen at all.

just my 2 cents