The Indian site Entrepreneur India celebrates transgender women and the Hijra community with a photo slideshow presenting inspiring trans women.
I’ll pick one to give you an example: Subramaniam is a writer, an actor and an entrepreneur.
She joined the trans family at the young age of 14 and went on to complete her education with a Bachelor’s degree in English and Master’s degree in Journalism and Mass communication from Madurai University.
During her younger days, Subramaniam also published a magazine called Sahodari, which means sister, to advocate equal right for the members of her community. In the latter part of her life, the entrepreneur started an NGO with the same name and the same purpose.
While in 2011, Kalki was recognized as the first transgender women in India to do a lead role in a movie. The feature film is known Narthagi and discusses issues surrounded to the community.
A lot of interesting views on gender, gender expectation, gender expression etc. in this warm and funny, little video where trans women ask trans men questions.
There is a huge difference between not being attracted to one particular transgender person to saying that you would never date a trans person (implying that trans persons are not acceptable as romantic and sexual partners).
In other words: None is forcing anyone to love a transgender person, but trans persons deserve the same respect and openness as all other men and women.
Sara C writes over at Medium:
Dating as a trans woman (online or in person) often means an exhausting stream of inappropriate, fetishizing, dehumanizing, and sometimes violent messages asking about my genitals, people expecting praise for fetishizing me, and others assuming my identity is either not authentic or repulsive in some way.
This gets even more complicated when trans women are trying to date straight cisgender men. These interactions (usually beginning online) can quickly lead to defensiveness as they backpedal to explain how they aren’t gay, usually including insults and slurs that dehumanize me for even daring to list myself as a woman. These men are interested in my femininity, even though they may be worried about being seen as gay just for hitting on a woman with a penis, or having sex with a girl who used to have one.
Sara points out that trans women are accused of both trying too hard and too little to present as women, which puts them in a no-win situation:
The problem with both of these social stereotypes for the “too good” and “too bad” trans woman is that they both infer that a trans woman is really a man, which creates an impossible balancing act for trans women. On the one hand, we punish trans women for being “pretty”, accuse beautiful trans women of lying by passing, and say that trans women are perpetuating misogyny by being stereotypically feminine.
Our culture seems, as Sara points out, to want trans people to both be cis-appearing enough to be invisible, but also we expect trans people to out themselves at every possible moment, “just to make them even easier to avoid.”
The main problem, as I see it, is that while some trans women (…) probably are aroused by their erotic imagery of their bodies as female, so are other women, cisgender women (or women assigned female at birth) who might identify as straight, or bi, or lesbian.
We’re all taught that women’s bodies are sexy (thanks, patriarchal male gaze!) and we all probably identify with our bodies as sexual objects to various degrees. So until there’s better research on how women of different types experience their bodies as arousing, it’s unfair to single out and stigmatize trans women as unnaturally drawn to this kind of self-eroticizing imagery.
She also draws attention to the fact that science has often been used to bully those marginalized:
I mean, imagine if male doctors were still intently insisting that all women suffered from hysteria, but every time we tried to speak up and said, “No, actually we are unhappy with the lack of opportunities in our sh*tty Victorian-era lives,” they just shushed us. Or if whenever African-Americans tried to challenge stereotypes that make them out to be more primitive and violent than whites, they were told, “Shut up, because science.”
Clare Flourish, trans woman and trans blogger, looks at what Julia Serano has called female embodiment fantasies:
When I fantasise about doing something, or having something done to me, I fantasise about my body, and I fantasised about my body being female or being made to appear female from my mid teens. The fantasy aroused me sexually.
Now I have attained my female body, with my breasts and vagina, expressing myself feminine, I have fewer such fantasies. Because I am attracted to women, I am more likely to fantasise about women’s bodies sexually- my own, or my fantasy partner’s- than androphilic trans women.
When trans women have sexual fantasies they have to imagine themselves as women. What else could they possibly do?
For more on the topic of female embodiment fantasies and crossdreaming (sometimes referred to as “autogynephilia” – a toxic and transphobic term to be avoided) see the Crossdreamer blog.
For those of you who see trans women invalidated by Ray Blanchard’s autogynephilia-theory, this article may give you the arguments you need.
Zinnia Jones does a good job at showing why the theory is pseudo-science and why Blanchard-supporters like Alice Dreger contribute to the continuing persecution of trans people.
