Okay, go read this.

[kiya]

It's not enough to be pissed off about Prop 8, okay? Pay attention to the Day of Remembrance, too.

Dilek İnce, killed with a shotgun.
Duanna Johnson, dead after going public about police brutality.
Aimee Wilcoxson, who the police claim was a suicide.

Names all from the front page of Questioning Transphobia.

Comments

[elf]

I don't think it's about that--but that's part of the rationalization. "This person is unavailable as a marriage partner THEREFOR it's okay if I'm totally freaked at the idea I might be attracted."

Removing the rationalization won't immediately fix anything, but it will help in the long run--it'll make the phobia more visible, rather than hidden behind a smokescreen of "MF relationships are the only real & valid ones, ergo anyone who isn't exactly M or F is just wrong." If MF, MM and FF are all valid relationships, then a person who falls somewhere between M and F, or who identifies as one and appears the other, is harder to call "unnatural."

Not that it won't be. But there'll be less public support, and considerably less legal support, for such a claim. And it'll be easier to claim discrimination or abuse when the victim can point to fully legal situations that parallel the trigger for the abuse.

These are tangled, complex ideas, and I'm not sure at all I'm explaining it well. Short version: More acceptance of gay rights, more legally fully equal gay rights, leads to more trans rights--because the claim that they don't deserve those rights hinges on the notion that "Males" and "Females" are so different they have different roles in society. If it legally truly doesn't matter what gender a person is, it's harder to justify mistreating someone because you thought they were or should be the other gender.

Oddly, if they acknowledged more-than-binary gender, they'd have better vocabulary for objecting. Since they want to insist that every human is either M or F, all pairs are either MM, MF, or FF... and all of those will have the same state rights.

It also has the benefit of not making transpeople have to sort out where they are on the gender line, in dealing with their own relationships. If they've got a loving partner, there's less need to sort out labels like "gay" or "straight"--not that they can't do so, but they'll have a bit more freedom to ignore some of those labels if they need or want to.

Being able to get equal treatment, being able to marry the same person, regardless of current gender, removes one of the barriers to a happy life.

(If I've made a total hash of this, I'm sorry.)