First, add my voice to the "Nomad is discriminating? HA!" chorus.
*hugs you* (a lot)
Secondly, I don't see how mentioning "men" and "women" as discriminating against transgendered people.
Yes, I was puzzled by the same questions when the fit hit the shan, way back when. So I asked some trans friends for their perspective. Obviously, different people will give different answers, and you can't generalize for a whole population any more than you can with any other identifier. But, looking at trends, the answers that I got was mainly along the lines that the attacks were not only poor citizenship, but also poorly informed. In general, my discussions on the topic with trans people indicated that they were more invested in the concepts of "men" and "women", as they had gone through great efforts -- not least of which is perpetually fighting discrimination -- to switch gender.
Whereas, in contrast, I'm not particularly tied into "male" as an identity. It's useful for some physiological aspects of my life, but I don't identify strongly with things that I was born into by chance (e.g., being male, US-American, a person of colour, et cetera). I had no say in any of that. The identities that matter to me are the ones that I chose for myself, sometimes requiring great efforts of my own: Anarchist, physicist, Pagan, bell ringer, and so on.
The way I had it explained to me was something like this: Being male isn't a big deal to me, as it is just something that happened with no choice or effort on my part. But to a transgendered male, it did take a choice and it requires an ongoing effort. So it matters much more to that person... just like being an Anarchist or a physicist matters to me.
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Date: 2012-09-27 02:19 pm (UTC)*hugs you* (a lot)
Secondly, I don't see how mentioning "men" and "women" as discriminating against transgendered people.
Yes, I was puzzled by the same questions when the fit hit the shan, way back when. So I asked some trans friends for their perspective. Obviously, different people will give different answers, and you can't generalize for a whole population any more than you can with any other identifier. But, looking at trends, the answers that I got was mainly along the lines that the attacks were not only poor citizenship, but also poorly informed. In general, my discussions on the topic with trans people indicated that they were more invested in the concepts of "men" and "women", as they had gone through great efforts -- not least of which is perpetually fighting discrimination -- to switch gender.
Whereas, in contrast, I'm not particularly tied into "male" as an identity. It's useful for some physiological aspects of my life, but I don't identify strongly with things that I was born into by chance (e.g., being male, US-American, a person of colour, et cetera). I had no say in any of that. The identities that matter to me are the ones that I chose for myself, sometimes requiring great efforts of my own: Anarchist, physicist, Pagan, bell ringer, and so on.
The way I had it explained to me was something like this: Being male isn't a big deal to me, as it is just something that happened with no choice or effort on my part. But to a transgendered male, it did take a choice and it requires an ongoing effort. So it matters much more to that person... just like being an Anarchist or a physicist matters to me.