Monday, January 17, 2011

Transgender Women


Many people believe that transgender women are not real women because they were born with a male body instead of a female one. These people are creating a false hierarchy of “authentic” versus “fake” that only perpetuates cissexism and transphobia. In Trans Woman Manifesto, Julia Serano makes a great point when she brought up the fact that “we make assumptions every day about other people’s genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex” (442). 
Another harmful stereotype of transgender women is that they reject their maleness and masculinity when, in fact, they usually never had a male/masculine personality.  In Beautiful Daughters, the author of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, came to the realization after interviewing a lot of transgender women that they never knew what it was like to live as men because they have always lived as women. Because males are supposed to be better than females and masculinity is seen as being superior to femininity, transgender women are seen as a threat because they opted to be female instead of male and to embrace their femininity instead of their masculinity. Because of this, transgender women are faced with violence and “dismissal” of who they are.
Transgender people and non-transgender people can all act as allies in order to fight transphobia by fighting for all women’s rights regardless of what gender each woman was born into. Another thing would be to regard women and men as being more similar then different. According to Serano, “we must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men”. 

4 comments:

  1. It's sad that transgender women are faced with violence because no one understands that they have never actually lived as a man, they're born with femininity and can't do anything about that. I never fully understood transgender women before reading the article as well as watching the videos. It would help so much if more people would hear transgender women stories to help them understand what is going through their minds.

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  2. No matter what trans people do, there are some (many?) people in society who will never accept their self identity but always put them back into alignment with what their assigned birth sex was. This repudiation is one of the hardest things for trans people to fight against.

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  3. I think that it is an important point to bring up that trans woman never knew or felt comfortable living as a male. This is something that is forced upon by society from birth before a child is able to grow into themselves and how they feel most comfortable expressing themselves, which can be out of the socially constructed gender binary of male and female. Its important that each one of us who are realizing the importance of transgender awareness need to communicate and start the conversation with others who do not have the level of awareness necessary to promote future acceptance and equality.

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  4. I agree that everyone needs to look past what gender someone was born as, and focus on the gender that they currently are/feel they are. Everyone is different, and as soon as we start to accept people for who they are/want to be, our society will become a much friendlier environment to exist in.

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