Rant.
Lookit. The whole point is that transgender women are treated with hostility and violence because they have chosen to reject their male gender and live as women. What does this tell us? That women are in general regarded as inferior to men in a society that assigns us gender roles at birth or increasingly, before. If you don’t believe that, please explain why the hell we are paid less for doing the same work, just for starters.
Transgender women turn their backs on orthodox masculinity in favour of life as a woman, the ultimate insult, the ultimate rejection of the male orthodoxy. They are punished for this. They are punished for having been privileged to be born as male and then devaluing and undermining that privilege for all males, by choosing to reject it.
It is incomprehensible to certain types of masculinity that any man could ever want to abandon his gender and choose to join the ranks of WOMEN. It’s a form of treason. It’s lowering yourself.
The rejection of the phallus, particularly its literal destruction, is perceived as an obscenity.
We are all in servitude to the performance of gender roles assigned to us by our culture and enforced so strictly as to cripple and maim our lives in a multitude of ways. It is the strangulating grip of these enforced roles we ought to be questioning, in particular the rampant inequality, despite what Julie Bishop says, based entirely on gender, that haunts women every day of our lives.
Oh, and while we’re at it, why do high achieving women such as Bishop and many others, feel it is necessary to publicly disavow any interest in or connection with feminism? Could it be that even high achieving women are still scared of men?
No Place For Sheep 
I’m always a little puzzled by the repeated line about women being paid less for the same job as men. This can’t be what it sounds like, anti-discrimination legislation would put a stop to this very quickly.
Isn’t it more a case of trying to have women compete with men and male traits on evolutionarily male grounds? That doesn’t sound like the end of the gender discrimination, it sounds like the beginning.
Surely the proper valuing of dimorphically opposed preferences and tendencies, is a more sensible way of settling the battle of the sexes.
If a female in a management role gets paid less because they took 4 years off to raise a child, that shouldn’t be grounds to re-writing the workplace manual. The workplace manual should be re-written on the grounds that socially engineering women to convince them they should throw off natural tendencies and compete with men, as men, does little for equality. Value the individual for the unique skills they bring as that individual, not devalue a female because she chooses not to seize every opportunity, light a fire to every bridge she crosses and trample everything in her path to get to the top. She probably added a heck of lot more unique value by being a better communicator and intuitive planner: pay her for that.
The gender re-assignment issue I think is more freak show gawking than it is hatred. Whilst the stats are going to turn up genuine violence, the vast majority of the population are sheltered, ignorant, gawkers who think that sexuality is black and white instead of on a continuum; with plenty of depth to it as well. The majority are more on the Barnum and Bailey, ‘Two-bits-a-gander’ side of the street than they are violent bigoted mob. I don’t think people really ‘hate’, they’re sheltered, and its why as soon as they find out a co-worker, friend or close neighbour is having a tough time identifying as Intersex or Transgender they come rushing to their defense, where 12 months prior they’re craning their neck to get a second look and clicking on the click bait.
That stuff isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, generational cultural hatred, its solvable with a continued slow progress through understanding, education, testimony and communication. It just sucks for the people in the middle of it in the meantime. They have to wait for the rest of society to grow to its full height.
The absolute best article (and article follow up) I have ever read on transgender issues was from Grantland.com earlier year. I know you think that reading a story titled ‘Dr V’s Magic Putter’ isn’t your cup of tea, I promise you’ll never look at transgender issues the same again; I didn’t.
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-physicist-golf-club-dr-v/
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Many thanks for that link.
I think battybattybats has information on violence in comment below & on previous post.
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“Equal pay for equal work” dos not and never did mean that everyone gets paid the same money. That women on average earn less over a lifetime than mean can be ascribed to several different causes. Some of them can be addressed, and are being addressed; some appear intractable. If you want to analyse it a little differently, ask instead why men get paid more on average over their lifetimes.
You may find you answer your own questions.
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Male privilege comes at quite a price, emotional traumatisation is standard upbringing from all parents from peers etc (the amount of single mothers i have met that teach their boys not to cry and ‘toughen them up’ is repugnant), compassion and many other traits necessary for the species and proper human interactions are treated as weakness and male society is built around punishing signs of ‘weakness’ and non-conformity with violence. What men do to women men also do to other men, to varying degrees based on degree of matching an impossible sex-stereotype. After al that’s why men don’t go to doctors, nothing is worse for most men than seeming weak as taught to them by years of violence.
There is another element to transphobic violence though. Many murderers and attempted murderers of Trans people kill them to hide their own attraction (for example the forensics on the sextoy found in the apartment shared by Angie Zapata and her murderer showed that the murderer had been the only one to use it, on himself. His statements of ‘all gay things must die’ being a cover for the truth).
While a gender-policing element exists in homophobia too nevertheless it has been found that most (over 80%) of strongly homophobic people have repressed same-sex attraction.
Suggesting a great deal of major transphobia stems from repressed trans-ness and/or repressed trans-attraction specific orientation, while gender-policing is much more found in the micro-aggressions of daily life.
I think an interesting point on this is seen in the way proportions of violence change based on identity. Let’s take a close look at the other categories of the study i mentioned the other day, especially FtM Trans and Cis males:
Key survey results:
Received verbal abuse:
76 per cent of males
69 per cent of females
92 per cent transgender male to female
55 per cent transgender female to male
Physical assault without a weapon:
32 per cent of male
15 per cent of females
46 per cent transgender male to female
45 per cent transgender female to male
Physical attack with a weapon, knife, bottle or stone:
12 per cent of males
6 per cent of females
38 per cent transgender male to female
9 per cent transgender female to male
12 per cent other
Source – AAP/Speaking Out: Stopping Homophobic and Transphobic Abuse in Queensland.
This shows elements of privilege diverge in different ways rather than across a single axis between male and female.
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