Being transgender in a transphobic society

Being transgender in a transphobic society leads to moments of sheer desperation

Meredith Talusan

"Imagine that, after having taken the most difficult step of deciding to live as your authentic gender, you find yourself losing the support of family members and friends just as you’re trying to adjust to a new social role. Then you walk out on the street and are discriminated against in various ways, from being referred to as the wrong gender, to being prevented from entering bathrooms or dressing rooms, to being verbally and even physically attacked.

Even if you’re fortunate enough to “pass” so that people can’t tell you’re transgender – which few trans people do early in transition – you must reveal your assigned gender when you present identification, and then deal with people’s often extreme reactions when they feel like you’ve “fooled” them simply for being who you are. If you try to change your name, let alone your gender marker on your ID, you’re told that you can’t do the former without a court order or the latter without surgery. But you can’t have surgery without money, and you don’t have money without family support, especially when people won’t hire you because you’re trans. You can easily find yourself homeless when you have neither a job or a support system, even as the shelter system also discriminates against trans people.

Germaine Greer is not on my list of positive feminists. In Fact, I dislike most of her speeches and most of her views. Why? She is a TERF. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist - a loosely-organized collective with a message of hate and exclusion against transgender women in particular, and transgender people as a whole. They have attached themselves to radical feminism as a means to attempt to deny trans women basic access to health care, women's groups, restroom facilities, and anywhere that may be considered women's space.

My article about TERFism can be read here

Hunted: Gay & Afraid. The rising bigotry

ELLEN E JONES - The Independent 

"Last night's Hunted: Gay and Afraid was a documentary about the recent global wave of regressive anti-LGBT legislation – and not the first, either. The excellent 2012 documentary, Call Me Kuchu, explored similar territory in 2012, as did BBC2's Stephen Fry: Out There in 2013 and Reggie Yates' Extreme Russia, earlier this year.
 All of those documentaries benefited from compelling personal insights into how individuals in the LGBT community have been affected. This Dispatches film, fronted by the former Newsnight reporter Liz MacKean, took a different tack.
 MacKean's film focused not on the victims but on the "villains", specifically the World Congress of Families, an organisation which, though based in the US, has tentacles stretching into Europe, Africa and beyond. View footage of any high-level meeting to draft draconian, homophobic legislation, anywhere in the world, and it seems you'll find a WCF member or affiliate lurking in the corner of the frame.
 Figures such as the WCF managing director, Pastor Larry Jacobs, and Brian Brown, president of the National Organisation for Marriage, were tracked down by MacKean and confronted with the accusation that the effect of their lobbying can be to legitimise violence.
 This isn't news to viewers of the above-mentioned documentaries. It was striking to note how the same lobbying tactics have been replicated from country to country: First, select a biddable local politician as a frontman, then falsely conflate homosexuality with child abuse, spuriously blame gay people for public health issues and repeat as necessary.
 Sadly, MacKean's strategy of pointing out the logical flaws in these arguments seemed to have little effect. Bigotry rarely responds to reason."

The episode ' Gay and afraid' by Chanel 4's Dispatches can be viewed here:

 

 

DISPATCHES

I'm Transgender - I'm Still Human! - Talulah-Eve Brown

"As a transgender woman I have been a victim of transphobic hate crime for a very long time now. When I tell people about my experiences of hate crime their reactions are "OMG. Why don't you report it?", well... if I was to report every single hate crime I faced then I would be in court every single day!

It's not that I don't want to report it because obviously I would love to see justice over this kind of abuse, but over time it has just become something that I'm used to so It just makes my life easier to brush it off.

Police fire at #pride march in Istanbul with water cannons and rubber bullets

"Is Turkish society overtly homophobic and religious? Or have these attitudes been fuelled by the religious regime of Erdogan's New Turkey?"

Police in Turkey blasted water cannons and fired rubber bullets at a pride march on Sunday as people celebrated in the city streets under rainbow banners, according to eye-witnesses in Istanbul.

For many Turks, Gezi symbolizes protest against injustice. And Sunday was no different.

— www.huffingtonpost.com

Photoshoot result

Working with Rich Suit, we came up with these:


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Male submission, Evolution and Enslavement

COURTESY OF www.enslavement.org.uk/malesub

One repeated accusation levelled against the Internal Enslavement website is that we are in some way opposed to female dominance or male submission.

This is simply false.

In attempting to understand relationships of Enslavement between masters and female slaves, we have limited the scope of our work, without claiming that similar relationships do not take place between people of other genders and orientations.