The worst of intentions

-

My baseline defense has always been my intellect. I could use it as a weapon and was ready to dismiss those who readily disparaged others as unworthy simpletons. But the formula is not so facile and, as my lived experience opened my eyes, I began to realize that many people are hurting from their own less than stellar childhoods. I began to see that could slowly lower my weapons and need not always be ready to strike before I was belittled.

We all have coping mechanisms for dealing with the world and we need to give people a chance. Sometimes there is the openness to be educated and we can work on their fear based prejudice.

By now, I have become better at recognizing the difference between being misinformed and willful ignorance (which is what will draw my ire) and rather than thinking that prejudice will be a default position, I now observe and let the person tip their hand. It is how I found out that, more often than not, people do not have the worst of intentions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Language matters

-
I am trying to comprehend why many in the male to female gender variant community continue to employ the term crossdresser when female to male persons who do the same thing are not so labeled. If women aren't "crossdressing" when they wear traditionally male clothing, why is a male bodied person doing so when wearing a skirt? I tend to personally see this term as slightly anachronistic and dismissive rather than helpful since there are a series of societal connotations surrounding it which aren't generally positive or helpful. If we are going to move towards a deeper level of understanding and tolerance of all types of behaviour (no matter the percentage of the population which engages in it), we need to update the lexicon as we have done in many other areas of social science. Hence if we are going to less stigmatize a behaviour which has always existed and which occurs with much more frequency than transsexualism, a name change might be in order. Perhaps as a startin
Read more

One transgender woman's take on AGP

-
This entry from the transhealth website dates back to 2001 and it offers a very nice dissection of the now mostly debunked but still controversial AGP theory and how this transgender woman could care two cents about it. People who have been trying to marginalize the experience of gynephilic transwomen have pushed for the stigmatizing idea that they are actually perverted men. Well this soul, who couldn't give a hoot either way, isn't buying any of it and her frankness at times had me chuckling to myself as I read her posting. If we ever met I would give her a hug for seeing through the BS but mostly for being herself: "About a year ago I was reading on Dr. Anne Lawrence’s site about a new theory of the origin of trans called “autogynephilia.” This theory asserts that many trans women—and transsexual women in particular—desire reassignment surgery because they are eroticizing the feminization of their bodies. The first thing that struck me about it, of course, was t
Read more

Never Say Never....

-
Image
 I was certain that I would never post here again and yet, here I am. It’s been several years, and life has changed me yet again. I have burrowed further into my psyche to discover more internal truths about myself all in the silence of a life lived with more periods of reflective solitude than ever before. After attempting for many years to be a problem solver for others, I needed to dig deeply to discover who I was, which should be a necessity for all people and an absolute imperative for those of us who dare rub against the grain of conventional society. The most important thing we can do for ourselves is honor the internal voice which has driven us since childhood. That whisper which we were compelled to ignore through our initial indoctrination must be listened to again for guidance. I knew I had spent too long heeding messaging that wasn’t working for me as a trans person, and it was time to stop. For the world gleefully basks in a level ignorance and hypocrisy we are not abl
Read more