Choosing stealth is a shame-based way to live because it supports the belief that being trans is bad and should be hidden. Being a transwoman is just another way of being a woman. If you want to save yourself a lot of misery, be truthful about the history that made you into the wonderful person you are today to the people who matter to you. You don’t need to tell the gas station attendant, but the point of transitioning is that you get to live authentically. Don’t put yourself into a position that you have to go back to living a lie; don’t go from one closet to another.
I wanted to see what sort of countries spend the most time searching for the term “shemales” on google. To make it interesting, I compared the search trends between “transgender” and “shemale.” What I found was interesting!
I believe people choose to personalize terminology. I think folks tend to build a weak sense of self upon a term like “transsexual” and they find they require consistent outside reassurance of their sense of self as a this or a that. It is for this reason I think that people take it personally when someone says transgender instead of transsexual, crossdresser, interesexed, gender-queer, etc. I think the problem with all of this is that the English language is not a dead language; terms evolve and become ever more complex through nuanced usage. The concept is more important than the label and I think that people forget that when their sense of personhood is rooted in a term they expect to stay fixed. Not only do I think tI think this practice does real harm.
This was a protest by the TG groups that come to the 2007 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta as well as other groups. We were all protesting the shrinking of HIV prevention funding, the micromanagement of HIV prevention efforts by Christian-based ideology propagated by the right wing and the fact that the conference blackballed the entire transgender community. […]
