Myopia

The one condition the transgender community suffers from is myopia. If you read all the news, the editorials, blogs, forums, etc. (I only access very few but enough through links) you come away with the sense they're either singing to the choir of like-minded transpeople or shouting at the crowd of opposing transpeople.

They very rarely write for the larger world and media outside the transgender umbrella, so you come away feeling like it's a large gender enclosed arena and unless you're "one of them" you're ignored, dismissed or hated, unless of course you agree with them.

The problem with that myopia is that the transgender community is not uniformily defined by the members and not universally agreed on the use of words for identifying people or classes of people, so words become swords and views become false wars.

As Shakespeare would say, "Much ado about nothing." or more any one of a number of saying about tempests in teapots, molehills and mountains, etc. You get the point. A good example is all the noise about the use of the word "tranny" and who defines and gets to use it.

This pitted the gay-drag community and the transwomen who came through to transition against those who felt the word, commonly used by RuPaul and other drag queens and often applied to transitioning, even post-transition, women, was derogatory and demeaning.

The former accused the latter of not understanding the history of the word and the latter accused the former of being dismissive. And then there were some transwomen who tried to arbitrate but only succeeded in stating the case for each and not solving anything.

In short, it's a lot of voices and noise at each other all the while the gay-drag community issued a half-hearted apology and promise, not RuPaul but the producers of the RuPaul show, that won't change anything.

The truth is, as many wrote, the public view of transwomen is taken from other groups under the transgender umbrella, such as the drag-queens, cross-dressers, she-males, etal. and some of the public post-transition women while helping transgender women are actually hurting post-transition women.

And that's something only a few of the public (post-transition) women do successively to represent women because they don't the use the stupid little adjective while most of them use it to promote themselves and transgender women not distinguishing between those in transition and those post-transition.

They're in effect talking to themselves thinking they're talking to the public. Transcommunity myopia in a nutshell.