Printer-friendly version
Author:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
This turned up on the Guardian website and I found it very sad. There are some links to reports and also some photos of the 'girls' working as prostitutes. Sometimes I think I need to count my blessings more often. The intolerance they have had or still receive is beyond my experience no wonder the health issues, substance abuse and other problems are so prevalent.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/18/transge...
Comments
it's very sad...
It's very sad... This world we live in.
There's also some more subtle forms of discrimination going on. It's possible to get GRS/SRS/(pick your acronym) here in New Jersey, now. It would have been years ago, except no hospital would let it happen, unless the surgeon was also a Urologist (This is STILL the case). This is despite state laws against discrimination that have been on the books for about a decade.
It also took a court case to get marriage equality here in New Jersey - since our governor veto'd the bill that would have made it legal without it, and the previous governor signed a bill that allowed for "Civil Unions" believing they were equal (they weren't/aren't).
Discrimination, sadly, is alive and well. There have been amazing advances on the legal front in the USA in the past few years, but there is so much more to do. It's still legal to fire a person from a job for being trans in a majority of the country.
Annette
Time and place are almost all
Realistic sounding stories of public abuse do seem more commonly set in the US. Anti-discrimination laws will help but an internally highly competitive society will always find those within to attack. Moving from the awful to the trivial I wonder if a US reader could recognise the mild paranoia someone TG might feel in England through wondering "Is my history visible to the people around me but they are too polite to mention it?"
Something we hopefully all enjoy are moments when a comment makes it clear our past is either unknown or has been forgotten and we can just get on with life...
Rhona McCloud