Whilst it's true that there are loads of vicious bigots who hate queers of all sorts, it's also true that there are quite a few women who are deeply suspicious around poorly-socialised transsexual women, so the issue might not be quite as cut and dried as it might seem from a distance.

A time-worn staple of Western popular culture is men dressing as women to put women down in crude and misogynist ways, sometimes putting a "happy face" on their nasty remarks by disguising them as "humour."

There are also a largish number of cross-dressing men who don their disguises in order to gain access to "women's spaces" for vicious purposes, including theft, armed robbery, rape and assault, or surreptitious "non-violent" assault through the taking of invasive "up-skirt" or "spy" pictures or videos of female victims, so popular on the web that a search on the term "up-skirt" yields twenty million, five hundred thousand hits, and a hundred other crimes the dreary imaginations of jerks can imagine.

I suspect that the number of hits on "up-skirt" reflects a rather larger number of male sexual predators in drag than there are real transsexuals.

For a few fictional examples: consider the ruthless Mrs. Doubtfire and the venal Tootsie, both of whom quickly betray the confidences of women they meet in drag for selfish advantage, Anything For Love (a.k.a. Just One of the Girls) -- same deal, Third Rock from the Sun (Dick dresses as a women to spy on Dr. Albright in her women's group meeting), Some Like It Hot (where the conniving cross-dresser attempts to use the confidences he's extracted from the innocent Monroe character to take sexual advantage of her), Psycho (probably the most famous cross-dressing killer character in the world), Dressed to Kill (another one, more recent), Sorority Boys (puerile adolescent male fantasies), the list goes on.

It might be appropriate to have a little compassion for the reality of women's lives, in which they're far more likely to run into a thoroughly heterosexual male predator than they are to encounter a transsexual of any sort.

It's impossible to understand the reality of a story unless far more detail is included than is usually the case in newspaper articles. Reserving judgement is often difficult, because one naturally feels sorry for one side or another, but it's also possible that there are two sides to the story, and perhaps we should feel compassion for all concerned.

Cheers,

Puddin'