Transwomen are women

Every so often a weird inclination overtakes me and I sign into my online dating profile, looking for someone I might find a connection with. I haven’t experienced much success: just one single date that didn’t lead to a second one, and a couple scam attempts. Nevertheless, I keep fishing in that pond, hoping I might meet that special someone.

Recently I started chatting with a woman through the app. She seemed potentially interesting, and we had both indicated that we liked one another -- a promising enough start. We exchanged a couple messages. Then she dropped this line on me: “I don’t mean to be offensive, but are you cis-female?” I was aghast at such a tactless question. How could this not be offensive? I chose to respond politely with “No, I’m transgender. Is that a problem?” Not surprisingly, her response indicated exactly what I had anticipated. Sure, we could still be friends, she said, but she had issues with transgender women and male privilege. WTF? She, a cis-female lesbian, felt she needed to lecture me, a transgender female, about my “male privilege.” I gave her a brief response pointing out that transgender women rate pretty well near the bottom of the privilege spectrum. I left it at that, though she sent another message challenging my understanding of transfemale privilege. I recognized that this discussion would be a futile waste of my time and energy and left it.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by her attitude. Thankfully, I have rarely experienced such bigotry among cisgender lesbians in my community. But I know it exists, and I felt furious encountering it. It testifies to one of the challenges the transgender community endures. We face rejection and hostility not only in the heterosexual community, but also in the lesbian and bisexual communities as well. We look to the rest of the LGBTQ community for support, as we all face marginalization in various ways and to different degrees, but as transgender women, we often find ourselves marginalized by other groups within the LGBTQ community. We, as transgender women, aren’t considered to be real women by people on all sides. It’s a tough and lonely place to be.

The denial of trans identities opens transgender individuals to discrimination and violence. Denying my identity as a woman because I happen to be transgender is to deny my humanity. Once you deny my humanity, you no longer have to respect and treat me as human. This is a chain of logic that begins with trans women feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome, and at worst can lead to deadly results.

As a transgender woman, I still enter female spaces and groups that are new to me with a measure of fear and anxiety, wondering whether I will be accepted as the woman I am. When I wanted to start attending a feminist book group at our local feminist bookstore, I hesitated, wondering whether I would be welcome. When I was invited by a friend to join a group for divorced women, I hesitated, wondering whether the other women would accept me equally. When I wanted to share my stories in a local female storytelling community, I wondered whether I would be welcomed. (I most certainly was!) And let’s not even get started on the whole bathroom question. This is not a fear that cisgender women have to deal with. They might feel a general anxiety over whether they’ll fit in, or whether the other women will like them, but they don’t have to wonder whether their very identity as a woman will be affirmed or denied by the other women they meet. Many transgender women, including myself, wrestle for years with affirming their true identity. When we do find the courage, we then face the challenge of wondering, over and over again, whether we will be accepted and validated, not just by cishet women and men, but even by others in the queer community. This is traumatic and keeps many from acknowledging who they are openly. How cis queer individuals could invalidate the identity of trans queer people remains incomprehensible to me. How can one marginalized group choose to discriminate against another one? Yet it happens too often. In doing so we perpetuate the toxic culture enforced on all of us by the patriarchal cisgender heterosexual community, and we transwomen are left isolated and vulnerable, looking for inclusion and acceptance but finding rejection and inclusion.

I appreciate the powerful words a friend of mine reposted on Facebook, words that she wrote a year ago which are just as necessary today:

The starting point for any conversation about transgender female identity must be that transwomen are women, equal to ciswomen. Cisgender women, whether heterosexual, lesbian or other, do not get to police what it means to be a woman. When they do so, they perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes which have enslaved cisgender women themselves throughout history. They use their voices as women to invalidate other women. This, dear women, is not what we need. Please hear our voices and understand the pain, trauma and violence you bring to us when you exclude us as not being fully women. If our identities make you uncomfortable, maybe you need to sit with that discomfort and examine it, rather than invalidating our identities. Maybe you need to take the time to listen to us, get to know us, hear our stories and understand how our journeys to be true to ourselves have impacted us, rather than accusing us of usurping space that we have no right to occupy. Maybe you need to enter into conversation with us and build new, open, affirming communities together with us, rather than accusing us of invading your exclusive realm. The future is inclusive. The queer community should model that.

Note: I imagine transgender men face similar issues. However, I cannot speak specifically to their experience and have chosen to speak here primarily from my experience as a transgender woman.