Comment Re:Why do we need to care about a gender gap? (Score 2) 376
I logged into an account I promised myself I would never use again, just to avoid undoing mod points to reply to this. I was sorely tempted to simply moderate you down, but I think that somebody needs to point out a few home truths to you instead.
And lord have mercy on any transsexual that gets clocked in one of those places. Females are far more sexist and closed-minded than any male I know.
Let me share my experience with both genders when caught as the other gender in a place I shouldn't be as that gender.
My experience has been the exact opposite of what you profess. Perhaps it's because I don't think of a place like the ladies' room as a "place I shouldn't be". I have as much right to be there as any other woman. And I have *never* been "caught" as you describe. Despite being 6' tall, and having been a former rugby player, and 250lbs of muscle when I began my transition, I have never once been confronted or challenged in the womens' bathroom, and it's been well over a year since the last time I set foot in the mens' room. The mens' room is the threatening (and dangerous) environment for me, not the ladies'.
I've been full time for over a year, and while the tits help, they're really not that important for your ability to pass: people look at your body language. They look at your dress. If you open your mouth, they listen to your voice. I transitionned on the job and still work for the same company I did before I went full time, and there are people I work with who have absolutely no idea that I'm anything other than a cisgendered female. People don't tend to consider your size or your build unless you give them a reason to, which brings me to my next point:
There's a reason I use the men's bathroom at bars, even if I'm passing. It's just not worth the drama to use the bathroom of the gender I'm presenting as.
If you're constantly worried about being "clocked", as you put it, then people are going to pick up on that. You may be unintentionally sending off signals which make things more difficult for you than it needs to be. If you are thinking about yourself in those terms, then that's all you'll ever be. You will never be the woman that you seem to want to be, because you are afraid to go into the correct bathroom with the confidence and conviction that it's where you're supposed to be.
A guy who sees someone apparently female in the men's room is sometimes surprised or shocked. Sometimes the man will become angry, especially if he's older. But yet, at the end of the day, I have not had a single serious problem with being apparently female, even fixing my hair or something, in the men's room. No police, not a ton of drama.
Now, I don't know myself what it's like to be a guy caught in the women's room, but from what I understand, it involves the police, drama, screaming, more drama, and signs that get posted at clubs saying that "crossdressers" must use the men's room. Then you have to show your papers and make sure you always have that letter from the psychologist that says you may use the women's room. Even though that really carries no legal weight and you're still getting your ass escorted out of the bar anyway.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress. People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper. And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female. I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female. That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented across most of the US, and *is* implemented everywhere else in the English-speaking world (outside of parts of Africa), as well as all of the EU, most of South America, and most of southeast Asia. Behaviour like *you* describe would be seriously illegal in this part of the world, as it would be a violation of my human rights (and was recently read into the constitution as such, yay Canada!). Even in the US, the human rights tribunals have pretty much unanimously agreed that a transsexual has the right to use the bathroom of their preferred gender, as long as they're presenting as such, regardless of what their documentation says.
Look into the drama surrounding a transsexual in an abusive relationship who tries to get into a battered women's shelter, and the truth shall set ye free.
They can't legally turn you away. Know your rights. You didn't choose this life, but if you don't fight for it, then you're going to get trampled by people who are either ignorant of you, or actively belligerent.
A woman just has to sit back and let her body just do its animal functions, because there will always be a man to rush in and save her whether personally or by proxy of government assistance. There will always be someone to feel sorry for her. A woman has no need for something like wikipedia. Wikipedia has man-knowledge, things that men write down so the next generation can build upon it. Woman-knowledge, on the other hand, is always about transient, animal things, like their period or their pregnancy, things they feel in the moment. Woman-knowledge is always renewed, but yet stagnant. Woman-knowledge is not knowledge for building and improving, like man-knowledge is.
I find this statement incredibly offensive. This is anti-feminism at its worst, and coming from somebody who claims to be of the demographic you claim, I am at a complete loss as to how you could be so ignorant of the point of it all. Men and women *are* wired differently, yes, but you clearly don't understand why they're different, or how.... if you want to go back to the animal brain, *way* back when, the breeding strategy was for the male to club the female over the head and essentially rape her. More recently, in hunter-gatherer societies, the majority of the calorie intake was from gatherered food, not hunted food. Humans never evolved to eat meat every day, and that's a major source of the health problems in the western world. And who do you suppose most of the gatherers were? Women. When we moved from gathering to cultivation? Again, mostly it was women (though it was more balanced, usually the women tended the crops and the men tended the livestock). Women were the ones learning about reading the seasons, and using things like the stars to figure out how close the next season was, which was incredibly important to figure out when to plant. *that* type of knowledge is definitely *NOT* transient in nature. Couple it with herbalism and knowledge of ancient medicines, and you have a basis for ancient "witchcraft" and shamanism, most of the practitioners of which (at least in Europe) were female. "female" knowledge most emphatically *is* about building and improving society.
I think you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out what it actually means to be female, and what the actual differences are between the male brain and the female brain. Yeah, there are differences, and yeah, females do tend to be more social animals, but it isn't for the reasons that you seem to think: Historically, females aren't as expendible as males, and most of the differences between female wiring and male wiring comes from the fact that people are safer in social groups; by contrast, male individualism probably comes from a drive to spread out and increase genetic diversity by joining other groups, though short of sending an anthropologist back in time to watch, we'll never really know for sure.. And I think you need to do it before you do something drastic and irreversible to yourself.