Transexuals

[Aractus]

Well you could start by showing a modicum of respect and not referring to trans people as their birth gender. This is extremely hurtful and harmful in the way of all forms of prejudice. That is because you are treating them as people who you think they are, not what they actually are. By using the wrong pronoun you are not allowing trans people to be themselves.

I know I already made this point, but no matter how you refer to transgender people some people will take offence at it. And that's not unique at all to transgenders, but it's also true for a range of other identities - nationality, beliefs (political, religious, etc), ethnicity, sexuality, cultural identity, other areas of personal identity. For instance, some transpeople will want us to acknowledge they have a disorder, and others want us to acknowledge that they do not have one.

These problems are not at all exclusivity due to "intolerance", in fact intolerance is barely anything when it comes to it IMHO. Ignorance perhaps, ignorance is far more powerful than intolerance. And remember, respect has to go both ways. You can't expect other people to be respectful to transpeople that are not respectful to them, and unfortunately there is a vocal minority who do paint a negative picture of transpeople (just as there's a vocal minority who paint a negative picture of Muslims).

Also, it's taken us more than a century of dedicated psychological research to come to the point where we are now in terms of understanding; it's not at all surprising that the public hasn't come along with the advancements in psychology - after all we're still only a few decades past a whole slew of completely immoral and harmful practises perpetrated by those practising in the psychology disciple. Look up David Reimer for example - he was used a guinea pig from birth to test a psychologist's hypothesis and committed suicide in 2004 aged 38. The psychologist responsible, John Money, received numerous honours and awards of his career. He also had favourable views of Pederasty (mutual love between a man and a boy).


Society's not going to change all at once just because someone has had a great new idea.