Quote:
Originally Posted by DapperButch
Thank you for writing all of this. I appreciate you sharing your history.
As I said before, I am glad that you are here. I would love to have the opportunity to discuss living in the world as a trans person, with other trans people, on this site.
Do you find that trans women are supported in most lesbian specific spaces in your area (both your area specifically, and the UK, in general)? I don't know if you can say this based on your own experience, but I am curious. .
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I'm happy to discuss that, Dapper, either here or elsewhere if it needs a different thread.
As for trans women being supported in lesbian-specific places in the UK, first a caveat - I am not on social media, I'm a refusenik. There almost certainly will be stuff 'out there' that I am not aware of. One of the things I've just been venting about is the fact that here I am in the UK's second largest city, and there is one lesbian-focused bar (and it's tiny) and two places where lesbians are often found, so far as I'm aware of at this point. And there are NO women-only nights in any of them. I'm guessing that locally women connect online first so there's less of the going to somehwere to find a date thing going on.
The twice I have been on the scene that ther'es actually been wall-to-wall women in our lesbian-centric bar, I felt no edge from anybody at all. I would say utter general social acceptance. Of course, that's not the same as saying that they'd all be happy to bed me, but then, I wouldn't have wanted to bed all of them, either. We all have our preferences :-}
At LFest - which has a firm no discrimination policy - much the same. Indeed, although I fluffed the situations through dithering due to introversion and nervousness, I did get some positive interest from a couple of lasses, which was a bit of a surprise to me. Being effectively a babydyke, introvert and recovering from years of self-policing due to fear of rejection as female, I told myself beforehand to not get my hopes up, and be realistic with my expectations. Seems my expectations were too low!
Contrast this with nearly thirty years back in my much smaller original hometown, and the utter rejection I got by the local lesbian support group. No-one was off with me at the local gay/lesbian disco when I attended, but the women barely interacted with me at all, although one did shamefacedly say 'we do think you're pretty though' as if that were a consolation prize. Well gee thanks, but having to deal with being lesbian on top of being MTF and telling me I'm pretty but cold-shouldering me.. yeah. Worst and most hurtful discrimination I've ever experienced. Heterosexual society actually proved to be way more accepting. That incident made me actually scared to go near the lesbian scene again for fear of similar rejection, hence my finally coming to the scene very late in life. I'm happy to say much has changed for the better!
I blame Janice Raymond 's nasty piece of supposedly feminist work for that, though. (I've had to self-censor there - I get a severe attack of the swearies every time I think of her infamous book on transfolk). Those women were in a tough situation at a tough time, and I was one more potential worry, I saw that even at the time. It was the fact that they wouldnt even negotiate some form of compromise that shocked me.
Nearly forgot - the women in the lesbian walking group I'm in - absolutely fine with me.
As for the rest of the UK - well, I've no experience there, and no information other than a few snippets I picked up from chatting at LFest whcih gave me the impression that it's much the same around the country. Sure, there'll be the odd bigot here and there, but in general we're accepted as part of the community, such as it is. Hmmn.. one caveat - it can depend on the individual. I've just recalled that one bunch I chatted with said they'd encountered a couple of transwomen that, from the descriptions of their behaviour given me, I suspect were either poorly socialised as women or just plain boorish in personality anyway. They were sent packing, eventually. I have noticed that some MTFs seem to think that their way of being a woman is THE way, and come on, we're all girls together, this is how to do it - and it sounds incredibly fake, and is in any case, rude, especially when you're the newcomer to a group.