Loving a Transman Isn't Easy

[SecretAgentMa'am]

Originally Posted by betenoire

I forgot to respond to this part. I almost choked on my coffee when I read it!

Because, honestly, it is wildly inappropriate that these groups operate any other way. They SHOULD be just for non-trans partners. PERHAPS if the trans partners weren't always fucking THERE in those groups people would tone down the performative "look how supportive and happy I am!" rhetoric and just be honest for 30 seconds.

This. Seriously. Could you imagine if you were in therapy and your partner demanded to come to your sessions to monitor what you were saying? Or if they got access to your therapist's notes so they could bring up things you'd said in your "safe space" later on in an argument? I really doubt that anyone would think that was okay, but apparently in this case it's supposed to be okay.

The really sad thing is that my experience was in Portland, OR. We have a huge LGBT community here. Sometimes I think the transmen in this town outnumber the female ID butches (they probably don't, but it feels that way on occasion). I think part of the problem here is that we've gone so far to the other side of the pendulum swing. So many people just don't have any access to support groups at all. Here, there are so many they're competing with each other, and they all seem to have decided the way to compete is by being the very most inclusive of all the inclusive groups. A large part of the Portland ethic is that you can never, ever be exclusionary about anything, ever. That sounds great on the surface, but what it actually translates to is hundreds of groups that aren't actually *about* anything. We have knitting clubs where half the members don't knit, cooking clubs where half the members don't cook, I recently joined the campus Queer Club, and only about 1/3 of the membership is actually LGBT. It used to be called something like LGBT Students of {college} but they changed it to Queer Club because people felt excluded. Because, you know, we're inclusive and that means it doesn't matter what the group is actually for, everyone who feels like coming is welcome whether they care about the stated purpose of the group or not.