I don't have any answers to why the gay community is not always determined to include transgendered people in civil rights legislation, but I have a question or two that we may need to address...

We gay men seem to be certain that we were born gay (at least all gay men I know think this) and so we feel that we had no more choice in being gay than a black person has in being black. We can PRETEND to be straight, but that is a life in Hell worse than death, so no thanks. I wonder some gay people are uncertain about this "choice" element of being transgendered?

I think we owe transgendered people the benefit of the doubt, just as we must expect straights to understand that we have no choice in being gay. But I think that we are STILL in the earlier stages of educating ourselves about transgendered people, so many people may suspect that there are some transgendered people who are just confused and are making a wrong "choice." They do not understand that the transgendered feel like they were born in the wrong body.

I recall that years ago I thought that TG people were just not able to accept that they could love someone of the same sex unless they looked like the OPPOSITE sex. I thought they just suffered from some kind of internalized homophobia, and needed to get used to the idea of same sex coupling. I wonder if other people have had this same misimpression of the transgendered?

I now support my TG brothers and sisters completely and want equal rights for them, but I do have to say that our struggles ARE different ones in many ways. We share many similarities - but there are differences. In most ways I think the Transgendered have it much much harder than we gay people do. The general public still needs a LOT of educating. Thank God movies like "Transamerica" and those TG shows on LOGO are starting to make a dent in this education process.

The main reason some folks have made this an issue is pragmatic politics -- namely, the idea that while we've come a long way in terms of acceptance of gay, lesbian and bi people, if we include the T-folk, we're going to deep-six the entire enterprise, because the social acceptance of T-folk is perceived to be behind that of Gs, Ls and Bs. As I understand it, this pragmatic idea has been the core of the objections raised by people like Chris Crain.

In my opinion, while I can understand the political pragmatism involved in that way of looking at things, taking that approach undermines our position substantially. The reason is that the discrimination against T-folks is the same as the discrimination against Gs, Ls and Bs in character -- namely, it is a discrimination based on gender, what is considered "gender appropriate behavior" and so forth. That's the core of all of the discrimination against everyone in the LGBT umbrella.

If we leave out the Ts, we're basically saying that, for now, it's okay to discriminate against people who are *really* gender different (ie, folks who publically present as the "other" gender), while those of us who are gender different in less open and notorious ways (ie, having sex with people of our own gender behind closed doors) get our rights now. That undermines our entire position, really, because the basis of the discrimination isn't against our sex lives, it's because of the idea that our sex lives as Gs, Ls and Bs is not *appropriate* given our biological gender. It's the same basis for discriminating against Ts (different issue -- sex vs. presentation -- but the same basis of being "inappropriate for one's given gender"), with the difference being that Ts can't keep their own reality as quiet as easily as we can if we choose to do so. Leaving the Ts behind would therefore be shameful, inappropriate and self-undermining to the movement as a whole.

For anyone who cares to investigate, there is overwhelming scientific evidence of a difference in the brain structures between male and female mammals. I would refer you to the NOVA program called "Sex Unknown" and The Netherlands Brain Institute's Dick Swaab's study on human brains. That study, the only one that has ever been done on human brains ( because, as Swaab has pointed out, healthy human brain tissue is very hard to find), not only confirmed that men and women have different brain structures but also that MtF transsexuals have FEMALE brains. The difference cannot be attributed to taking estrogen because some of those subjects had NOT taken female hormones.

Many in the gay community maintain (correctly in my opinion) that they are born gay, and when others ignore scientific evidence in support of that assertion, they become frustrated. Why then do so many members of the gay community treat transsexuals the same way?

Most MtFs in my generation did not have any realistic chance of transitioning in our youths. If you care to research the type of criteria used to determine admission to university based gender programs, which for a long time was the only avenue to transition, you will understand why. They were absurdly restrictive, and even then, the numbers admitted were miniscule (the Johns Hopkins clinic admitted only two patients per month) .

Since transition was essentially unavailable to us, we struggled to live our lives as best as we could. For people to suggest that we "wake up one day and decide [we] want to be women" is insulting beyond belief and trivializes the hardships that we had to live through.

I realize that it is impossible for anyone who hasn't experienced it to understand, but the thing is... I tried my best to live out my life with the cards that were dealt me, and was in tremendous denial, but one day it simply explodes. You MUST be your true self, it is a BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE.

The losses we experience are incalculable. I know others who are medical doctors, dentists, police officers, academics, architects, engineers, lawyers, soldiers and scientists. Many of us lose our jobs and often our careers.

I personally lost my job (I would have lost my career but for my dogged determination to remain in it - after two years I finally found another position), my home, all my friends and almost all of my family. As high as the transition costs are in dollars (none covered by insurance, of course, and often in six figures) they are nothing compared to the other costs we pay in our lives.

And after all this, we are rejected by the one group that, more than any other, ought to understand our problems.

For those who are geniunely interested in learning some facts from authoratative sources, I would first recommend "Transsexuality: The Uninvited Dilemma" and second, "Transgender Emergence".

I have heard gay people respond, when ignorant straights (generally bible thumpers) claim that being gay is a choice, that being gay causes incredible difficulties in one's life, so why would anyone choose it.

Why in the WORLD would you think we would choose to lose almost everything in our lives to transition ???

We did not choose to be born with the brain of one sex and the body of the other sex. And we did not CHOOSE to transition. At a certain point, the suppression of our true selves simply becomes impossible.

I think the hardest thing for gays to accept is that transgendered people usually aren't gay. When I was younger I hung out with gender-queers (people in the "queer" sub-community of the gay community) like a lot of my female friends. What was always off putting was how ignorant (actually I'd have to say stupid) gay men can be. It seems many see the world only in terms of themselves and their gayness. This extends way beyond "t-folk" as I'm sure you know many gay guys that insists everything is gay despite all evidence to the contrary. As I got older, the one-sided view of everything being gay, and probably to a greater extent the alcoholism and immaturity of the gay scene was a big turn-off and I made a conscious decision to cut off most of my gay friends and stop going to gay parties, like most my female friends who realized that you're always just going to be another faghag to most of the gay community.

What I ultimately discovered was that I had really nothing in common with gay people. I've had bi experiences but I wasn't lesbian (not that many lesbians enjoy gay male immaturity either), and most gay men made no effort to understand who I was and were often incredibly insulting. The terms "trannie" used by this website is the equivalent of me calling you "faggot", and when I turned the offense back at most gays they became intensely offended. Gee, I wonder why.

I no longer support gay events and have only one close gay friend. Most of my friends are straight (or bi). They accept me as I am and don't seem to need to add little disclaimers like the term "Miss" in front of my name. I realize this is something to the gay community, but I'm not your Black nanny maid and I have a normal name that doesn't begin with a derogatory prefix. Again, when I returned the insult and called them "Faggot" before their name, each and everyone was so offended as to cut me off first. Ha!

Personally, I feel gays are some of the worst people to claim to represent T-folk, and in my experience are often the least understanding of women in general. I never identified as gay or lesbian and I still don't. Gays and lesbians don't know the unique laws that face transgendered people, and gays will never face the forced-sterilization or legalized psychiatric apartheid that we are expected to submit to. I'm all for gay rights, but I have very little faith that the gay community understands my legal needs or even acknowledges their own bigotry against us. A national gay writer tried to explain to me that we are ALL gay, and that was proof enough that he didn't understand the issue at all. In my patriotic days I was offered a position to write for a queer magazine that was supposed to cover "all the bases", but I quit when the lesbian editor kept asking me to write about transgender murder victims instead of all the positive examples I suggested. Someone else can be the sad lynching victim of the gay world. There's no advantage to being the misrepresented minority of a misunderstanding minority.

Probably many transgendered people look to the gay community for understanding and friendship (like so many faghags and fat girls before us) but then move on when the support just isn't returned. I run my own business, I'm in a great relationship (5+ years strong), and I have a healthy attitude about my body and the way I was formed. I DON'T see it as a "mistake" or an "error", and I don't feel anymore "trapped by my body" than any other woman. I have a normal (for a heterosexual) sexlife. I don't see a "therapist" and I buy my hormones online -- not through some sceptical doctor that sees me as an AIDS risk (here in NYC the only sanctioned place to get hormone treatment is an AIDS clinic in the gay ghetto, where they charge $150 for a $50 shot). The best thing in life is to know yourself and be comfortable with your body. The worst thing is to be constantly treated like a 3rd class tragedy or embarrassing relation. I know I probably sound like a gay-hater, but really I'm not. I thought this site was funny and enjoyed the pink sparkles, but I had to leave this comment when you used the term "trannie". You certainly don't represent me.