longer.blue

Note: this post contains various slurs, with the intention of debunking both the usage and the origin of same. Slurs aimed at trans women. I wrote this many many years ago on Facebook and it's still mostly pertinent today. TRANNIES AND SHEMALES AND WORDS, OH MY! Tranny. Shemale. Ladyboy. Chix-with-dix. Terms a lot of people have heard regarding transgender people. And guess where most of them come from? Porn. This particular piece isn’t going to be specifically about porn, though I may do one later on. This is going to be about the terms used in porn and how they’ve emigrated to the general populace. When someone hears ‘transgender’ or ‘transexual’, far too often, they think of the words above. Of trans sex workers. Hookers. Prostitutes. And they’re not completely to blame. The media far too often portrays us as such. Note that I am not criticizing SW. I've been a part-time SW, for years. When it’s not portraying Cindy-Used-To-Be-George as a hooker, almost always it’s a tragic end (Boys Don’t Cry, A Soldier’s Girl) or a drag queen (Bird Cage, Crying Game). If all you had to go on was Hollywood’s portrayal of us, you’d think it was glitter parties and high heel races every day to Starbucks, after which we service our johns until wee hours of the morning. Where are the other people who are trans? We do exist, you know. Even politicians. There’s Dana Beyer, state representative of Maryland. There’s Amanda Simpson, Obama appointee that was a technical adviser and Assistant Secretary in the Department of Defense. There’s Joanne Conte, councilwoman of Colorado. There’s Kim Coco Iwamoto of Hawaii. There’s Victoria Kolakowski (judge) in New York. There’s Jessica Orsini of Missouri (she’s pagan, too, gasp!) Oh, wait. None of those people lived in San Francisco. You know, the ShemaleCapitalOfTheWorld where all trans people are required by law to move once they get their trans union cards. None of those people were ladyboys, hookers, shemales. What? We can’t have our bigoted preconceptions and our porn, too? Oh, and there are female-to-male trans public people, also. Like Loren Rex Cameron, photographer, Balian Bushbaum, Olympic athlete and Ian Harvie, standup comedian. Wait, what? There are female-to-male transgender individuals? But YOUR porn doesn’t have them! Right? Right? The terms are used in a derogatory manner, just like whore, cunt, slut, hooker, etc and are generally used in that same vein. Hollywood has a long history of treating the LGBT community like shit in its scripts, while happily using them as actors, producers, screenwriters, or crew members. Anything is fine as long as the movie/tv show doesn’t portray us as ‘normal’, as ‘part of America’ to Joe SixPack and Josephine Muffintop. But we ARE part of America. We are doctors, lawyers, cops, judges, teachers, singers, entertainers, photographers, construction workers, painters, welders, tech gurus, even writers like yours truly! We’re also mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, even grandparents, in my case, as well as that of many others. What we are not, is porn terms. What we are not, is something you heard on a porn video or saw on a porn title. What we are not, is a group of people that is easily categorized, diminished, marginalized by a group of terms made up out of imaginary whole cloth by the porn industry. So next time you use a term like “shemale”, try to think of the impact. And here’s my final thought: where did YOU hear the term from?