Issue Number 999 | Don't Tick Off Trans | Advocate.com Don't Tick Off Trans  |  | Advocate.com

||  Guest Column  ||
Don't Tick Off Trans
Transgressive questions likely to be a transgender conversation-ender.
By Andrea James
From The Advocate  December 18, 2007
Don't Tick Off Trans

Let’s say you’re at work, a social setting, or political event, and a real live transgender person says “Hi!” You don’t want to say anything wrong since you recall the tedious questions and responses you’ve endured about your sexuality, but you want to appear interested and engaged. Thankfully, there’s etiquette for talking to trans people. Here’s a look at questions to avoid. Trans people will thank you for it.

What’s the T doing in LGBT? You probably get the L and the G from extensive personal experience. You might even get the B (we’ll save that for another article). But that pesky T can be a real mystery. LGBT people (in fact, all people) have a gender identity and expression. That’s how many LGBT people are oppressed.

Our society rewards partnering with the “opposite” gender and is organized around a procreative ideology: Male and female are the two types, and they make babies. Same-sex partnering violates the first rule of gender identity and expression, which is so deeply ingrained and enforced that a violation of it is sometimes described as “unnatural.”

Here’s the real problem. We aren’t oppressed just because we’re queer but often because we look and act queer. That’s gender identity and expression. And it’s often imposed from inside our own community. Some LGBT personal ads demand only “straight-acting” applicants need apply. The community often rewards those who pass as members of the majority culture.

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