Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2015 23:46:41 GMT 8
Hi, Everybody!
I had a snowball thrown at me today. The lad who threw it meant it, too. He’d packed it tight to make it hurt. It fairly well exploded when it hit the railing beside me. I simply ignored it and went on my way, which is when I heard some cat-calling behind me.
A bit ironic, since a few days ago when I was on my way home, I was intending to go through the park beside the river. But as I was getting there, I saw four young lads doing nothing but throwing snowballs around. They were school age, so why they weren’t in school, I don’t know. They might have been OK, you never know. But I decided not to give them the opportunity and simply went around the park.
Today’s incident was particularly disappointing in that it occurred outside a school at which I myself did a course a few years back. It’s something of a mixed place. You’ll see mature adults there, along with kids just out of secondary school who haven’t made it to the university but want to do computer courses and the like. You’d hope that at a place like that all the students would be a bit more mature than to throw snowballs at people, but unfortunately today showed that that’s not the case. There are exceptions everywhere.
And what to do about it? How can you really complain about a snowball? Now we all know that an anti-trans snowball isn’t just a snowball. There’s more to it than that. But how to explain that to people? I could go to the principal of the school. He’s a good guy, a neighbour of mine who knows me well from the time I did a course there. But is it his job to tell grown lads not to harass transpeople? And if he did agree to tell them, which he might well do, would it do any good? What really can you do with young lads like that?
I’ve already related on this forum how good the people of this town have been to me. But that’s the people who know me personally. There have been several times when I got some harassment from young lads—verbal abuse, one time a volley of stones.
Some friends have advised me to avoid certain parts of town—and I do in fact avoid the secondary school. But as I explained to them, this town is so small that if you start avoiding places, you’ll soon have nowhere to go. The fact is that every time I’ve been harassed it’s been in the middle of town in broad daylight—and every time by a group of young lads when I’d got myself a bit isolated.
It’s another problem with this town. It’s a dead town. With the economic collapse some time back, this town died and it still hasn’t started recovering. Which means that there’s not just a lot of business going on here, not always a lot of people out and about even during business hours, so that it’s easy for somebody to catch you on your own with no one else around.
I keep asking myself, Why? Why are people like this? We can blame the young lads of course. With a lot of them, you simply can’t expect much at all. But as we all know—especially with the recent Leelah Alcorn case—it isn’t just young lads. There are depressing numbers of people in this world with tiny minds.
What is the real opposition to transgenderism? The group of lads who were throwing stones at me put it in a nutshell: as they were letting fly at me, one of them yelled out, “You woman, or man, or whatever it is you’re supposed to be!” And there it is, the perfect expression of the tiny mind, one that cannot fathom anything out of the ordinary.
Horrors! “A man” who wants to be a woman! Or “a woman” who wants to be a man! We can’t have that. Let’s throw stones at it. Such minds will harass anything. Such as the kids in a nearby town who so constantly harassed a certain man every day on his way to work that they literally reduced him to tears in the end—all because he was black. Tiny minds in idiotic young people depress without surprising you. It’s when you see the same thing in older people that you truly despair.
We often talk about the benefits of being transgender. For me this is perhaps the most important one: if you’re trans, you have to work pretty hard to be tiny-minded. There are some of us who manage, but by and large we don’t.
This world is full of possibilities, many of them very strange. Black holes, relativity, evolution? Harder to get any stranger and more marvellous than that. We transpeople are simply one more of this world’s strange and marvellous possibilities, and when we accept that it opens us up to all other sorts of possibilities. We have to be open-minded if we’re going to come to terms with ourselves, and so we become open to lots of other things.
“Horrors! ‘A man’ who wants to be a woman! Or ‘a woman’ who wants to be a man!” That simple statement is the essence of the opposition to transpeople. Simple, tiny minds that cannot even begin to glimpse possibilities greater than their own little existence. And perhaps the saddest thing of all is when otherwise intelligent people fall into this trap. They may be competent to explore other matters, but transgenderism proves to be a bridge too far for them, and they can say nothing about us but the usual ignorant rubbish we hear everywhere else.
It’s hard for me to express the contempt I feel for such sentiments. It’s the worst thing about being so heavily outnumbered: you pay such a high price for people who cannot see very far.
I had a snowball thrown at me today. The lad who threw it meant it, too. He’d packed it tight to make it hurt. It fairly well exploded when it hit the railing beside me. I simply ignored it and went on my way, which is when I heard some cat-calling behind me.
A bit ironic, since a few days ago when I was on my way home, I was intending to go through the park beside the river. But as I was getting there, I saw four young lads doing nothing but throwing snowballs around. They were school age, so why they weren’t in school, I don’t know. They might have been OK, you never know. But I decided not to give them the opportunity and simply went around the park.
Today’s incident was particularly disappointing in that it occurred outside a school at which I myself did a course a few years back. It’s something of a mixed place. You’ll see mature adults there, along with kids just out of secondary school who haven’t made it to the university but want to do computer courses and the like. You’d hope that at a place like that all the students would be a bit more mature than to throw snowballs at people, but unfortunately today showed that that’s not the case. There are exceptions everywhere.
And what to do about it? How can you really complain about a snowball? Now we all know that an anti-trans snowball isn’t just a snowball. There’s more to it than that. But how to explain that to people? I could go to the principal of the school. He’s a good guy, a neighbour of mine who knows me well from the time I did a course there. But is it his job to tell grown lads not to harass transpeople? And if he did agree to tell them, which he might well do, would it do any good? What really can you do with young lads like that?
I’ve already related on this forum how good the people of this town have been to me. But that’s the people who know me personally. There have been several times when I got some harassment from young lads—verbal abuse, one time a volley of stones.
Some friends have advised me to avoid certain parts of town—and I do in fact avoid the secondary school. But as I explained to them, this town is so small that if you start avoiding places, you’ll soon have nowhere to go. The fact is that every time I’ve been harassed it’s been in the middle of town in broad daylight—and every time by a group of young lads when I’d got myself a bit isolated.
It’s another problem with this town. It’s a dead town. With the economic collapse some time back, this town died and it still hasn’t started recovering. Which means that there’s not just a lot of business going on here, not always a lot of people out and about even during business hours, so that it’s easy for somebody to catch you on your own with no one else around.
I keep asking myself, Why? Why are people like this? We can blame the young lads of course. With a lot of them, you simply can’t expect much at all. But as we all know—especially with the recent Leelah Alcorn case—it isn’t just young lads. There are depressing numbers of people in this world with tiny minds.
What is the real opposition to transgenderism? The group of lads who were throwing stones at me put it in a nutshell: as they were letting fly at me, one of them yelled out, “You woman, or man, or whatever it is you’re supposed to be!” And there it is, the perfect expression of the tiny mind, one that cannot fathom anything out of the ordinary.
Horrors! “A man” who wants to be a woman! Or “a woman” who wants to be a man! We can’t have that. Let’s throw stones at it. Such minds will harass anything. Such as the kids in a nearby town who so constantly harassed a certain man every day on his way to work that they literally reduced him to tears in the end—all because he was black. Tiny minds in idiotic young people depress without surprising you. It’s when you see the same thing in older people that you truly despair.
We often talk about the benefits of being transgender. For me this is perhaps the most important one: if you’re trans, you have to work pretty hard to be tiny-minded. There are some of us who manage, but by and large we don’t.
This world is full of possibilities, many of them very strange. Black holes, relativity, evolution? Harder to get any stranger and more marvellous than that. We transpeople are simply one more of this world’s strange and marvellous possibilities, and when we accept that it opens us up to all other sorts of possibilities. We have to be open-minded if we’re going to come to terms with ourselves, and so we become open to lots of other things.
“Horrors! ‘A man’ who wants to be a woman! Or ‘a woman’ who wants to be a man!” That simple statement is the essence of the opposition to transpeople. Simple, tiny minds that cannot even begin to glimpse possibilities greater than their own little existence. And perhaps the saddest thing of all is when otherwise intelligent people fall into this trap. They may be competent to explore other matters, but transgenderism proves to be a bridge too far for them, and they can say nothing about us but the usual ignorant rubbish we hear everywhere else.
It’s hard for me to express the contempt I feel for such sentiments. It’s the worst thing about being so heavily outnumbered: you pay such a high price for people who cannot see very far.
