The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #145436   Message #3364680
Posted By: Amos
17-Jun-12 - 03:58 PM
Thread Name: BS: About This Whole Transgender Thing....
Subject: RE: BS: About This Whole Transgender Thing....
I hope that someday someone who suffers from the conviction they are on the wrong planet will be able, with perseverance and courage and some dough, be able to put matters right and end up on another planet. When this occurs, they will probably expect to be treated as though they were actually ON the planet they move to, not still on the old one.

A person who changes gender has to red-do the whole learning process of style, gesture, phrasing, and methods of moving that everybody goes through from the time they first learn to walk. They have to rebuild their whole armamentum of techniques for operating in the world. The trans-gender people I have known, of whom there are several, did not spring full-blown into their target identity. It took practice. So perhaps, Josephp, you could modulate your "no way, sorry" refusal into a willingness to treat them as learners.

In my experience, once they have spent some time practicing up, they get very good at it. For most of them the fact that they are speaking "female as a second gender" (or male) is hard to detect.