This article was taken from Stopping The Hate, the excellent website ran by Meghan Chevalier about transgender rights and thoughts. Please click the link on our blogroll or go to Stopping The Hate where Kelly runs a regular column.
My Wish – by Kelly Shore
Stop Oppression. We can do it if we just be ourselves with out word slinging and violence. Why is it we transpeople feel we need to talk back to a group of guys that clocked us in public? Why do we need to escalate it so it’s another transsexuals death in vain? A beautiful individual working her/his way down the path of peace within her/his self. The peace they will never be allowed over an escalated argument or dating a man or woman under false pretenses. I’ll go more into this topic later.
It’s a minute out of our day that we were name called, but we have 23:59 to keep on our path and the rest of our lives. I say let’s bury our pride and worry about ourselves and safety first. Too many transsexuals deaths come from escalating the issue of hate. We think standing up and yelling back at the person/persons emotionally bruising us is going to make them change their mind or change what was said that made us so mad. I can tell you it won’t. I have always believed you can always catch more bees with honey. When we decide to take part in the word slinging it escalates the hate more and gives them the catalyst to make it easier to physically harm us. Who knows if that day it will be a beating or death. Why play with fire people?
I don’t get why we give these people filled with hate so much power over our lives? We should worry more about what we think of ourselves and what our loved ones think, before instigating a mob of haters. So they called us a fag, a man, a woman, a dyke, a pervert, or whatever lame attempt they can throw at us let them have it. In the end we know who we are and what path we are on. Let him have his view, if thats what it takes to keep us safe for another day. We still have our view, he hasn’t taken it from us. The media hasn’t stripped us of who we are, like they’ve done to so many of us. Hold dear to things in our life we value and love. Remember that tomorrow we most likely won’t even remember the incident the day before. This keeps us safe and gives us the time we need to achieve our genders we need to be viewed as, live as, and love as. Escalating hate in an instant we can have this ripped away from us. Remember time is precious, life is precious, and lying on a morgue table still pre-operative is not a wish I have for myself. My wish is to get these men and women that have beat us and murdered us not to have the option of a slap on the wrist with a thing called an insanity plea. That judicial systems finally start seeing these crimes as hate crimes. We need to stop giving these people the angle they need to be set free for our deaths.
Lastly with ladies and gentleman that go around tricking men and women on dates. I beg you to think of your actions before you keep practicing this habit. I realize you need to be treated as your gender, and maybe you think in your head you can’t be treated solely as that gender if they know. I assure you this isn’t true! Let’s remember our dead. Let’s remember the beautiful teen Gwen Araujo who played with fire and in the end was burned. No she did not deserve this, she was a teen girl wanting to do what every teen girl does her age. It would be great that we were blessed in that way, but we as transwomen have limitations we need to understand this and embrace this. To protect ourselves. To stop our murders. Let’s stop giving these people of hate an excuse to dismiss who we are so easily by killing us. I am sure I’ll get many debaters on this, saying this is cowardly, but dear it’s smart. Why throw away your life so easily? Why do you feel the need to give these people who you only knew for that instance so much power on who we are? This issue goes on a lot with transmen also tricking women, violence is less in these instances, but please remember Brandon Teena, another young transperson wanting to be viewed as what he was, a man. He wanted to fall in love like everyone does, but loving under false pretenses under any admission will never work out. There are those rare and lucky cases where tricking did turn out good for the transmen and women, but don’t base these rare chances on fact or your fate.
Let’s talk about what we should do. Let’s ignore the people that don’t understand us on the streets, and put our anger towards getting our voices heard politically, by openminded supporters, and by each other. Let’s stop hating on one another and focus this energy on getting transwomen and men jobs, opportunities, and equal rights. Let’s try to figure out a plan to make sex work less of a stigma of what transsexuals are and do. Let transwomen and men that have the means open businesses and hire other transpeople. Many are doing this now, let’s stick to doing this. Let’s work on helping our weak and making them strong, instead of focusing on the people that would rather see us dead. Let’s donate money to activist groups that are fighting for our rights in Washington, in our counties, and in our cities. My wish is to become a more unified, caring, and helping community rather than a community that reads one another, because one girl is less transitioned than the next. My wish is the lover of transwomen and men stand with us to battle discrimination and oppression. My wish is to see less transsexuals having money for sex and more mainstream jobs, even if it’s just stripping. My wish is to bring our sisterhood and brotherhood together instead of transmen being on one side and transwomen on the other. Let’s stop oppression now. Let’s use our voices to uplift, instead of defending all the time. Most of all let’s stop our murders, that’s my wish.
XoXo
Kelly
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