The Pecking Order…

Have you ever heard someone say that you are not really transsexual unless you have surgery? They think that only they are true transsexuals everyone else are only “transvestites” and they also refuse to use the name “crossdresser.”

Back in March there was an article about it,

Lateral Hostility and the Transgender Woman
Info Barrel
By m_spicer
March 1, 2013

Are you a transgender women who has experienced hostility from the transgender community? I would dare to say that a lot of transgender women have been the victim of bullying and pigeonholing into the brutally enforced “hierarchy” of transgender women through cyber-bullying, ostrification and deadly gossip. I use the word deadly because I believe that this behaviour is directly related to the skyrocketing transgender suicide rate. We don't we just add to the suffering and feeling of isolation that most of us feel. Some of us take their own lives; could this hostility among trans women be a factor? Perhaps something to think about the next time someone is being persecuted by our very own. We are doing it too ourselves people! It has to stop if we are going to get anywhere in society as a group of oppressed people. I asked my doctor about this phenomenon and he simply relied “it's called lateral violence”; he continued “when a group of people are singled out and ridiculed in society and have no place to put the anger and frustration they feel so they put it on the closest people to them who are on the same social rung as themselves".

We see lateral hostility in almost all oppressed groups; it is not unique to the trans-community*. In gay and lesbian communities we see it; those who can assimilate into the general population look down on those who display stereotypical gay and lesbian characteristics. People in oppressed community try to separate themselves from the community or from the more identifiable members of the community.

The article goes on to say,

There are some key characteristics of lateral hostility that you can watch out for:

• We repeat our oppression by oppressing those around us. Often being harsher on ourselves than our oppressors ever were.
• We intensely focus on the negative in another person or group. Pieces of information about you can be twisted into some negative, fear based, conclusions. Once you have been labelled “bad”, “wrong” or even better “your actually trans-phobic!” then the attack can begin.
• Collective cooperation is a key element in lateral violence. A number of transgender people will work together to attack and undermine another person or group.

The reason why I have gone to monitoring the comments on my blog is not because derogatory comments from non-trans individuals but because of derogatory comments from members of the trans-community.


When I was first coming out and finding myself, I was at a First Event conference and a trans-woman sat down next to me and she asked me if I was transsexual and when I said no, she said, oh and looked at me and got up and left. I know a lot of post-op trans-women who do not want to be associated with non-transsexuals and I know a lot of crossdressers who do not want to be around transsexuals.

But stop and think; when the person is attacking you with a baseball bat are they asking themselves is that a crossdresser or transsexual? They just see us as “A man in a dress,” they don’t think about the pecking order, it is only us within the community who tries to distinguish a trans-pyramid. 

*Community: in this case I use the word in a sociological sense, where a group of people have cultural, religious, ethnic, or other characteristics in common. You do not need to feel a member of the community, you are part of the community because you share a characteristics in common, we are all trans.