Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don’t

In a relationship when do we tell a person about our history or do we even tell the other person?

No matter what we do we will be criticized and it could be fatal to us. We have been murder for just sitting a bar; some guy has the hots for us and when he finds out that we are trans he beats the crap out of us or kills us. So what do we do?

There is an article in the Huffington Post Gay Voices by Brynn Tannehill about this dilemma. In the article she says,

Not only are our bodies not our own, neither are the history of your genitals or your genetics. For whatever reason, this seems to only apply to transgender people.

Is there societal acceptance of someone who beats a woman when he finds out she's a quarter Jewish? Are men required to tell if they're circumcised? Women have to announce if they're had a clitoral hood piercing? Is it self-defense if you murder your boyfriend because you found out he's not a gold star gay like you? How about throwing your girlfriend off a balcony when you find out she identified as bisexual before she identified as a lesbian?

From Gwen Araujo, to Brandon Teena, to Angie Zapata, to Cemia Dove, our lack of ownership of our bodies has meant being forcibly stripped, groped, raped, strangled, stabbed burned, and bludgeoned. It means that transgender panic defenses live on in court, and sometimes even win. After Brandon McInerney shot Larry King twice in the back of the head in the middle of a crowded classroom, the jury deadlocked on the case. Some even sympathized with the murderer. "[Brandon] was just solving a problem," one juror said.

As she pointed out in the article, all it takes is one bigot on the jury and the murder walks free.