Dating

This is one topic that many trans people either loves it or hates it. Let’s face it dating is hard when your trans, there are plenty of “tranny chasers” who just want to sex with a trans person and many of them don’t want to date post-op trans women. Many trans women who don’t integrate into society that well have a very hard time finding a mate.

So now there is a web series about relationships “Her Story,”

Q&A 'Her Story' creators Jen Richards and Laura Zak highlight dating while transgender
LA Times
By Tre'vell Anderson
January 19, 2016

“Right now we're in the Sidney Poitier phase of trans representation, where the few that we have have to be so unassailable so that we can open doors,” she said in an interview with The Times last year. “But what's next is we need our hot messes, our rebels, our sexpots and drama queens. We need representation across the board.”

In an effort to vary such representation, Richards, who is transgender and known for being on “I am Cait,” teamed up with Laura Zak to pen the script for a Web series called "Her Story.” The series of six 10-minute episodes, available online for free Tuesday after a successful crowd-funding campaign, follows the lives of two trans women (played by Richards and Angelica Ross, who is also trans) and a queer woman (played by Zak) as they navigate the intersections of desire and identity.

Ahead of the release of the drama, Richards and Zak, along with producer Katherine Fisher, sat down with The Times to discuss creating “Her Story” and pulling together a team of primarily trans and queer women to get the job done.

They go on with the Q&A and one question was,

One of the topics I really liked was the line about the “tacit acceptance” of trans people by the broader LGBT community and how we can be complicit in transphobia. With such complex topics, was it difficult putting them into the script?

Zak: I don't think it was difficult to tackle that particular theme because that was one of the obstacles built in for [my character] Allie, and grappling with this attraction she was feeling. She was looking at her own [surroundings], of what she believed was a progressive queer community of friends, and seeing there were no trans people. And then learning through her friends’ reaction to her new connection with this person, the transphobia within the queer community. I think a lot of people outside of the queer community don’t realize how much division there is within the LGBTQ world. For that part, the theme organically came out the story.

Richards: What that line refers to is something that was present from the very genesis. A lot of people in the queer community, because they're queer, see themselves as particularly progressive and therefore are cut off from some of these other issues. But their groups are often entirely white, middle class, college educated and cis. They have an intellectual understanding of a lot of these issues without any direct experience.

One of the issues that it looks like they tackled was when to tell.

There is no firm answer about when you should tell a prospective partner that you’re trans. If you tell them up front then you probably not make it to the first date. Other trans women say they tell a prospective partner start to get romantically involved, while others say they don’t tell them at all.

All paths can lead to violence, especially if you are dating men. They might be okay with dating a trans woman but their friends might put pressure on them if they realize that he is dating a trans woman.