Privilege

There are all types of privilege the two biggies are white and male privilege and for us it is the privilege of blending to the gender of our gender identity.

On Sunday I went out to get a sandwich at a shop in Truro...

Owner: You come up here for Fantasia Fair?
Me: Um... yes.
Owner: You look really good.
Me: Um... thank you.

That is the lack of the privilege to integrate into society, I joke sometimes that if you can’t tell that I’m trans then you need glasses and a hearing aid.

Transgender Women Explain What It's Like When They Don't 'Look Trans'
When women don't visibly scan as transgender, it can feel affirming, dangerous, and totally unremarkable, all at once.
Vice
By Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard
July 25 2019

When I was 10 years old, I was a boy that looked like a girl. I had thick chestnut hair down to where my boobs should’ve budded and a dainty voice as yet untouched by testosterone.
[…]
Thirteen years later, my boobs have budded—courtesy of modern medicine—but my voice has also dropped like a brick. I can now pass, at least, if I'm quiet. When I ride the A train in the morning as all the Wall Street stallions pile in, coyly biting off my split ends and minding my own business, I’m cis...until a source or editor calls me, and I frantically pick up before the train leaves the platform: “Hi, hello—I’ll call you back in five.” My voice’s deep vibrations hang in the air. Eyes turn to me, guys’ eyebrows raise, and girls breathe a sigh of relief that at least the prettiest girl in this car is a tranny.

Every day people have privilege…

A thin women has privilege over a plus size women.

 A young person has privilege over an elderly person.

A person with mobility has privilege over a person with a disability.

A right handed person has privilege over a lefty.

We are being judged every day.

Passing can mean the difference between having access to resources, rights, and respect—or not. Working at a national advocacy organization, Branstetter has seen firsthand how this can play out. "One of our staff members was in a meeting with a sitting member of Congress,” she said. “They told the staff member that 'they're not worried about you, because you look like a woman.'”

But passing has it own risks,

What some guys see as hot about trans women can also be their grounds for violence. Some men realize they're attracted to someone who looks like a girl, but challenges their notions of what a girl is, so they panic. "Trans panic," in fact, was the defense mounted in the 2002 murder case of Gwen Arujo, a 17-year-old Latina trans girl from California [Note: Connecticut banned trans/gay panic defense this year]. She had been sexually involved with four men at a party who forced her to undress. When they learned she had a penis, they tortured and murdered her.

To reduce the conviction from murder to manslaughter, the defense argued that the “crime [was] one committed in the ‘heat of the moment.’” Like the “gay panic” defense innovated in 1960s courtrooms and most famously used in the Matthew Shepard murder trial, trans panic holds that discovering “withheld” information about the victim’s “true sex” reasonably “prompts the ostensible ‘panic’ that leads to violence.”

Men have such a fragile egos and they fear being labeled “gay” by their friends “The men felt emasculated because they sexually harassed what they [no longer] thought was a woman. They broke my jaw.”

I knew a trans woman who was able to “pass” and she is a project manager for an international engineer firm; before she transitioned in meeting “his” was law in meetings. After she transitioned she was asked to get the coffee for the meeting and if she said something during the meeting she was ignored and when a man said the same thing everyone thought it was a good idea.

I know a couple of trans women who said it was like she had a lobotomy and a trans man told me that all of sudden “he” was an expert on cars. One time early in my transition I was at Home Depot looking for a cheap voltmeter and the sales clerk came up to help me. He told me that “it was very dangerous and that I should hire an electrician” I told him that I was an electrical engineer and I built controls systems for power plants.

Vera Blossom, a Filipinx trans and nonbinary woman from Las Vegas, passes as a cis woman. The treatment she experienced before and after transition makes clear for her how racial and gender passing are intertwined. Blossom said she was previously “perceived as an Asian man, which was one of the least desirable categories of men. She wore “four-inch platforms, overall booty shorts, and purple hair, and no one would point," she said. "I was trying to be seen. No matter what I did, no one would look at me.”

A black trans man told me that “she” never was stopped and asked what she was doing in a “white” neighborhood, now “he” is being stopped all the time and he now always carries his driver license.

There are all types of disempowerment and sometimes they stack up against us… if you are trans and black and you do not “pass” you are going to face much more discrimination and harassment than a black trans women who “passes.”