Blog # 11

To be honest, I never quite understood what would drive someone to feel that they need to drastically change their bodies from male to female or vice versa. That is a stereotype that I needed to overcome. In Beautiful Daughters, the thing that stuck out most to me is that to consider yourself a trans-gender you do not need to change your body to the extreme preconceived notions that I had. I always thought that trans-gender people known what it was like to be or feel like both sexes but that is completely false. One of the women in Beautiful Daughters made it very clear by saying that I never knew who it felt to be a man that is why I wanted to be a woman. It made sense after she said that.
In the Trans Woman Manifesto, I originally thought that trans-gender people were supported by feminist groups and the gay community, but it appears this is untrue in most cases because even defectors of the gender binary that do not have surgeries or the like still do not fully accept trans-gender people. I had never even heard of cissexism until reading this article. I completely agree that transphobia is a result of the "extraordinary amount of pressure on individuals to conform to all of the expectations, restrictions, assumptions, and privileges associated with the sex they are assigned at birth" (Serano 442).
We have made it clear through this course that there is no such thing as a "real" gender. It saddens me to know that the oppression of trans-gender people is a result of our gender experiences and our expectations of ours gender identities. Trans-misogyny, in my opinion, is a problem that needs to be dealt with by the trans-gender and the feminist community because the core value that they both fight against is the idea that masculinity is superior and/ or in opposition to femininity.
Homosexuality has become more tolerate in recent years but trans-gender people still do not have the ability to push new forms of media that promotes them in a positive light. I am sure that it was a huge deal for the FX network show Niptuck to have a trans-woman on the show as a love interest of a heterosexual plastic surgeon (She is a knock out too). However in the show, the surgeon becomes aware of this and is disgusted with himself which is negative for the trans-gender community.