Journal BarbaraHudson's Journal: Proof that those who attack transsexuals are often repressed gay men.

The "repressed gay men hate transsexuals" has been proven in various court cases, but it's still a bit jarring to find it repeated in my face.

There's a guy who for several years made a habit of loudly insulting me in public. One day, he went too far - "Hey, are you like those shemales on Jerry Springer?" He was about 30 feet away when he shouted it. Pissed me right off, so I went up to him and said "You ever do that again and I'll call the cops and have you arrested for sexual harassment*. Do you really want to go around the rest of your life being on the sex offenders registry?"

He continued to talk against me behind my back. But at least not to my face.

One day I saw him walking along with a bicycle wheel, and asked him what he was doing. He said he was going to the garage to get a flat fixed, so I told him to wait and I'd fix it for free (our old man had taught me and my sisters to fix flats using nothing more than 3 tablespoons and a patch kit so he wouldn't have to over and over again).

It was after this that we ended up talking about the biological basis of transsexuality, and how transitioning to the other sex isn't a choice - it's what you realize you have to do when you have run out of choices to avoid the inevitable. How it's much better to live as who you are, and not what other people expect or demand you be, because you'll never please everyone anyway, and why should you? And how liberating it is.

So fast forward 5 years later, to last night. I'm walking my dogs (I babysat a Jack Russell last weekend and the woman was so amazed at how much calmer and happier he was that she asked me to adopt it) and he pulled up on his bike. He wanted to thank me for changing his life. What I had said had sunk in, and the next day he decided to tell his parents (and a few others) that he was pretty sure he was really gay, not straight. Later that very same day he went online and found a boyfriend, and they're still together.

So that cliché has a lot of the truth behind it. Repressed gay men do beat up on transsexual women, and them coming to terms with their sexual orientation makes the hate go away.

Please keep that in mind next time you see me getting slagged for being me - there's lots of truth in the conventional wisdom, and there are way too many repressed people out there looking for what they think is an easy target to make them feel superior, or at least distract them from their own issues, or turn their self-loathing against others..

I'll do my part by reminding them of what they're running away from :-)

* Yes, it's considered sexual harassment here - as well it should be. Any form of harassment based on sex qualifies. As one judge remarked, "if harassing someone because they used to be the other sex doesn't qualify as harassment based on sex, what does?" Transsexuals are a protected minority at both the provincial (for decades) and federal level (June 18th), unlike the USA.