I feel that the transgender community has come a long way in drawing attention to their conditions, which are more serious than most people thought, and I think that their leadership has been nothing short of heroic in addressing this.
I think that the transgender community has been very successful at forming a strong and healthy alliance between their own community and the psychiatric profession, successfully winning their support in fostering safe and rightly guided transition. This alliance confirms my trust in most members of that occupation to be dedicated first and foremost to the pursuit of healing, and it has elevated that occupation in my esteem.
I know that transgender people can be any kinds of people, even...ironically...partly transphobic. I have met transgender people that were hateful toward non-transitioned transgender people, even though they had not really started transition, themselves, using the argument that someone that was anatomically one gender was somehow contemptible to have a desire to be seen as the opposite gender. I have known transgender people that were haughty and morally self-righteous, including toward zoophiles. I have also known transgender people that have been staunch friends and allies, not only to me personally but toward the zooey community, and I have been glad to listen to their stories of battling against prejudice and often violence in their day-to-day lives.
However, I do appreciate the fact that you have started this discussion, and I am glad to participate in it.
You ought to know that, just as there are many different kinds of people in the transgender community, there are also many different kinds of people in the zooey community. We have good people, bad people, and also many zoos that come from very conservative backgrounds. They did not choose to be zooey, and many of them would not have been if they had had any say in it. They can be just as transphobic as any of their relatives, unfortunately, and the more enlightened members of the zooey community are very hard-pressed to try to educate them on better manners. They are not our children, though, and they do not really answer to us. Many of them will ultimately have to learn certain difficult lessons on their own. I have run into members of the transgender community that hated zoophiles because they had known too many zoophiles that were deeply misogynistic and transphobic. It was not in my power to change their minds. Our enemies had been multiplied, and there was nothing that I could do about it.
I identify as a member of the broader transgender community. You could call me a "demi-man" if you like. That is the word that people are using, these days, to refer to the feelings that I describe. I think that the term "non-binary" just leads to people having an exaggerated idea of what that actually means about me. However, that only makes me a member of the transgender community in the broadest possible sense, and not every transgender person recognizes the broader transgender community as really being relevant. I do feel a strong sense of solidarity with transgender people, though. I come from a painfully heteronormative background, and being pressured to be something I was not just made me feel like an outsider and deeply alone. Ironically, I don't think that I ever would have noticed if I had come from a more progressive background. If I had grown up in a culture where many different kinds of people could have been regarded as "boys," then I would just have never thought about my gender very much at all.
I think that the need to discuss gender is at least partly a consequence of the fact that our culture has complicated all of the blessings of nature. It is a complicated discussion because of the fact that we have made it complicated. The process of unraveling a tangle is complicated because the tangle itself is complicated, and it was not simple just because it was yanked taut. It was really more complicated then. It is just more apparent how bad the tangle is when it is being unraveled. In the end, we will be better off when the work of unraveling it has been finished. When we are more capable of interacting peacefully with another person that attempts to be peaceful toward ourselves, then we will recognize more fully that it was worthwhile to put ourselves to the trouble.
