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Please stop saying "trans women are among the least privileged in our society".
It's really not a very good way of understanding either the issues trans women face, nor is it at all helpful in terms of putting them in context with other social issues.
It's really not a very good way of understanding either the issues trans women face, nor is it at all helpful in terms of putting them in context with other social issues.
It's not even intersectionality (you should go read black feminists more until you understand what that term means before you use it again!!)
I don't see trans women using the term this way, typically. I'm sure it happens, obviously, but mostly it seems to be allies with a really poor set of political concepts, mostly driven by a sense of charity for the poor downtrodden trans women.
It helps not having to think much about what we need beyond some vague and generalised pity which will only serve to get more clout for the more privileged among us, help argue for hate crime laws that will be used to prosecute and demonise the most vulnerable among us.
1 in 3 employers in the UK won't hire a trans person *by their own admission*. 1/4 trans people in the UK as surveyed by Stonewall have experienced homelessness at some point, typically aggravated by family rejection.
Trans people face high rates of domestic abuse and very low rates of successfully accessing domestic violence resources. Trans people face difficulties both in access to transition related healthcare, but furthermore in mundane healthcare leading to widespread "trans broken..
..leg syndrome" where stigma and fear among medical professionals mean that our ability to get ordinary things dealt with is impaired.
Transition related psychiatric healthcare has been described by bioethicists as "dehumanising and unjustified".
Transition related psychiatric healthcare has been described by bioethicists as "dehumanising and unjustified".
Trans people are at much higher than average rates of experiencing mental health difficulties and as such are more likely to suffer detention in the psychiatric system.
Trans people routinely struggle with respect to our access to public spaces as well as traveling around. This is particularly aggravated for people who have never been in a position to buy a passport with amended documentation but any of us may be challenged as traveling on..
..false documents by someone who decides we have the wrong gender marker.
Domestically this sort of challenge comes in the form of trans people struggling to stay out for extended lengths of time in some cases as a result of fears of being assaulted in toilets.
Domestically this sort of challenge comes in the form of trans people struggling to stay out for extended lengths of time in some cases as a result of fears of being assaulted in toilets.
While cis people frequently tell us to just use "the right one" whatever that is many of us have experienced harassment and abuse in *BOTH* and it can be a gamble from one day to the next which one is the safer bet.
This makes participating in public life difficult for many trans people, and has been linked to a massively high right of urinary tract infections among trans men in America, as well as anecdotally reported "trans bladder" issues discussed pretty widely in the community.
Most trans people face some sort of transphobic violence at some point, but black trans women form a particularly vulnerable and politically under-represented portion of our community - one which around the world is most likely to be subject to murder.
Onto more abstract struggles: trans women are vilified *as trans women* and in fact anything that looks *like* trans women is vilified with us as one of the comparisons of choice. We are stereotyped as hypersexual, sexually available and existing..
.. to play out roles serving men's porn scenarios, ugly, unlovable monstrous psychopaths, predatory, demanding, deceptive, aggressive and disposable. These stereotypes pervade all cis works about us from Hollywood to psychiatric literature on trans personality types.
In most places where we don't already have strong networks of allies to defend our presence we are treated as an invasive species that must be stamped out.
Where we have managed these, instead we are agents of "institutional capture", to be attacked by any means necessary.
Where we have managed these, instead we are agents of "institutional capture", to be attacked by any means necessary.
That's a long enough list now. All of those are practical components of a system of oppression you can think about, but other forms of oppression exist and the intersection of these is often not described adequately by just layering these components on top of each other.
Privilege isn't linear. It's a matrix of mutually interacting components of a power system operating as designed to maximise the power of the already powerful.
