Having Coffee with the Peeps

If you recall, my sit down with the Dayton/Cincinnati Trans Ohio community meeting was this last Tuesday and I wrote a brief post about it here in Cyrsti's Condo.

Since that time of course, I have come up with a few more observations.  First, I was disappointed in the transgender turn out.  In an organization called Trans, in a group of 14-16 peeps, there were only three in the room who identified as trans. From that point on, the meeting became one of educating everyone else about us and our concerns. Absolutely no problem.

The tough part was explaining why we transgender women belonged there anyhow. Trans Ohio is largely a trans male based organization but I have no problem with that either.  The third trans person in the room was a trans guy and the host.  Bottom line was, once again, I found myself  aligning with the other trans women and speaking for a silent group.  Fortunately, neither of us was shy.

As I said before, we introduced transgender employment, health care and over all visibility into the conversation. The first two, are such huge issues, I can't come even close to solving them -except to talk.  As far as visibility went, the turn out proved we are still an invisible "T".  A gay guy in the room went out of his way to explain why using the Tranny word was as OK.  He had it all worked out.  Since gay guys can call themselves fags then they can call themselves trannies as well as black's can use the "N" word with each other.  What he still didn't understand was as long as Tranny can be mistaken for an abbreviation for transgender or transsexual, it's not right  and is a slur.

I was satisfied though, by the end of the meeting, I walked out with the feeling I had helped to educate the gays and lesbians in the room who we really were.  An example was the young lesbian representative from a prominent GL organization in Cincinnati  who had no idea of HRT was or the succession of transition. I make the mistake of assuming they know as much about us, as we know about them.

The best I could do from there- at the end of the meeting I passed out my business cards and volunteered to attend their meetings too.  Every educated person helps!

Finally, the building the meeting was held in a GBLT Center and the sign on the restroom door was "Anyone"!