Sometimes I feel that I only ever write about the bad things – particularly the violence – inflicted on trans people and I wonder if it’s just me. Surely there are good things happening to my trans siblings too, that I could write about, to even things up, to shine a light in the gloom?
And then I think about events like the Transgender Day of Remembrance (which affected me quite profoundly on a lot of levels)… and I follow the Robyn Browne murder trial, wherein the victim is relentlessly and deliberately misgendered by the prosecution, the defence and the press alike (twelve years after her death and Planet Cis still can’t get the pronouns right?)… and I read about the recent spate of attacks on trans people in Honduras (five deaths in two months)… and all the other, horrible things – and these are all events that I’ve written about in the first two weeks of this year (and it’s still only January 15) – and I begin to think that maybe it isn’t just me.
And as distressing and upsetting as it is to hear about these kinds of trans news items, it’s also frustrating to feel so helpless, to feel that there seems so little I can do in practical terms to help end this undeclared war on my trans siblings. Realistically, it seems that all I have is this blog, this online digital smallholding, where I can at least stand on a virtual soapbox and rail (in futility) against this brutal and uncaring world.
Sometimes it feels all I can do is bear witness, and that doesn’t seem anywhere near enough of a contribution.
/end rant mode
bird of paradox 
January 15, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Hey, don’t beat up on yourself so much. Things really are getting better, think back 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Where were we then ? Where even was the LG community 25 years ? Remember Section 28 ? We were buried far deeper and as they’ve risen and beocme accepted, we have risen too. Heck we have legal rights to our name and gender now.
Things are bad now, but they were so much worse. And things will get better, it takes time. There will be no more Tebbits or Widdecombes in public office when they die off. We cannot be complacent, but we should be hopeful.
January 18, 2009 at 9:12 pm
i think part of the problem is that many of us obtain our blog posts based off of news reports. i have an rss news feed that searches for “transgender” and “transsexual”, and most of the news reports are either murders, religious outrage, or t.v./movie reviews. if it isn’t sensational, the mainstream media doesn’t want anything to do with it. and really, is my recent promotion and raise at work something that news readers really care about?