Carolynn wrote:What about the situation made the writer have to say anything about "He" and "His" in the opening sentences and a few times later? She has fallen into the same trap that other writers do that just don't get it. It is not getting a new piece of a surgeons art work on your body that makes you a woman, or a man for that matter. It's who you are.
Carolynn, as much as the women in my support group remind me of this--that they've
always been women, it's a concept that I can only wrap my head around intellectually. Even though I share many things in common with transitioned women, I don't share this 'gut' feeling.
I may go on to transition, and I still may not end up feeling that I've always been a girl. My own TG girlfriend feels she's always been a girl. I know what that must feel like from my own limited experience with it, but it's still not real to me in the way it is to her.
So it is not surprising to me that the general public might have a hard time understanding this part of transgender. The use of 'he' in this article would have made sense, if the writer had used the name John at the very beginning of the article, when he was introducing us to 'the person who was John at that time.' The writer was trying to show something about the person who was involved in the transition. Like it or not, there's drama when a person goes from one gender to the other, and people reading articles like this want to know "who was she before?"
In an article, I sometimes want to know this, too. In person, meeting TG women, I have little interest in "who they were," and their stories usually don't come out until I've known them a long time. But this comes from knowing many TG women. It also comes from having things in common with them in the here/now, so we don't have to talk about the past to have a good conversation.
A majority of the population don't know any of us. They are very curious when they come in contact with any information about this. I can remember my own curiousity about it; being a teenage crossdresser did not educate me about transgender women, especially not pre-Internet. I was as much in the dark as anyone else, when it came to that subject.
So I can see why you might grow tired of the misunderstandings, but you've lived the knowledge--you know it as a real experience that's always been there. You can explain it to people, but you can't cause them to feel it. The acceptance of concepts like this just has to grow over time.
I left a couple myself, in order to help straighten things out. Man, have we got a long way to go! 