Terminology - TG and TS ARE NOT THE SAME THING

[JulieK1980]

It matters because it limits confusion and bias. Many SOs wouldn't have the trouble with acceptance that they do if they knew about things like the transgender spectrum and that just because a guy dresses in women's clothes, it doesn't mean he is gay. This has been synonymous in our culture. It causes confusion for SOs and for anyone who is associated with the person who is coming out purely because of ignorance. Sorry, you can say it's apples and oranges...but, I think education on gender issues is extremely lacking and to say that we should just continue with the ignorance and say it's okay is just feeding into it. I hope not to see any of you posting threads about how you were misunderstood then, because it's just apples and oranges...right?

It's not about "not educating" Its about using the terminology as a way to divide us.

Ultimately I'm pretty sure we all want the same thing, for the world (and ourselves) to understand us, and accept us. The difference is more in how to go about it. While some wish to categorize us into different groups, I feel we need to take a bigger look at the big picture. If we had a better understanding of our commonalities, it would give us a better understanding of where we fit into the picture.

Educating people is extremely important IMHO, but when we dwell on the differences, and focus on specific little categories of people, we divide ourselves into our own class structure. I've seen numerous examples on this forum, and out in the real world, where someone will say, "there are too many whiny crossdressers" Or they don't understand, "they're just crossdressers"

Things like that sadden me, because it points out the seeming truth that I don't like to see, we are a disjointed group that will have severe difficulty coming together, which (I think) is necessary to advance our equality, and understanding as well as acceptance by the public.

I fully understand the medical necessity of trying to sub-categorize so as to understand our needs better, but while we focus on crossdressing differences and transexual differences, and develop our own little class system, we miss the obvious similarities between the groups.

It would be one thing, if as a whole we celebrated these differences between us all. As we would gain a HUGE insight into different peoples experiences. But we don't, we go on with our own self-pretentiousness, and use the differences as a way to demean other "groups" and justify our own ego.:2c: