There is a song "You have to b carefully taught" and that applies to "us" a lot.
As a group we all know that we are not all on the same road, we do the label thing threads over and over, and it ends up being a "Don't call me Shirley" fight. I should say most of us know it. There are a few here who still think if you ain't _____ you are just playing a game. So anyway, how does this start? When outside people see the fringes of the group. It is hard for us to compete with daytime talk shows that show us as deviates. Or movies where we play the funny crossdresser or the psycho murderer. Or like this weekend the television news will focus on those 12 people in the parade who are overly camp Or even just the societal misunderstanding that we all want to be women. Maybe because those that don't want to go all the way stay hidden from public view. Sort of like how 60 years ago every Italian-American was a restaurant owner or fruit salesman. Or even closer to us how every woman who wore slacks was trying to be a guy or trying to emasculate them.
How to prevent it? That is hard. In order to eliminate wrong ideas you have to replace them with corrected ones. And it is harder to break bad habits than to instill good ones. We are a small minority and as noted in many threads we don't even agree to disagree here. It would take a united front to start educating. It won't happen in this community. When only part of the community is truly marginalized, the rest of the community won't or cannot rally to support them. We can work on the one person at a time thing. We can try and show our friends and SOs that what we do is just what we do. It may not go any farther than a sometimes thing, a fun thing. And it usually does not go any further but without being able to point that out with examples, it is an uphill job. It is easy to point out TS's who have made a name for themselves. But try and point out a guy who likes skirts who has made an impact (Before everyone points at Eddie Izzard, he is a comic and he doesn't really give us a great image). What I am saying here a picture is worth a thousand words. One great crossdresser who isn't a clown (i.e. all the movie actors who have portrayed CDs) or the bank robber on the bad side to all the great TS's who make a statement that IS positive back to Rene Richards and going through today, one positive model would really show how we all don't want to or NEED to go the whole post-op route.
