Sady at Tiger Beatdown, who is having an awesome week, wrote an amazing post about the (false) rumors that Lady Gaga is intersex:
So, yeah. It will always puzzle me when cisgendered people don’t see how the marginalization and oppression of trans people affects them. Because the fact is that there are a ton of trans people in the world, and you don’t necessarily know who they are, and they’re not required to tell you. But when people get a case of the Deceptive Tranny Fever, nothing – not decency, not tolerance, not basic fact-checking, not even Google – will get in their way.
So true. The whole “deceptive tranny” thing is the old double-bind in action as well, ergo: if you’re trans, and you don’t tell the whole wide world, aaaand you sleep with some cisgendered dude or lady, aaaand they find out, then you are a deceiver and deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out; but if you’re trans, aaand you tell the whole world, then people call you a thing or refuse to use your correct gender, aaaand you deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out.
That is, you get it both ways: you’re punished for both telling and not telling, because the culture punishes “deception” without rewarding “honesty.”
Go read the post, because like most things Sady, it is awesome.