There has been a fair amount of discussion being brought up about the exclusion of a transgender woman, Jenna Talacknova, from the Miss Universe Canada pageant. Miss Talacknova was excluded from the contest, for no other reason than the fact that she was transgendered.
It has become predictably routine for trans women to be denied and excluded from women’s spaces, be it from domestic violence shelters, rape counseling, homeless shelters, or even the simple ability to use the restroom.
Transgendered women often face a situation where they are too feminine to use a mens space, but simultaneously too masculine to safely use a women’s space, leaving them without any sort of safe space.
Transgender women are excessively targeted for abuse and harassment, with 83% of trans women reporting verbal abuse because of their gender identity or gender presentation, and 37% reporting physical abuse, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and yet the available resources to help them with that abuse is relatively minuscule.
Miss Talacknova is simply one of many trans women denied access to a space that is rightfully hers.
Even places that purport to be feminist, most famously the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, exclude trans women from attending, citing fears that allowing trans women would compromise the safe space and be tantamount to allowing men in.
And they allow trans men to attend.
Ideas and attitudes such as these are inherently transphobic, because they reduce us trans women to our genitals, something that the feminist movement has been fighting as well, they presume that biology is destiny, and that because we were born into a role, that we should just accept the situation we were born into and not fight it.
Even worse is that by allow transgender men, but barring trans women, you are invalidating the identities of transgendered people. You are telling trans women that because you are not ‘really’ a woman, despite that you have fought hard to be accepted as one, you can’t come, because you’re really a man. But they are also telling trans men that even though they identify as male, they aren’t really men and that they are women at the core and should come on in.
On both fronts it’s disgusting and it erases our identities as transgender people.
We don’t want to force the cisgendered world to like us, or be attracted to us, we simply want to be considered as equals to out cisgendered counterparts.
