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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

I'm a trans woman, so I'm gonna go ahead and be gentle when I say that my understanding does not match yours.

Some trans women are as you describe, preoccupied with passing and going stealth, especially for safety reasons. Many aren't.

You can speculate on if the term is gonna go away, but right now it's the best adjective to describe trans people. It's not offensive or a slur, it's literally the community's chosen language.

And you're right, sometimes it's better to be nice and gentle to people who are wrong. I won't be mad if you pop back upthread and correct them gently. We can do one of those good cop bad cop things.

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The elephant in the room is that "passing" is often little more than wishful thinking, and people are starting to understand this. Ultimately, a shared focus on full transparency about being 'trans' or 'cis' is quite helpful at de-escalating hostile attitudes and discrimination about the matter - one could admit of rare exceptions, but by and large, anyone who feels like they must hide themselves for "safety reasons" is likely better off leaving the unsafe environment entirely!

Unfortunately, even a lot of places that are generally trans-supportive won't admit refugees fleeing anti-trans violence - or when they do, they're not treated much better than the place they left.

https://www.hrc.org/blog/the-precarious-position-of-transgen...

I'm not sure what your first comment is meant to imply, but I suspect you might be suffering from confirmation bias if you think that passing isn't realistic.

I made my attempt to explain it upthread for cis folks who haven't got it sorted yet.

I'm surprised that my understanding is already out of date or was wrong in the first place. Maybe 5 years ago or so, the rule I learned was that cis people should make no distinction between trans or cis, so as not to separate people into groups. I figured that extended to everything, which is why we don't make a distinction between cis and trans in things like sports or bathrooms, because there should be no distinction to make.

It's all a bit confusing. I'd like to get it right, but there's a lot of change happening and it's hard to keep up.

Thanks, upvoted. :)

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