I had a distasteful encounter with a trans advocate/fanatic yesterday. They showed up in a science fiction forum and started demanding that trans people weren’t shown the respect that they “deserved” and somehow everyone “owed” them things and damn it, we’d better pony up, or else!

I think you can understand how that played out. They ended up running away screaming that we were all “-ists” before the moderators banned their account because that’s how so many of these encounters go. They don’t have to, and I figure you can guess what political ideology they were espousing, but I wanted to take a few minutes to explain how reasonable trans people can behave.

I have 3 trans friends. One is post-op, the other two are pre-op, not that it matters. None of them are assholes about it, but I wanted to highlight one of them because they did pretty much everything right.

I’m not using their real names, I’m just going to call them Joe/Joan for the same of argument, not that it matters. I’ve known Joe, now Joan, for probably 45 years. We didn’t exactly grow up together, but I’ve known him since I was in my mid to late teens. Joe was always a bit strange. He was a hard-core conservative, but never religious. He hated gay people with a passion. When we’d play together in a role-playing game, he would ALWAYS play a female character. Always, without exception. In retrospect, he was trying out a new identity while desperately trying to fight against it.

Eventually, he decided that he was in the wrong body. He started calling himself Joan. He didn’t call all of his friends and family together and make a stage show out of it. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t care. This is who she now was, end of discussion. None of her friends cared. We just removed “Joe” from our brains and inserted “Joan” and nothing changed. She started taking hormone treatments and started dressing in gender-appropriate clothes and that was it. I never treated her any different than I ever had. It was the same person with a new name and identity. Big deal. I never cared.

Hell, we all acknowledged that she made a much better woman than she ever had a man. She never made any demands of anyone else. She was what she was, take it or leave it. She was now, as she had always  been, self-reliant. She didn’t need external validation. She’d made up her mind and that was the end of it. Deal with her as she was or go away.

Most trans people I run into these days can’t do that. They are intellectually and emotionally weak people. They spend their time screaming that people aren’t giving them the amount of respect they deserve, which is ridiculous. Respect is earned, not granted and they are not earning anything.

That’s why I think Joe/Joan had a relatively pain-free transition. Nobody she knew was friends with her gender, just herself as an individual. We didn’t care about the outward presentation, only the inner person. I think that if she had gone the full liberal “respect me or else!” bullshit, she would have wound up with no friends at all. Instead, I don’t think she lost anyone, at least not anyone that I knew. We’re all still a close group of friends. She never cared about pronouns. She never asked anyone, as far as I know, to call her anything. We did it  because we respect the person inside. I don’t think it mattered to her what anyone called her. She never got mad.

That was a very long time ago now and she’s been Joan for longer than I can remember her as Joe.  I figure if more trans people behaved that way and didn’t insist that everyone pandered to their gender identity, there would be a whole lot less problems in the trans community. My other two trans friends did largely the same thing. Joan was the first. They followed suit. they’re all happy today, with careers and friends and families that care about  them. Nobody looks at any of them and thinks they’re self-centered assholes. None of them demand respect, or need to. They get what they have earned.

Why can’t more people be like that? That’s what I’d like to know.