I am not sure that what limited social acceptance the homosexual community has gotten from positive media portrayals — assuming that those portrayals were not a result of a growing acceptance homosexuality in the first place — can be translated into transgender acceptance because I don't think that the philosophy that guides even a basic level of tolerance among conservatives can itself be translated. Partly, I think this is because a significant level of conservative "acceptance" of homosexuals is rooted in the "love the sinner, hate the sin" philosophy. Transgender people, to many, are the actual embodiment of that "sin."

Also, I think that the root of a great deal of homophobia that the gay community has had to fight lies in a complete inability on the part of homophobes to not think about the sex that other people are having. But, for the transgender community, it seems that intolerant people don't just obsess over what they're doing with their private parts, they obsess over what they look like. Just ask porn star Buck Angel, who takes shit from both breeders and gays for his genitals. Or Michelle Bruce, who was the mayor of Riverdale, Georgia and faced a lawsuit to disclose her "true" sex. (She won that lawsuit, but not before she lost her bid for reelection). Transgender intolerance comes from some of the same intolerant places as homophobia, but it also draws from people's understanding/ignorance of gender and identity, which makes it much tougher to fight.

In addition, while people in America are slowly coming around to the belief that gay men and women deserve the same rights as their hetero sisters and brothers, the same cannot be said for transgender people — even within the gay rights community. When the House was looking at passing a bill last year to eliminate workplace discrimination against homosexuals — a bill, notably, that stood almost no chance of passing the Senate and less of avoiding a veto — Democratic Congressional leaders opted to remove provisions related to discrimination against transgender people. Worse yet, groups like the Human Rights Campaign signed off on it, saying that they'd totally help transgender people get their rights... but later.

So, maybe a beautiful young transgender woman like Isis will be able to push the acceptance-ball slightly forward for others — I certainly hope she can. But would I stake anyone's rights on that? No. People shouldn't have to wait for the larger society to accept their sexual identities to achieve the equal rights guaranteed by our Constitution and the freedom from discrimination promised by our (supposed) political philosophy. I think we could try providing all Americans with the rights they ought to be entitled to and simply enjoy Isis' time on ANTM for the great reality TV turn that it is.

The New Transgender Reality [Newsweek]
Isis [ANTM]
Gay Talent on Nonscripted TV Continues to Rise [Media Week]
For Some, Fox Apology Not Enough [glaadBLOG]
Being a Woman in Politics Is an Unfair… Advantage? [Wonkette]
Good News, Crap News [Wonkette]
Pelosi/ HRC ENDA 'Bargain' - The Inside Story [Gay City News]

Buck's taken shit from lesbians, from gay men, from Howard Stern and his crew, from pretty much everybody because he just won't conform. He won't get the add-on that would make him look "normal" as a man but that would leave him potentially without the ability to ever orgasm. And he deals with the question of the status of his genitals all the time, even as he announces to the world every day what they are, calling himself The Man With A Pussy. (If you're really, really curious, if you just have to know, 20 years of testosterone therapy has its side effects and an extremely Not Safe For Work Or Your Mother picture can be found here). He's living, breathing, fucking evidence of the fact that, even in the gay community and the sex-positive community, even when people are marching and fighting for the right to keep from being discriminated against for what they do with their genitals, everyone wants to know exactly what his look like. Being dumped by all his lesbian friends when he decided to be a man hurt, he says:

Fuck communities then, Buck thought, if all they do is uphold the tenets of a rigid, unchanging identity, and then spit you out when you deviate. The dykes won’t stick with a trans-man, and the trans-men get offended by a guy who has the balls to trumpet the virtues of his vagina. Why go through the effort of establishing nomenclature for every variation of queer identity if they’re going to be used as tools of division? If only your average straight-laced queer-baiter knew how closed-minded some sects of these hated deviants can be.

Everyone has prejudices, even people against whom too many people hold prejudices. But Buck forces us to confront not only issues of prejudice but of identity. Am I a woman because I have a vagina and breasts and a uterus and ovaries? Is Buck not a man because he is only minus one of those things? Biologically, he and I have the same chromosomes, but the state agrees to recognize him as a man and some people insist that he must still be a woman. My sex is female, but my gender is a more complex question, and a more complex answer because gender is an identity that doesn't reside in my nether regions. I'm a woman because everything in the mass of cells above my eyes knows that I'm a woman, and Buck's a man because the same mass of cells tells him he is. If he can get us all to think of gender as opposed to sex, to think about our chosen and established identities and those of others rather than which bits we all have and how we use them, and if he can do it by sticking a dildo in his big man pussy, then Buck Angel can be my feminist hero.

A Man Without a Cock or Country [BME]
Buck Angel, A Man With a Pussy: LGB Without the T [Village Voice]

Image via of Buck Angel Entertainment