“No one can be free while others are oppressed.”
I’ve seen this quote attributed to Dr. M. L. King, Jr., Malcolm X and “unknown.” Who cares who said it, really. It’s accurate. Especially for transgender women and transamorous men. In fact, I say transgender women, by nature of their existence and their desires, created transamorous men.
And vice versa.
As a result, so long as the women you love face oppression, inhumane objectification, ridicule and worse, so go transamorous men. In other words, your freedom as a transamorous man is dependent on the freedom of transwomen.
This is why it’s important for you, cis-males who love transgender women, to stand up. I know you’ve been stewing in self-reproach. I know you’ve been trying to live in secret. I know you fear what your friends might think, what your family might think. I know you fear losing your job. I know because I was there. That’s why I wrote The Man’s Guide For Finding Your Transgender Partner. It’s the first volley intended to destroy social bullshit keeping you in the closet.
Nevermind that transwomen have asked you to stand up for many years. If the fact that your release from your self-imposed bondage (and it is self-imposed) will free transwomen everywhere doesn’t inspire you, then perhaps this will: your freedom is directly connected to your choice to stay in fear of what society will say about you if you “come out”.
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Freedom is an amazing thing. Some believe it is most precious when it is lost. For transamorous men, freedom has been lost for so long, they may not remember what freedom is like. To me, freedom is most precious, not when it is lost, but when recovered. The feeling of not giving a shit what your family, friends and work colleagues think about you catapults you to levels of self-esteem rarely reached by mortal men. I’m not talking about arrogance which is a mask for fear and insecurity. I’m talking about freedom borne from knowing you are at the center of your reality and nothing can influence your life that you don’t allow. From here, your confidence is absolute. It’s a great feeling, a feeling amplified when you’re out holding hands with the transwoman you love.
I know when I’ve been out in public, not only have I felt liberated holding my partner’s hand, being out with her in public and looking passersby directly in the eye with a confident smile, I felt honored being with her. You have to get this guys: being with a transgender woman is an HONOR. You have the rare opportunity being with a person who is on the leading edge of the human story. And your participation in her life, has serious positive repercussions for your life and for hers.
But this honor isn’t available to you until you accept your freedom by accepting your transamory.
Look, you’re not going to feel this way until you own up to what you desire. There is everything natural about it. There is no reason to fear what others are saying about transwomen or guys who love them. What they don’t know is their comments are saying far more about them, than they say about you.
The dynamics of ridicule, bullying, teasing….all that happy horse shit is about trying to manage an extremely insecure epistemological footing. People who ridicule others for their choices are trying to regain their psychic and emotional footing by trying to control their environment through the use of power and force. Your insecurity feeds their success, for when you cower before their taunts, it reaffirms their (false) superiority. To the degree you shrink from such acts, you give them back the footing they need to remain secure in themselves. Notice, by the way, that this kind of behavior occurs by groups of boys or girls (boys and girls = emotionally immature men and women). That’s because the insecure find strength in numbers. Rarely will a single person make such a comment. When they do, they are really insecure.
When you are able to stand in the face of such displays of personal insecurity, sure in the awareness that the taunter is putting his or her/their insecurity on display, you win.
You are also free.
Here’s a process for practicing finding your emotional feet in the face of such displays of insecurity. First you have to realize the process by which your thoughts connect with your emotions. Your emotions are a response to a thought you are thinking. Amateur thinkers are not aware of most thoughts they think. So their emotions seem to them to come and go at will, almost randomly. Little do they know their thoughts are dictating the emotions they feel.
Second: In order for you to break free of what others think, and become a master of your life, you have to develop the skill of manipulating the connection between your thoughts and your feelings. Once you do that, with practice you’ll find a new level of power and control over not only how you feel, but also over your life. That’s right, you can direct your life much like a director directs a movie, simply by being aware of what you’re thinking. At that level of mastery you no longer have to put up with insecure people because they disappear from your life entirely.
With a little more practice you become the deliberate chooser of your destiny, including satisfying all your desires, including meeting quality transgender women ongoingly.
What is freedom? It’s the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. That includes the freedom to meet, love and live happily with the transgender partner of your dreams. Freedom is available to you now. All you have to do is acknowledge your natural desire, learn about it, and develop the security and confidence about it that is waiting you. But to do all that, you need to first understand yourself.
Need help? I wrote The Man’s Guide to Finding Your Transgender Partner for exactly this purpose.
I came across this article while cruising my FetLife profile. Yes, I have one of those. Doesn’t it make sense? I think so.
In my earlier post, I defined Transamory, a word coined by “
