"No, she's a girl, she's just living transgender"

In the few years that I've been out, I've been lucky enough to only face a few instances where my being transgender was responded to negatively. I lost a friend over it.

Tonight I was faced with a tremendous amount of hostility for being me, from people who I thought were at least acquaintances, if not friends. People who will so willingly accept and learn new things and accept restrictions from people within their subculture, but who adamantly refuse to learn about anything outside that little comfort zone. Even if it's just to foster some kind of mutual respect or understanding.

What's bothering me is when a subculture that wants to be respected and taken seriously can't respect or take seriously other subcultures, or minorities who are different from their own. People seem to think their minority, or their subculture is the only viable one, and there couldn't possibly be any overlap.

Like a transgender person can also be gay, or straight, but in many cases neither the gays nor the straights want to accept them into fold. A transgender person can be into BDSM, but the BDSM community may not accept a transgender person.

Walls built on top of walls, all it ends up doing is dividing us, whether we are LGBT, BDSM, or any other manner of subculture. There's no love and there's no cohesiveness to our goals if we are constantly finding more reasons to exclude people.

All this leads to is hurt feelings and lonely lives.

They don't have to accept me. No one has to accept me. In the end, acceptance is entirely their choice. I'd at least like people to give me a chance, offer me at least the benefit of the doubt, before automatically discounting me as not worth the effort. Yes, my feelings are hurt. This isn't the first time, and I know it won't be the last.