I am shocked by the ignorance here, in what is my own community, about gender identity. I was born transsexual and

1. It is NOT a mental condition. It is a congenital birth condition. Maybe you've conveniently forgotten that being gay used to be considered a mental condition! We are in the process of being removed from the DSM because all the research points to a physical cause.

2. Despite being in the DSM now we are employed in every job field imaginable. I work in health care. I know other who are doctors, lawyers, accountants and GASP! even a couple that are pilots! Stop stereotyping us!!! We are just as capable as everyone else God Damn It!!!

3. Many of you seem to forget people go both ways (MtF and FtM) and that they are roughly equal in numbers. Just like general public you focus on the MtF's. Don't be sheep and fall for that patriarchy BS!

4. You all seem to assume all us MtF's look like men in dresses. Hello! If that was true most of us who have jobs wouldn't be employed. Don't be stupid! Surgery and hormones do a wonderful job on most folks. Anybody remember Tula Cossey the Bond girl? Or how about Hirusu the Korean pop star? Both T. The fact of the matter is most of us pass just fine thank you.

5. The dangerous time for us is when we transition. During that time we can appear quite gender variant and that's what draws the attention of others and often leads to being fired, or worse, violence. Happens to a lot of us in transition. I know someone who was an engineer with NASA for 18 years. She was fired when she came out. Or try googling Susan Stanton.

6. People born transsexual have been around since the dawn of time. We are not Johnny come latelies. We were at Stonewall, Comptoms Cafeteria (before Stonewall) and many other places. Don't try to erase our history. We've contributed to this community and we deserve respect!

7. There are more of us than you know. The simple fact is many of us blend so well you don't even realize who we are. Just because we don't walk around with a big T tatooed to our foreheads doesn't mean we aren't there.

Stop falling for stereotypes! Educate yourselves! Stop using us as a scapegoat!

Hello there, I'm post-op male to female transsexual. I'm also a law student and I'm currently writing a paper about sex discrimination law. I'd like to add my voice to the chorus criticizing Mr. Aravosis although I think I can offer some original reasons to oppose his position.

In his article he asks: "what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman." Given that kind of language, I doubt I'm the only trans woman who found it hard to believe his subsequent assertion that he genuinely respects transgendered people. However, I'll put aside that argument and address his question at face value.

In some circumstances, Mr. Aravosis might be right that he and I suffer different discrimination for different reasons. There are many cases of workplace harassment where it is clear from the evidence that the worker was targeted because they were perceived to be gay. However there are also many cases where the cause of discrimination is far less clear; a worker might be targeted because they're perceived as effeminate. Some courts have held this is discrimination because of sex and some have not. Without protection for gender identity, defined very broadly in the act, a effeminate gay man might lose in court if a judge or jury believed he'd been harassed because he was effeminate rather than because he was gay.

Including gender identity is even more important in cases of sexual harassment. The Supreme Court unanimously held in the Oncale case that same-sex sexual harassment is covered by title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, they stressed that the plaintiff still must prove that the discrimination was because of sex and to most courts sex means man or woman. This would be very difficult for a plaintiff such as Oncale to prove because he had been sexually assaulted by heterosexual men in an all-male drilling rig. How could he prove his coworkers harassed him because they didn't like men on the job -they were all men! How could he prove they sexually assaulted him because he was a man -they weren't attracted to men! There have been many cases decided after Oncale where men and some women have failed to win because they couldn't prove they were sexually harassed because of their sex.

Straight men sexually assaulting men is most commonly seen in prisons but the dynamic easily observed there paints a picture of what's going on beneath the surface in cases such as Oncale. The abusers almost universally sodomize their victims or demand the victim fellate them; this makes the victim (and not the abuser) a "fag" or more often they're referred to as the abuser's "bitch". The abuser often refers to the victim with female pronouns and asserts that the victim really wanted the sexual encounter. In many cases, a frequent victim will adopt feminine mannerisms and perform traditionally feminine chores to mollify their abuser. In the minds of abusers, sexual orientation and gender identity are one and the same thing.

This is precisely why we have a moral and pragmatic obligation to include gender identity and sexual orientation in the same bill. If someone is sexually assaulted on the job and is called a "fag" they should get the same protection as someone who is sexually assaulted and is called a "bitch" because the choice between the two words is likely to be completely random. The exact same dynamic is at work in many, if not most, harassment cases that do not involve sexual assault but instead other means of harassment. We cannot win genuine protection for gay or transgender people if we allow identical types of abuse perpetrated for identical reasons to be treated differently under the law.