I agree, you should try to get people fired, lose their livelihood, etc. By far, the best course of action. :rolleyes:
People who act like jerks in the workplace endanger the company’s interest and do not deserve to retain their jobs.
Wouldn’t that be up to the employer to determine what’s in the company’s best interest?
When I was pregnant a nasty, nosey woman I worked with hounded me about my breakfast choice one day after I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. She upset me badly and not even telling her I did not want to discuss this with her, that I had a dietician who advised me, that the choice was approved my dietician, or finally bursting into tears and doubling over with a contraction. I was able to calm down after the first attack, but when she saw fit to launch into a new one I could not stand it. I burst into tears once more and left. I called KellyM to pick me up. The contractions started and would not stop. KellyM drove me to the hospital. I was in premature labor and was very lucky that they were about to stop it. That signaled a change in my pregnancy and I had further scares of premature labor that led to complete bed rest for three months. Bedrest that began so suddenly that I could not tie up loose ends at work.
What my co-worker did was illegal and against company policy. It was not the first time that she had hounded someone to tears. The employee handbook had that behavior down as reason summary termination as it should be. If things had turned out a little different, had my company not gave her a hard warning that she would be fired if she so much as said hello to me while I was still pregnant, you can bet I would have sued my company and her. I could have lost my baby. As it was, my company lost my services months before they expected and paid out quite a bit in disability and healthcare that they would not have had. I have known good employees leave because of gossiping, harrassing co-workers. How much does that cost?
Yes, I think that trying to get someone fired for harrassment is reasonable. I think that trying to get someone fired for poisoning a work atmosphere is reasonable.
Who gets to quash (NOT squash) ignorance first?
Transgender-transsexual. What the hell is the difference? I’ve been straight for too long. The latest activist groups have gone from the gay-lesbian- bi to GLBT.
Can anyone explain the special groups?
“Special”?
Transsexuals are individuals whose neurological/psychological gender does not match their phenotypic sex (that is, the gross anatomical sex evident at birth).
Transgender is a bucket category that covers anyone who adopts, in whole or in part, any gender roles not normally associated with his or her phenotypic sex. It’s a pretty large bucket containing a lot of people who really don’t have a lot to do with one another.
The inclusion of the T in the GLBT conglomeration is a matter of considerable dispute, especially given the history of the Human Rights Coalition, one of the leading gay rights advocates, of being twofaced on transgender & transsexual rights issues.
Yeah, “Special” Your post pretty much answered my question. A “group” wants to be recognized, without having a cohesive agenda, nor base apparently. But needs to be recognized as being “special”. i.e. outside the mainstream. I can’t keep up with this shit.
Uh, no, you’re totally wrong.
The T tack-on to the GLB collection was instigated by the GLBs, not by the Ts. Transsexuals have their own advocacy groups with cohesive agendas and so forth, and want recognition of those issues and agendas on their own basis. As far as I’m concerned, the GLBT sandwich is actually a backhanded attempt by certain transphobic gay rights groups to submarine transsexual and transgender rights.
Transsexuals are a well-defined group (well, actually, two groups, male to female and female to male). It’s the transgender bucket that is ill-defined. Since the transgender label was created by the majority out of ignorance, it’s not surprising that the label doesn’t really fit anyone very well. Blame the ignorant majority, not the mislabeled minority.
As far as your claim that transsexuals and transgenders need to be recognized as “special”, I think that’s just an underhanded attempt on your part to diminished transsexual and transgender rights as “special rights” and therefore dismissable. Your posting pattern here matches the usual “ask the seemingly innocent question, then slash back when an honest and friendly response is given” that I run into far too often both here and elsewhere. A less polite term for this behavior is “baiting”. :rolleyes:
“baiting”? Fuck you. It’s people like you that can’t get people like me to listen to your side. YOU used the the quoted “special” in your response. I was in this thread trying to get an idea of what the differing terms were, and you had to shit on it by using a word that you slammed me for using.
I can only assume you are “special” and will therefore leave this thread assuming you represent all the GLBT-people.
duffer, you’re really being more than a bit of an ass, here.
You asked about special groups. KellyM used a commonly accepted method asking what you meant by that particular choice of words, and you responded by being belligerent and obnoxious and called the entire issue shit. It almost comes across as you making a special effort to piss her off, which is known in some circles as baiting. In other circles, talking shit just to piss someone off is called trolling.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, because I think it’s more an issue of you just not expressing yourself as clearly as you might and being hyper-defensive about the subject. But I do hope you can see where other people might interpret it that way.
I can’t beleive I came back to this thread. My question started (I thought) innocently enough about the GLBT meaning. T=? transsexual, transgender (which I was also trying to figure out).
I’m often barraged with why I should be “sensitive” to the GLBT “community” but never told what it that is. When I ask, I’m accussed of “baiting” and worse:
“trolling”
Any ideas why I’m just giving up on this? The people that want to get me to accept them won’t help to understand them. I give up. Please don’t hold this against me in other threads. I know I won’t. I just can’t stand to be the bad guy when I tried my damndest to get a handle on the situation and end up being called a trolling baiter.
Have a good day.
Because in this thread and others (like the ex-mistress one, for instance), you say “help me understand this, I honestly want to know about _______” and when someone does, you dump back with hostile comments. If someone beckons you with one hand, and then takes a swing at you with the other when you come in range, you might see why you’d question that person’s intentions.
WELL! :eek:
Thank you lee for sharing your story with me. Not something you had to do, and for obvious reasons, I would’ve been hestitant to post personal information like that. 
I am truly interested in the lifestyles, habits, interests and ideas of other people from other parts of the country/world/etc…I have a hundred other questions I’d love to ask, but for the sake of getting the thread back to where it began I will save them for another time.
Congratulations on your daughter. I hope that you all are enjoying parenthood thus far. 
You got to teach my wife that trick My email is in my profile
If you have any questions for me, feel free to email me 
. Once again my email is in my profile and I will do my best to answer them.
Duffer, tone it down. That’s not appropriate behaviour for MPSIMS, no matter how frustrated you get in a conversation. And you know it.
KellyM, you could stand to be a little less confrontational as well. I’m sure you’re answering questions that have been asked to you a thousand times before, but that does not mean the opposing party is trying to get a rise out of you per se. And even if they were, you know you’re not supposed to accuse other members of trolling - and no, using a synonym doesn’t fool us, really. Use the report button if you must.
Wow the second time I ever posted a thread and I had a mod show up. Heh.
I must have forgotten what forum I was in. I’ll watch it in the furture. However I take offence to the allusion of being a troll.
I beg pardon for reviving a relatively old thread. My excuse is that I’m just starting to catch up on this topic, and when I asked about it in a recent thread, was presented with a whole big bouquet of links to earlier threads, and this one was both fascinating and relatively recent.
odaran, let me first of all back you up with all the moral support I can offer, for what it’s worth. You go, girl. I don’t have the knowledge to answer your question, but I need to find out the answers too. I just came out to myself last week and am presently getting up the nerve to come out to my family. In my work situation I seriously doubt I’ll ever be able to come out. I work as a contractor with the federal government and have a top secret security clearance on which my livelihood depends. The security officers are awfully persnickety about people who are… different. If word gets out in the wrong circles, someone might try to force my situation to become medicalized, psychiatry and all that stupid shit, just because the DSM still maintains that all gender boundary crossing is a “disorder” the way they used to categorize homosexuality as a “disorder” and tried to forcibly “cure” gays back in the Dark Ages (i.e. my lifetime).
Hannah — the woman who is me (not her “real” name) — has stayed in a closet all her long, lonely life. Poor dear, she has just now had the closet door opened and had the chance to look out on the bright world and talk to some people outside. She needs to walk out into the sunshine and be a fully actuated human like all the rest of you. If only the coercive alliance of the State with the grim priesthood of the Church of Psychiatry wouldn’t hunt her down and deny her right to exist the way the Inquisition did heretics and Jews.
Back in 1986, there was a mtf who had a security clearance yanked and then handed back because she was doing important military weapons work. I know this because she visited the base I was at and a good friend told me about the situation. Someone had briefed her and told her that if the visitor seems odd, this is why. My friend gave her the important visitor a tour. My friend’s comments were, “Well, if that is what she wanted to do more power to her, but for crying out loud won’t someone teach her how to hold a purse?”
Yes, it can be a career killer, but even with the feds there can be hope.
Oh, dear. FWIW, duffer I don’t feel you intended any disrespect, rather you made an inadvertant faux pas with your choice of words. It should have been clarified before it became an “issue” in the thread.
“Special” is a bit of a hot button, and more so these days in light of the current administration’s attempts to quash equal rights for the GLBT community. The president stands before the nation and says “Gays want special rights.” No, no, Geogie-Porgie. We don’t want “special” rights, we want equal rights. The same rights everyone else already enjoys.
The use of “special” is a sneaky strategy: It suggests we want rights that are above and beyond those that the average person gets. So “special rights” is a good way to muster opposition from the folks who then think “Special rights? What makes them so special and better than the rest of us? Why should they get more rights privileges than everybody else?” So the “special vs. equal” thing has stirred the pot a bit.
It also has the pejorative connotations like “Jerry’s kids are special kids!” wherein there’s the implication that there is a defect or aberration that we should happily tolerate and tell the person “you’re special” so they don’t feel bad about it.
I don’t think that’s at all how you meant it though, Duff. I think you were innocent of ill intentions. But you may find that “special” tends to raise hackles sometimes when there are civil rights issues at stake.
KellyM, I think Duff just got a little tangled up when he asked his question and didn’t meant “special” the way it sounded. I think, lacking any other jargon that sounded any better, he just sort of borrowed “special groups” in the context of media-used terminology, like “special interest groups” (with the intended meaning of “minority interest group”.)
I wave my rainbow flag proudly, and yet I must confess I too would have a tough time wording a question for “What are all the flavour’s of queer in ‘GLBT’?..”