🚀 go-pugleaf

Below is a letter to the editor to the Wall Street Journal regarding
a recent story it did on San Francisco's sleazy Tenderloin District.
The Tenderloin is the unofficial crackwhore district, with not just
the usual skanky ho's working the corners, but also TRANSEXUAL ho's.

To be very brief, I know a transexual.  In fact, in my four decades
or so on earth I've only met one single transexual and he happens to
be a crack whore, so it is funny to read the follow letter where the
writer decries this perception as a hateful stereotype:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was surprised to discover that the Journal lumped transgender people
with drug addicts and pimps.  Your statement hinges upon the blindness
to crucial differences between various behaviors, such as pimping, drug-
taking and prostitution, and one's personal identity, be it gender or
sexuality.  To stigmatize transgender people by associating them with
drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes only fuels the same stereotyping and
prejudices that has led this group, in particular, to become
economically underprivileged in the first place.  Such is the larger
social context that this article has stumbled through without notice.
These sorts of statements do no service to the Journal or transgender
people, whether Tenderloin residents, research scientists (such as
myself), or (yes, take another look around) fellow journalists.
-- Jess Rowland, San Francisco
------------------------------------------------------------------------