Equally, transgender woman and writer Janelle Villapando showed the other side of the coin when she wrote about how a handsy make-out session in a car turned to disaster when she realised her date hadn't read her dating profile properly and did not know she used to be a man. After finding out, her date became incredibly aggressive, leaving her in fear of attack.
"He started yelling that I never told him," she wrote. "I responded saying it was all over my OkCupid profile, which it turns out he never read. He said, 'I’m bouncing; that’s f**ked up,' and jumped out of the car, spat on the ground, slammed the car door and walked away. I sat in the back seat of my car in complete shock. In that moment, I was mostly concerned about my safety. I stayed in my back seat for probably five minutes to make sure he was gone. When I got back into the front seat to drive home, I still felt uneasy. What if he’s still around? What if he’s going to try to hurt me?"
Her experience tragically highlights a recurrent fear that many transgender people have: the fear of being physically harmed, or even killed when they go out on a date. In a world where
Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox make headlines, you'd think that this wouldn't be a common problem, but you'd be grossly incorrect. Last year the Trans Murder Monitoring Project and the Transgender Day of Remembrance organisers compiled lists of each murder of a trans and gender non-conforming person, revealing that there have been over 270 reported murders of trans and gender non-conforming people in the past year.
Furthermore, there have allegedly been a total of 2,609 reported cases in 71 countries worldwide between January 2008 (the year Transgender Day of Remembrance began) and September 2017. Shockingly, a number of these cases have seen transgender people dying at the hands of a lover. Take the case of 24-year-old trans woman Ty Underwood, who was murdered by her boyfriend, Texas College football player Carlton Ray Champion. The motive was said to be jealousy, but Underwood's inner circle believes that the murder was a hate crime.
Additionally, when the January 5 murder of Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien marked the first reported homicide of a transgender person this year, a Milwaukee-based national transgender advocacy group came up with some worrying figures. Loree Cook-Daniels, the policy and programme director at FORGE stated: “We don’t have complete data ... but based on what we do have, we think up to half of the murders of trans people are murders by either partners or dates.”
So at the end of the day, sure, perhaps Emma's responses on Tinder were a little out of line. Yet, in order to try and understand why a transgender person may be defensive when plunging into the world of online dating - or any dating at all - we must take a look at the world they are forced to live in. A world of fear, rejection and constant justification, where they never quite know where they stand. After all, they say romance is dead, but when the first thing people do is inquire about your genitals, you know for certain that it's dead, buried and never to be seen again.
