I’ve had a cold for the last three days, and have been running a slight fever. It’s a little uncomfortable, but certainly I don’t wish I were dead.

Yet, a peer San Diegan I avoid whenever possible has recently wished me dead in the alt.support.srs Google Group:

I wish Monica Helms and Autumn Sandeen and company would die and let the rest of us get on with out lives without those maggots trying to usurp the term Transsexual for teir [sic] own ligitimazisum [sic]. how any self respecting Post-Transition Female could support these tranny trash i don’t know.”

Wow.

I know I’m a firm supporter of diversity in general, and gender diversity in the transgender community, but who knew those opinions of mine raised up enough ill will with a Harry Benjamin Syndrome / Autogynephilia supporter like Sue Robins to have her call me “tranny trash” and a “maggot” — while in the same breath wishing I were dead.

Sue’s language has become odiously creepy in this and at least two other occasions (previously stating that I’m “self-marginalizing” and I “dick-tate” to others what they should think). I guess I’m going to have to in the future monitor Sue a little closer to make sure she doesn’t communicate any death threats towards me.

~~~~~Update~~~~~

Sue has sent me some emails, and commented on this blog entry.  Here are quotes from the emails with my responses:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dallas Voice: Where Do They Stand?
Excerpt: Democratic candidates across the board support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but Clinton told The Washington Blade she is not sure it should include protection for transgenders.

Monstrous Regiment: “inclusion fascists”
Excerpt: Transfascism (n) (related to BiFascism; both being subsets of QueerFascism)(def) hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts of ‘Oppressors’ or ‘Hitler” while calling for the banning/shunning/hitting/hating of any gay man or lesbian (LG) who does NOT embrace forced “inclusivity” of everything BTQ. (Source)

The Feminist Pulse: Girlistic’s Blog: Transfeminism – Joelle Ruby Ryan (Interview)
Excerpt: I think the most important founding paper in transfeminist discourse is Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” first published in 1991. Written in response to Janice Raymond’s anti-transgender “radical” feminist diatribe The Transsexual Empire, Sandy Stone lays out a brilliant interrogation of Raymond’s faulty ideas as also exposes the conservative logics behind early, traditional transsexual treatment clinics and how we must work to liberate transpeople from these gate-keepers and allow for greater flexibility of sex, gender and sexuality diversity and expression.

Box Turtle Bulletin: The Death Rattle of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Excerpt: This past Sunday, Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had some comments about the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy put in place during his term of service.

Gay City News: Transgender Health Fair Draws 150
Excerpt: More than 150 people turned out Monday evening, June 6, for a first of its kind transgender health fair at the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street. The event was initiated by the Transgender Health Initiative of New York, a joint project of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF), the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), and the Center’s Gender Identity Project.

PlanetOut: Baptists’ gender point man tries soft sell
Bob Stith, who advocates a softer approach on LGBTs in the church, is named Southern Baptists’ national strategist for gender issues.

San Francisco Chronicle: The TSA Hates Your Vibrator
How to safely fly with your sex toys

Jamaicans.com: Reggae stars renounce homophobia – Beenie Man, Sizzla and Capleton sign deal
Excerpt: Three of the world’s top reggae/dancehall singers have renounced homophobia and condemned violence against lesbians and gay men. … Beenie Man, Sizzla and Capleton had previously released anti-gay hate songs, including incitements to murder lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. … They have now signed up to the Reggae Compassionate Act in a deal brokered with top reggae promoters and Stop Murder Music activists.

Shakesville: Privilege: In One Story (with Pictures!)
Mr. Carol Broussard, mayor of a Louisiana town called Delcambre, is set to sign into law a new ordinance unanimously passed by the Delcambre town council which will make it a crime to wear trousers that show underwear, punishable by a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. When some residents complained that the ordinance was racially-motivated, targeting blacks who wear the baggy trousers “fashionable among hip hop fans,” Broussard dismissed them with the inevitable: “White people wear sagging pants, too.” … he told the AP that people who wear low-slung trousers would be “better off taking the pants off and just wearing a dress.” And something tells me Broussard isn’t directing that recommendation at teh boyz.

.

I took one of those non-scientific, blog polls that gives people canned answers of what kind of person the poll’s writer thinks you are. Per the Blogthings poll, I’m 100% feminist.

Funny, I don’t identify as a feminist.  I identify more strongly as an equal opportunity egalitarian and a promoter of diversity than I ever would as a feminist.

Why?

Well, feminist philosophy has its roots in the belief in male oppression of females. It’s kind of in the same vein of caucasian oppression of racial minorites, but not exactly the same because racial oppression is seen within the framework of race as a constant.

A significant number of feminists believe being female is a lifetime constant too — the oppression of females relates to being natally female — even more specifically being oppressed durning one’s girlhood has a lot to do with why one becomes an adult feminist. This, of course, separates out male-to-female transsexuals as not being capable of being true feminists because — and now I shift to the use of “we” because I’m a transwoman — we had male privilege as children born with penises and raised as boys.

I’m not welcome as a female attendee at events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) because I had a boyhood instead of a girlhood, or something to that effect.  Actually, instead of paraphrasing, let me quote Lisa Vogel, director of the MWMF:

“I deeply desire healing in our communities, and I can see and feel that you want that too. I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space — as do all communities who create space to gather, whether that be womyn of color, trans womyn or trans men … I wish you well, I want healing, and I believe this is possible between our communities, but not at the expense of deeply needed space for womyn born womyn.”

So you see, I’m not eligible to be a womon because I’m not a womon-born-womon, and the womyn-born-womyn want their “space” away from women like me because I’m really not one of them.  I’m different enough from other women that I need to be segragated out from other womyn/women at womyn’s/women’s events. 

This sounds to me a lot like the unconscionable justifications for what racial segragation was to southern blacks back before the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60′s — but I guess I’m considered a transwoman trying to assert male privilege to get into the feminist womyn’s club for even suggesting gender/transsexual segregation is the same as racial segregation.

The womyn-born-womyn faith in oppression and transsexual’s male privilege seems to close to me to the same sort of mind-numbing faith in philosophy as fudamentalist, socially conservative Christians.  The discriminiation against LGBT people that socially conservative Christians do in the name of Christ is main reason I have a hard time identifyining as a “Big C” christian; the segregation flavored discrimination against transwomen that womyn-born-womyn do in the name of feminism is the main reason I have a hard time identifying as a feminist.

If feminism can be twisted into a justification for segregation based on natal (or any other) physical characteristics of a given woman/womon, I don’t want any part of it.  So, call me someone who believes in equal opportunity and diversity, but whatever you do just don’t call me a feminist – 100% or otherwise.

–
H/t: Shakesville

There’s a post over at Women’s Space/The Margins entitled The Colonizing of Lesbian and Women’s Community: Bitch Performance at Boston Dyke March Canceled by Transgender Activists. The performer named Bitch has been pulled from the performing line-up of the Boston Dyke March because Bitch has performed at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF), and she hasn’t denounced the “womyn-born-womyn (WBW) only” of the MWMF. As one can guess, folk who identify as WBW are upset, and folk who identify as transgender or trans-affirming are happy as hell.

Let me explain the situation as neutrally as a transwoman can describe this situation:

To begin with (for those not aware), Bayard Rustin was a gay, black man who worked with MLK Jr. on civil rights. He’s probably most famously known for being the primary organizer for the March on Washington where MLK Jr. spoke to thousands.

There is a Bayard Rustin book out of his collected writings entitled Time On Two Crosses. In the piece in the book entitled From Montgomery to Stonewall, Rustin wrote:

[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment.

There is also a sociological “definition of a situation,” which states:

If a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences.

Given the circumstances of the “WBW only” policy of the MWMF, transpeople can successfully argue that a pro-womyn event is an anti-transgender event because the concept of segregation can be applied as a consequence of having pro-WBW events — and segregation is a civil rights buzz word. And, segregation can easily be parried into the concept of discrimination and inequality — the concept of “separate-but-equal” is a non-starter for most people these days.

What’s happened to Bitch may be functional censorship. It may be particularly unfair as Bitch’s partner is Daniela Sea [who played Max, a female-to-male transgendered person on the L Word, and uses the pronoun "ze" to refer to gender-ambiguous persons (like hirself)].

That said, transpeople are using what tools they have to to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest [perceived anti-trans] sentiment.

What tools would lesbians and other self-identified womyn use to deal with perceived segregation and discrimination against lesbians and other self-identified womyn? My guess would be the tools would be similar to the ones the transcommunity is using against Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival indirectly in their inflicting of consequences against Bitch and other performers who’ve played that festival.

Right or wrong, WBW have a hard sell ahead. The transcommunity has the narrative that’s easy to understand, and is an easier sell to the broader, trans-positive, LGBT community.

Hello To A Sense Of Superiority And All That

Last Tuesday I linked to the article Good-bye To Transgender And All That in my Tuesday Recommended Reading post. I’ve wanted to comment, but I’ve been feeling too ill to sit at my computer and write out a response (stupid IBS!).

Let me begin by saying Good-bye To Transgender And All That uses terms I don’t like: Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) and TS (for Transsexual Syndrome vice just transsexual). The syndrome of HBS and Transsexual Syndrome seem to be intentionally added to the terms to misdirect and misinform people that HBS and Transsexual Syndrome are medically recognized conditions. Regarding psychiatry and pathology, a syndrome is a very specific term referring to a group of symptoms that together are characteristic of a specific disorder, disease, or the like.*

HBS and Transsexual Syndrome didn’t originate from any medical or psychiatric publications’ peer review process — the terms are medical sounding terms made up by post-operative transsexuals that for the most part believe that post-operative transsexuals are entirely different from pre-operative or non-operative transsexuals, as well as other people who may fall under the transgender umbrella.

When we said we were not transgender, the leaders started telling us we were transgender by definition. Imagine my surprise when 30 years after sex reassignment surgery, which made me female, I learned that in the name of political expediency and without my consent I had been defined as something I am not.

When I started calling people who identified with the transgender movement on this act of colonizing my life they started calling me an elitist and warned about how I could not live without the support of the community. They told me how lesbian separatists hated my kind even though I lived among lesbian separatists and worked for a lesbian publication where they knew my personal history.

Over the past year, WBTs have been debating replacing the term “transsexual” with “TS” for “Transsexual Syndrome” or “HBS” for “Harry Benjamin Syndrome” in honor of Dr. Benjamin who first defined the syndrome and treated us as human beings in need of medical care and sex reassignment surgery.

Prior to 1979 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) pathologized transsexualism with the classification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) it tended to be treated as innate, something similar as to how homosexuality is currently treated.

Many, including Dr. Benjamin, saw it as being more of an intersex condition than a psychiatric one. Indeed the surgery that changes our sex from male to female is similar to other surgeries performed on intersex people with one major exception. It is performed on us after we have reached an age where we have the agency to give fully informed consent.

The author of Good-bye To Transgender And All That, Suzan Cooke, goes on to state in her article:

Those wishing to use post-sex reassignment surgery women for their own political purposes colonized us without the consent of many of us, claiming us as transgender because they believed it to be to their political advantage to have the public associate transgender with post-sex reassignment surgery women and men.

Because most of us assimilate as members of the sex that we have been reassigned to and are loathe to make spectacles of ourselves few stand up to contradict the politicos who claim to represent us. We do not march with the transgender community on Pride Day nor do we seek a “T” after LGB. Many of us are heterosexual and others like me are lesbians. If I march, I march with other lesbians. I do this even though I did at one point think the transgender community was a positive thing.

The transgender community is like a cult that pounds extremely negative messages into the heads of people treated for TS/HBS. Its fear mongering aims to convince post-sex reassignment surgery people to stay in the transgender ghetto rather than assimilate in to the world of members of their new sex.

And therein the last paragraph lies another problem with these HBS/Transsexual Syndrome separatists’ arguments — the proponents of HBS and Transsexual Syndrome have often defined transgender people who aren’t post-operative transsexuals with offensive terminology. It hasn’t been enough to describe themselves as different than other kinds of transsexuals/transpeople, but they use terminology that is meant to describe themselves as better than other transsexuals/transpeople, or describing other transsexuals/transpeople as lesser people than them.  And, the example of this superiority syndrome in Suzan Cooke’s aritcle is her describing pre-operative and non-operative transsexuals as living in a transgender ghetto.

Frankly, I’m not a fan of most kinds of separatist philosophies because most of their proponents usually embrace a “I’m superior to others” element. Call me a non-separatist who embraces more inclusive diversity models.

——
*syndrome. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved May 11, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/syndrome

I see someone else is having a bad day… To The Radical Feminism Transhaters… (Warning — that link isn’t a “work friendly” link.)

Excerpt from Marti’s blog:

I’ll even go further than brownfemipower did with her F*CK YOU post… KISS MY FAT F*CKING TRANNY ASS.

I really am sick of reading this fucking bullshit. I didn’t just walk into this and decide, YA KNOW, I WANT TO CUT MY DICK OFF! Truth is, I hate the testosterone that cycles through my body. It makes me feel f*cking nuts. Taking estrogen and blocking testosterone make me feel centered, and focused, and right. If I could, I’d just cut my testicles off and be done with it. In a Utopian world, I’d be able to do that and not be F*CKING ASSAULTED because I want to piss. I’d not have to make a choice between jail and being murdered or raped, or worse.

For you that want to play the victimization game has the patriarchal system in this country told you that because your a radical feminist that you:
CANT SEE YOUR CHILD?
HAVE BEEN PASSED OVER 16 TIMES, AND BE QUALIFIED FOR EVERY F*CKING ONE?
HAVE BEEN MADE FUN OF AT WORK BECAUSE YOUR A RADICAL FEMINIST?
HAD PICTURES OF YOU PUT UP AT WORK THAT HAD SHITTY COMMENTS ON THEM?
HAVE BEEN THE FREAK THAT PEOPLE COME DOWN TO YOUR DEPARTMENT GAWK AT?

Yup, another good day. Added with my blog about getting harassed while trying to get my hangnail looked at…The gawds are frowning at us TG’s this week, apparently.