Women Born Transsexual

Hi folks,

Something began to happen when I posted my report on Zucker’s threat (and oh my, this is starting to get really strange):
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/News/US/Zucker/The_webpage_Zucker_attempted_to_suppress.html

Other women began coming forward, saying they’d also received threats from Zucker. Seems I wasn’t singled out for special treatment after all. Zucker’s nastygram was part of a wider pattern of threats and intimidation that CAMH has been using to silence critics of his reparatist therapy.

I’ve just posted a report about all this. The report includes links to pdf’s of threatening letters sent to two additional women, and makes an appeal for others who’ve received such threats to come forward too:

“Kenneth Zucker’s legal threats: Part of a pattern of silencing transgender critics”
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/News/US/Zucker/Kenneth_Zucker’s_pattern_of_silencing_transgender_critics.html

It’s now clear that CAMH has engaged in the systematic issuance of falsely-concocted threats of legal action as a means of intimidating and silencing Zucker’s critics.

I wonder how Zucker’s colleagues in the American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Psychological Association (APA), Canadian Psychological Association (CPA), World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), and other relevant professional and licensing organizations will feel about this highly unethical practice – and the massive conflicts of interest involved.

Please pass this alert on to all interested parties.

All the best,

Lynn

Zoe Brain made a comment that is worthy of greater discussion:  (Edited to make more general)

“The problem is that by writing in this blog, you “out” yourself as a woman with an unusual medical past. You become one of those “Activists” to some degree.

The real problem is though that so many have it worse. How can I *not* help? And how can I retain my privacy when I *do* help?”

When I was part of Students for a Democratic Society/Weather Nation we spent a fair amount of time discussing “contradictions” and working to resolve them within ourselves.

We would first discover the contradiction.  As an example feeling resentful regarding being swept up by “transgender” ideology.

Part of WBT is ownership of self.  Autonomy.  This means telling those who use “transgender as umbrella” that we find this an unacceptable act of colonization, a form of imperialism that makes it difficult if not impossible to function as a coalition of equal in working upon issues that may well affect both our groups.

Mind you that what set me as well as my partners and others off on the path to WBT was refusal on the umbrellaists  to use “transsexual and transgender”.

We did not feel we were transgender because  our sense of self was different from that described as part of what defined transgender.  Our attempt at reconciling those differences by saying transsexual and transgender were angrily rebuffed.  We were told to shut up and when we continued to state our case many forums silenced us.  Others defamed us.

I faced a chioce I could shut up and let the bullies win or I could continue to speak out even if that meant being open within a sub-culture.

I’m a life long activist with many causes so I do not have much of a problem speaking up regarding what I see as injustices.  I think this is part of personal courage that come out and start the process of becoming female in 1969 rather than living behind a mask until middle age. Granted this in and of itself represents the resolving of a number of contradictions and is the result of not one major act but many, many small acts of courage.

For me, but not necessarily others.  I am a person in history.  Not the big history of presidents and kings but the small history as described by Howard Zinn and Studs Turkel.  I was part of the early history.  Treated by Dr. Benjamin and was one of the first few “Transsexual Activists”.  Historian Susan Stryker impressed this fact upon me.

The simple act of giving an oral history placed me within this context.

I started attending events and I’ve had an on line presence within various mailing lists for over 12 years.  I discovered that we are a sub-culture and one can attend an event or conference and walk outside of that conference and not have the larger culture see you as a member of that sub-culture.  Granted this works better for some than for others.

Much depends on what you personally want, what you find important.  I’m writing a memoir that places my coping with transsexualism within the frame work of other history that also caused me to be part of Weather, aiding deserters, the NTCU, the lesbian movement and a feminist.

I believe it is important for us to tell our individual stories.  You may not feel that way. Your life path may well be different.

Life experiences vary.  A decade ago on the net we used YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) when describing this.

I take stands.  Taking stands is not required unless you want to.

If it is any comfort I too have had to struggle with the contradictions of wanting to be just ordinary and knowing that like the Act-Up slogan “Silence = Death”, even if it is the small death of having my own life experiences dismissed and surrendering my self to the control of others.

I personally believe standing up for what you believe in is one of those existential acts of courage that defines us as individuals.

YMMV

One of the people viewing this Blog found my use of the term queen offensive and called me out on it.

To me it seems almost as though when people who were heterosexual cross dressers became transgender and started to demand a T stuck on to the L & G that there was a near simultaneous erasing of those people who lived 24/7 as women in the days when that meant risking arrest simply for existing.

From my point of view there has always seemed to be a shade of heterosexism in the claims of certain people who wear the label of transgender + lesbian, especially when some of those who wear that label look down on two sisters who get together.

But that aside I considered myself a teen queen long before the term transkid existed.

In 1967 a drag pagaent in New York City was filmed and made into a movie starring Rachael Harlow called “The Queen”.  I saw it a year or so later.

Some of us were queens because we were figuring out how to get hormones and sex change operations at a time when we knew about Dr. Benjamin’s book but could not obtain a copy.

Others of us were queens because after we became throwaway or runaway kids we were raised by wolves and hustling was the only way to survive.

The queens who fought the police at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin of San Francisco 1966 called themselves queens as did those who fought during the three nights of the Stonewall Rebellion.

They were more my sisters than were those who came out through Tri-Ess and were horrified by our anarchic sexuality.

We partied together and over the years I cried when I learned they had passed away.

I used to feel closer to them than I did toward people who came out in their mid-life after heterosexual marriage and becoming a parent although those that I knew from 1970s Hollywood are now deceased.  Hard lives, lived fast.

Now many of the sisters I know have come out later and I can see more sameness than I could see in the 1970s.

Those of us who came out in the 1960s and 70s have a different point of view regarding much of today’s thinking regarding people with transsexualism and their place in the scheme of things than do the transgender activists.

We didn’t view our transsexualism as something that made us transsexuals our whole lives and we definitely saw SRS as a dividing line between being women and being queens/transgenders.

Passing was something one did before SRS.  It meant you had something to hide.

I don’t recall there even being a term like stealth for post-SRS women in the 1970s.  We were female after surgery and just assimilated into the world of women.  Some of us married men, some of us became hard core lesbian feminists.

One of Janice Raymonds bad raps regarding WBTs in the women’s movement and lesbian feminist movement had very McCarthesque overtones that put forth the proposition that as women we were so much like other women as to blend in with other women in the movement.  A red under every bed/ A WBT in every feminist collective.

I happened to be really open about my history because I was so indistinguishable and because I had years of immaculate Left as well as LGBT/T credentials many movement women knew my history.  I had a certain continuity.

I also helped run the San Francisco National Transsexual Counseling Unit with funding from the Reed Erickson Foundation.  Reed was a T to M MBT from Baton Rouge who funded many of the early transsexual peer to peer groups.

Like most transsexual groups of the time our purpose was to help each other get our sex change operations. The expectation that was pretty implicit in our mission was that after SRS we were women or men as the case maybe and that we would leave the ghetto behind.

In those days there were physical places (Ghettos) where one could be an obvious drag queen or otherwise in between the sexes and not be harassed by the police.

I never lived in one.  I found the ghetto a scary place both physically and spiritually.

Transgender activists want us to stay in those ghettos and feel our just being the ordinary women and men we can be (but are not forced to be) after our sex reassignment surgery is some how an act of treason.  I have never understood how I could betray something I was never a part of but that is another article.

They use the term stealth as a pejorative term for our simply getting on with our lives, the presumption being that if we do not wear a t-shirt proclaiming our past then we are somehow hiding something.

This denies us the right to having personally determined complex lives within the ordinary society of men and women.  Therefore calling our assimilation “stealth” has a textual reading that makes our assimilation seem both dishonest and a betrayal of this activist generated social construct call the “Transgender Community”.

I am not part of the Transgender Community.

I am not part of some transgender activist’s ratty assed umbrella.  So don’t call me transgender.  Calling me transgender is an insult.

This is particularly true since the term was coined by a misogynistic transsexual hating dirty old man in a dress named ….  Well he had so many freaking names I don’t know where to start so I’ll settle on the last two Charles Prince aka Virginia Prince.

Out of my own decency I will use she and Virginia just as I would with any other drag queen or heterosexual transvestite.

Back before she went full time or transgender she penned one of the vilest most misogynistic pieces of literature I’ve read.

The feminist community didn’t get drag queens but they have historic location within the L/G world that also embraced lesbian butch/femme roles.

Prince wrote a short book called A Transvestite and His Wife a rather strange maual teaching transvestite how to keep their wive under their thumbs.  She outline all the lies and the con jobs to use as strategies.

She was one of the founders of Tri-Ess, a homophobic organization for heterosexual cross dressers only.  It was filled with men claimed pure hetrosexuality and an abhorence toward those transsexuals who had their dicks cut off so they could become transvestites with inverted penises.  (Their language not mine).

Prince had an absolute hatred for post-SRS women who came out as lesbians.  At best considering us transvestites who went too far.

Prince had a fondness for coining terms because transvestite suggested..  I don’t know what since the terms she came up with like femmophile, cross dresser and transgender failed to add anything to the discourse.

But it is particularly that last term “transgender”.  I had little problem with its initial usage as it did describe a demographic consisting of people who lived full time as women, taking hormones, having breast implants, facial surgery and electrolysis who looked similar to transsexuals but with an essential difference of likng  penises and not really wanting sex reassignment surgery.

Okay transgender has greater dignity than drag queen and creates a term somewhere inbetween transvestite and transsexual, which is fine if you believe there is a continuum and not several similar appearing categories that in reality bear only superficial points of commonality.

All well and good until the 1990s when I suddenly found my life and dignity co-opted by a bunch of penis people who claimed I was just like them.  Now being a strong willed woman with a radical past and a potty mouth I answered that colonization with a hearty, “Fuck this shit!”

I am not transgender, hell I’m so far past transsexual that it is a purely historical artifact residing in medical records.

I like the idea of WBT or Women Born Transsexual or women with a transsexual history but I’m not a member of a community that includes people who live full time as members of a sex not co-ordinated with their current genitals.

I give a hearty fuck you to anyone who tries to colonize me with retroactively extending the definition backwards to sex assigned at birth.

That is a gross violation of my autonomy and right to self define.  It fascist and as oppressive as anything handed out by the right wing or Cristofascists.

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/126674/roses_are_red%2C_lipstick_(still)_has_lead/

By Stacy Malkan, AlterNet
Posted on February 14, 2009, Printed on February 16, 2009

Any day now, President Obama will name the head of the Food and Drug Administration, and the question is: Will the new FDA revive its passion for the public interest, or continue giving consumers the toxic kiss off?

Case in point: lead in lipstick. More than a year after health groups in the U.S. reported that top-selling lipsticks contain lead, FDA is sitting on the results of its own research.

Meanwhile, new tests reveal that lipstick isn’t the only make-up with a heavy-metal problem. Health Canada announced last week that if found lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium during routine testing of children’s face paints. The results were immediately announced to the public as the government evaluates next steps.

Health Canada is also conducting a major review of chemicals in cosmetics, and creating an “ingredient hotlist” to prevent harmful chemicals from entering beauty products in the future.

Here at home, Americans are left to wonder about the safety of cosmetics.  Unlike Health Canada, the U.S. FDA has no toxic-chemical designation, does not conduct routine safety testing of personal care products, and — as the lipstick saga shows — doesn’t even bother to share its science with the public.

Lead in Lipstick Jungle

The story began with internet rumors claiming that popular brands of lipstick contained lead, a highly toxic heavy metal that can affect brain development at the lowest doses.

Not true, said the cosmetics industry.

True, according to tests conducted in October 2007 by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics: 61% of the lipsticks tested contained lead, including a $24 tube of Christian Dior Addict and six L’Oreal brands. (In contrast, a $1.99 tube of Wet & Wild and several Revlon lipsticks did not contain lead).

FDA said it would conduct its own analysis, and several U.S. Senators urged FDA to test a wide range of lipsticks, publicly report the results, and take immediate action to reduce lead exposure from cosmetics.

Fourteen months later, FDA has made no public statements, issued no report and taken no action to reduce lead exposures.

It takes about 10 days to turn around lead tests in a lab, so what’s the hold up? FDA is saying they will not release their study until it is published in a peer-reviewed journal — a process that could take years.

In the meantime, don’t expect any action from the beauty industry. L’Oreal has repeatedly dismissed concerns about lead with the statement that their brands are “in full compliance with FDA regulations.”

Unfortunately, FDA doesn’t regulate lead in cosmetic products.

Bush-era Tactics

This isn’t the first time FDA has kept science from the public with the peer-review journal excuse. In 2002, environmental groups reported that 70% of personal care products tested contained phthalates, a set of industrial chemicals linked to birth defects and infertility.

FDA conducted its own study of phthalates in cosmetics in 2003 but did not release the data despite a Freedom of Information Act request filed by environmental groups. The FDA study eventually appeared — three years later — in a journal edited by an Estee Lauder staffer.

The public was not notified, the article cost $35, and the raw data was not disclosed as required by law.

So what’s going on at the FDA Office of Cosmetics?

As I wrote in my book, “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry,” in recent years, the agency has served more as a marketing arm for the beauty industry than a watchdog for public health.

User-Friendly FDA

“The new reality, unfortunately, when you look at the federal budget, is that there will be no federal funding available to FDA — either this year or in the foreseeable future — to focus on cosmetics,” lamented Pamela Bailey in her first speech as president of the cosmetics industry trade association in 2006.

Bailey was lamenting because, as she explained, “we know that industry needs FDA as the tough cop on the beat to protect us, and to reassure consumers.”

Wait — isn’t the cop on the beat supposed to protect us, the American public?

Unfortunately, FDA has few resources to protect people from toxic cosmetics. But the agency does a good job of reassuring consumers, according to focus groups conducted for the cosmetics industry by right-wing messaging guru Frank Luntz.

Lexie Shultz, who sat though a three-hour focus group about cosmetic safety in 2006, reported that participants reacted most favorably to messages from the government. “People were willing to believe FDA,” Shultz said. “The FDA comforted people.”

Comments from participants included “FDA is strong” and “Nothing would get through FDA if it wasn’t safe.”

The reality is, FDA lacks the authority to fulfill this expectation. Under current law, FDA can’t require companies to safety test cosmetics and can’t even require product recalls. In cases where FDA does have authority — for example to recommend limits for hazardous substances such as lead — well … take a seat and wait a while.

FDA does, however, have a good reputation over at the cosmetics industry trade association.

At an industry conference in 2006, John Bailey, former head of the FDA cosmetics office and current spokesman for the industry trade association, was introduced with these words by conference moderator Meyer Rosen: “(John) has always been on our side, even when he worked with the FDA. He was always willing to give us an inside voice.”

Several speakers at the conference joked about Bailey being “user friendly” to industry during his tenure at FDA. Bailey joked back, “If I’d known I was so user friendly, I would have been a bit tougher.”

Compare this to FDA’s relationship with consumer groups: When a Campaign for Safe Cosmetics staffer called FDA to find out how many people work in the Office of Cosmetics and Colors, she was told to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

Time for a Makeover

All this has deeper implications than the lead that obviously doesn’t need to be in lipstick. It’s about the food we all eat, the medicines we take, and the products we put on our bodies and our babies.

Way back when I had my sex reassignment surgery I wasnt as common as dirt.  Being a woman born transsexual, especialy a post-SRS WBT was good for a dinner and perhaps a speaking honorarium. By the 1980s there were so many of us guys started recognizing the peculuar graft scar Dr. Laub gave a bunch of us on the west coast and it was as though there were hundreds of us in the Hollywood/West Hollywood area alone.

But I worked with the National Transsexual Counseling Unit and I was dedicated to helping the doctors with their reaserch.  I answered questionaires for years on end.  Until the religious right wingers started slipping in studies that were aimed at pathologizing us into being transgender etc.

More and more I found the “research” was more aimed at gathering material to support a pre-odained conclusion than it was at actual research.  Questionaires that demanded we pick a choice from a limited set of answers when the real answer was “none of the above”.

So I started answering them in an appropriately surrealistic manner.  Now Arlene, who claims to be a friend of the transgender community although she ghettoizes WBTs in the same category as transvestite, albeit full time cross dressers  has announced a forum.  One that no doubt costs money to attend there by furthering the exploitation.

I’ve included part of Lev’s announcement along with a reply from Andrea

Transgender Research Forum

The Transgender Project has been funded by a five-year grant from the  National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded to the National Development and Research Institutes (NDRI) in New York City. The Transgender Project is designed to describe the economic, social and personal, family and workplace experiences of male to female trans-persons, and has compiled data on issues of HIV, depression, and gender identification and disclosure.
From Andrea

This is an insult to the existence of any woman born transsexual, let alone the American taxpayer.

The fact that the NIH has funded this voyeuristic nonsense, is nuts by any standard.

This is not research, it is voyeurism.

The United States has lost its lead in several areas of science such as stem cell research, energy efficiency, nuclear fusion and material science. This announcement tells anyone outside the United States of America, exactly why.

It is clearly obvious that the National Institutes of Health, over the last 20 years has been steadily infiltrated by anti-science voyeurists. They approve funding for this type of nonsense and fetishists, who have a need to impose there fetishes on others, by funding instruments of racism and Nazi ideology such as the Chicago North Western and Toronto CAMH.

Women born transsexual and men born transsexual do need some National Institutes of Health funded research into better surgery outcomes in all areas of transsexual surgery, such as facial feminisation surgery, voice surgery, vaginaplasty, vaginectomy and phalloplasty, as well as short/long term hormone care.

Transsexual people do not need a bunch of voyeuristic perverts to be funded to get there rocks of at the expense of transsexual people.

As for how transsexual people life there lives, here is some hard facts.

When transsexual people get away from the ghetto imposed by the mindset of those who came up with this nonsense, they live there lives like everyone else.

They pay there bills, get mortgages, struggle with the bills, try to get pension plans sorted out, shop for food, etc. Some of you may recognize that as the exact same things as the rest of the human population.

In the Ghetto, where they have less rights, somethings are at the permission of those running the ghetto. This takes personal control and personal responsibility away from those in the ghetto.

Imposed Ghetto’s, create bizarre behavior. Creating a Ghetto, screwing up a section of the population and then stating that is naturally how they behave, is what Himmler did in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940/41.

Hopefully soon, the new president will realize there is racists / xenophobes and Nazi’s in the USA who need federal government funding cut of, permanently.

Andrea

By Charles Flores
Malta Independent

The gay community and its sympathisers all over the world are up in arms following Pope Benedict XVI’s less than kind reference to their cause at a time when they thought they had breached the bastions of utter contempt and obvious prejudice in civilised society. As with other trends and social commotions, the issue has also had its repercussions among us, living as we undoubtedly are in a horrific haven of conservatism.

The fact that there have been exponents of the local gay scene who have had the courage of their convictions, and publicly declared their disgust at the attitude of the Catholic Church, can perhaps be described as an isolated pot shot on behalf of those, gay or not, who genuinely believe there can be no going back to when society could, at will, victimise innocent, law-abiding and tax-paying people whose only “crime” was their different sexual orientation.

The Pope’s recent utterance sent shivers down the spines of liberal people everywhere. It also, perhaps all too quickly and perhaps it was rather far-fetched, re-ignited fears from well over half a century ago about the fate of gay people even in the 21st century. The horrors committed in Nazi Germany against gay people form a substantial part of the whole concentration camp human tragedy best projected in the media and Hollywood films by its millions of Jewish victims, but which also included socialists, communists, trade-unionists and other progressive social players at that shameful moment in time in world history.

Suffice to say that even at the end of World War II in Europe, when the Allies finally reached the concentration camps and frantically tried to bring back some sanity to those poor people’s lives. However, the gays imprisoned in those horrible places of torture and death were not released as were the rest of the thousands of other skeletal inmates. And why? Because gays were still considered taboo then and “a danger to society”, even by the democratic forces of the time. While the Jews and the Left wing progressive elements of those camps were freed and underwent a personal rehabilitation programme, gays were sent directly to prisons in their respective countries. Freedom was won, but not for everyone.

Justice has never been an accessible realm for them, alas. The refreshing changes that occurred during the Sixties had their obvious effect on the gay scene. People suddenly were no longer afraid to reveal their sexual orientation, no doubt a welcome offshoot of the generally happy and peaceful scene that nurtured the back-to-nature trends of the period, the flower-in-your-hair mentality, the anti-war movement and the awesome realisation that society’s rules could after all be changed for the better. They were, which is why the first openly gay media, mostly newspapers and magazines, came to be, and then gaining strength and recognition all through the Seventies and Eighties.

The backlash, however, was inevitable. Society’s forces of darkness have since been waiting for the chance to hit back. The Sixties and Sixties people were never forgiven. Even on the local front there have been politicians, one or two of them still active in the public domain, who openly insisted that the liberal wave of the Sixties had been a “negative” event and therefore needed to be reversed. It is a view held by conservatives and the Right everywhere, including the European Union where we have also had the minority of Nationalist MEPs voting very strangely on gay issues, stuck as they are within the primitive groove of the so-called popular party set-up.

At a time when gays were finally feeling safe in the knowledge that the world no longer sees them as criminals or dangerous human beings, even in ultra-conservative Malta that is still without a divorce law, let alone same-sex marriage, out comes the head of the universal Catholic Church to abruptly drive them back into persecution mode.

As it has done over so many centuries, during which the wrongs of the time – from the relation of earth to the sun and the importance of Church-State separation – were soon found to be right, the Catholic Church continues to resist life’s progressive needs, which include a change in mentality with regard to people of a different sexual orientation. While tactics have changed from utter arrogance to obvious soft-soaping, the message remains the same: the Church is against, the Church dictates, the Church does not want change, the Church refuses to move forward, the Church is not open to everyone, the Church prefers to live in the past.

A former member of Hitler Youth, Pope Benedict XVI chose to use words that hurt those who have been hoping for so long that they can one day feel they belong to the Catholic Church. To be made to feel excluded, as openly as gay people were in Nazi Germany (there were many closet ones within the Fuhrer arm’s reach!), gays today are rightly angered. They have won and continue to win many a civil battle, but on the religious front they seem caught in a downward spiral, which not only reverses the clock, but also creates a new danger: conservative governments and conservative politicians.

When politicians need the psychological assistance of church and churchmen, they are only too willing to stop the movement for social change and so stay within the happy and warm embrace of those who can assure them of votes and power. If the leader of an important world religion chooses to “halt the wave”, obliging politicians are expected to toe the line and join in the race back to the prejudice and injustice of many decades past.

Maltese society at large has changed, as we have seen from decisions taken in our Law Courts where such cases as sex-reassignment procedures are concerned and the attitude to gays in general in the villages and towns, but there is still so much to be done. As expected, the Bishops have come out repeating and amplifying the Pope’s recent stance, soft-soap and all. But there’s no going back. I honestly believe Malta has gone past the stage where people can be made to do and believe things that are contrary to their nature. All that was lost in the Sixties when the progressive forces on the island were ready to forfeit power until society was mature enough to accept their ideas and proposals for a fairer, more positive secular life. They were vindicated in the early Seventies when this nation finally leaped into what was still then the 20th century.

To even think of taking us back to where we were at that time would be an insult and I am sure the vast majority of people do not think it can be done. Hopefully, it is the same all over the world. Spain has shown it has the resolve to resist, the Scandinavians do not even worry about it, the British remain steadfast in their own special ways and the Americans, well, they have overwhelmingly voted Barack Obama in. So it’s not all bleak, after all.

I am sure gays and believers in human rights everywhere hope the Church too has its own Obama ready and willing and who will one day guide it back into humane ways.

I’m lucky in a way.  Because I came out young I have my entire adult history as a woman.  That is 40 years in a couple of months.  I actually have friends that go back that long.

Until very recently I didn’t have friends that went further back.  Writing my memoir caused me to think about some of the people I went to high school with since the last three years I was in school were the best three of any period from Kindergarten through Senior.

I went to a small school in upstate New York.  I was a new transkid in school and the bullies immediately picked up on me and started in.  But there was also this group of really nice kids who became my friends.

When I left home in 1967 being born with transsexualism was a thing of shame.  I cut myself off from all the people I knew.

I recently signed up at Classmates.com using my current name.

One of my classmates contacted me, a very sweet woman who had been especially kind to me.  She was a wonderful girl and very kind to me when I was barely managing to keep from committing suicide.  She made a difference in my life.

It turns out her mother worked in the school office and handled my request for a change of name and sex on my school records way back in 1970.  Her mother told her and swore her to secrecy.  So all these years she has wondered as have other people.

We’ve exchanged a couple of letters.

Those who make everything about gender and transgender this, transgender that miss a very important thing.  My core sense of self never changed.  The trappings of gender might have.  What I changed was my body and sex to fit the core of identity.  In some ways core sex identity makes more sense to those of us who have sex change operations than gender identity.

Now this may be more true of those who come out young but I suspect it isn’t.  I suspect that those who come out later were just a little better at hiding who they really are.

(Washington) A new report on workplace equality shows rapid expansion of protections for transgender workers in the private sector over the past decade.

The State of the Workplace report found that 60 of the Fortune 100 largest businesses and nearly half of the nation’s largest law firms and colleges now prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.

The report was prepared by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the HRC.

It found that currently 35 percent – a total of 175 – of the Fortune 500 businesses have gender identity protections, including 60 of the top 100 Fortune-ranked businesses.  In 2000, just three of the Fortune 500 businesses had such protections.

Furthermore, HRC said, 85 percent of the Fortune 500 businesses now have protections based on sexual orientation, compared to 51 percent in 2000.

“This report shows that the country’s largest and most competitive employers are most likely to have added protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation, setting consistent expectations of equal opportunity for their employees and job applicants regardless of where they work in the United States,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese.

The report also assesses the current state of employment laws and employer policies surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation throughout the United States.

For the first time, more than 100 cities and counties now prohibit employment discrimination based on both gender identity and sexual orientation.  Already, twelve states and the District of Columbia have protections in place.  An additional eight states and 80 cities and counties prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation alone.

In addition, the report said, more employers have improved benefits to ensure fair treatment of LGBT employees and their families.

Since 2006, a majority of Fortune 500 companies have offered benefits to same-sex partners of employees.  Today, 57 percent – a total of 286 – of the Fortune 500 companies offer domestic partner benefits.  Removing discriminatory exclusions for medically necessary, transgender-specific treatment is a rapidly-emerging trend, the report said.  Eighteen of the Fortune 100 now provide transgender-inclusive health insurance, compared to just one in 2001.

Several major California businesses publicly and financially opposed Proposition 8 in 2008, and more than 50 major businesses have joined the Business Coalition for Workplace Fairness, which supports passing federal legislation that would add both gender identity and sexual orientation to existing classes protected under federal employment law.

“Millions of people work in cities, counties and states where discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation is still legal. Particularly as so many workers are losing their jobs, no one should have to face the added worry of losing their job simply because of who they are. Employers and lawmakers alike should support the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act to establish clear and consistent expectations that workers should be evaluated based on their ability to do their job — and not based on their gender identity or sexual orientation,” said Solmonese in a statement.

“German pop star Kim Petras has revealed that she underwent sex reassignment surgery late last year at the age of 16, becoming what some are calling the world’s youngest transsexual.”

Semantics…  Since we are born transsexual rather than becoming transsexual upon receiving sex reassignment surgery the labeling of her as the world’s youngest is a tad inaccurate.

Other transkids with hip sensitive parents have had their SRS at an early age as well.  Indeed it would probably be ideal were all of us to have such enlightened parents.

I have already heard the hissing coming from the self appointed transgender leaders down playing her public announcement of having completed her sex reassignment surgery.  The slagging off on her because she is more a typical teenage girl than a transgender spokesperson.

Some people seem upset because she is more sweet sixteen and into being a pop star and not deconstructing gender.  Never mind that female pop stars are out there doing something that is quite feminist even if it doesn’t wear the language of feminism and that is charting their own life course.

Being born with transsexualism and then doing something as public as being a performer is a hard path.  There have been some like Amanda Lear who have taken this path with some success.

I wish Kim all the best.

Feb. 6, 2009

Clitoraid Announces Its First 5 Clitoral Reconstructive Surgeries in U.S.

Genital mutilation victims enjoy new pleasure and dignity, thanks to science.

(BLACK PR WIRE)LAS VEGAS, Feb. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Honoring Feb. 6 as a worldwide “Zero Tolerance Day” for the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), Las Vegas-based Clitoraid.org announced that its first five U.S. clitoral reconstructive surgeries will be performed Feb. 17 at the Trinidad, Colo., clinic of Dr. Marci Bowers, who has volunteered her services.

“Five women who endured hideous mutilation in their native African countries will finally recover their pleasure and dignity,” said Clitoraid spokesperson Nadine Gary.

Bowers, a world-renowned surgeon, has appeared on Oprah Winfrey and other TV shows. She is an expert in gender reassignment surgery and other sex-related procedures.

Gary emphasized that these first surgeries are only the preamble to a much larger project — completion of a “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso, West Africa, where thousands of FGM victims will have the procedure done for free, performed by volunteer surgeons.

“Rael [www.rael.org], the international spiritual leader and Clitoraid’s founder, launched this project,” Gary said, adding that the revolutionary surgery gives hope to some 150 million FGM victims worldwide. As children or adolescents, each underwent the horror of having her clitoris brutally sliced off by a female family member.

“The intent behind this barbaric practice is to curb the female sex drive at puberty, thus ensuring virtuous, virgin brides and faithful wives,” Gary said. “It’s incredibly painful — done without an anesthetic, using a knife or razor blade or even broken glass.”

The mutilation leaves deep physical and emotional scars, including a sense of shame.

“It even shatters the victim’s marriage, since she won’t be sexually aroused,” Gary explained. “And it slashes her self esteem, which in turn affects her children. That’s why we follow up post-surgery with an intensive sex reeducation program designed by sexologist Dr. Betty Dodson. The reconstructed clitoris needs specific daily stimulation to fully recover its pleasurable function. Meanwhile, the patient’s psyche must be freed from shame, so she can enjoy those newly discovered, wonderful sensations.”

Gary said Clitoraid’s ultimate goal is to permanently eliminate FGM.

“We use science to repair the physical damage, and love to understand not only the victims but the circumcisers, who were sexually mutilated themselves,” Gary said. “We tell them sexual pleasure is noble and virtuous. It’s a fundamental right for all human beings — women included!”

Contact Information

Panteha Naghi
of Clitoraid,
1-702-513-2387,
int-administration@clitoraid.org

Feb 6, 2009 · posted by Japhy Grant ·

I came on line in 1996.  In those days the place to be was the Usenet aka News Groups.  There were groups such as “soc.support.transgender” and “alt.support.SRS”.

They were noisy and often times nasty places to discuss issues.  It was there I started to realize that much of the transgender theory was pretty much misogynistic towards all sorts of women including WBTs.  Women didn’t have the right to define who was a woman.  Not when that definition fell into the common sense area of saying something to the effect of “Women are adult people with vaginas.  They come in all shapes and sizes but they have vaginas. Some have interests defined as feminine along with accompanying modes of dress etc and some are butch with interests often defined as masculine etc.”

I got in trouble for arguing the women are adult female people because the transgender people started using language I had previously heard only from Janice Raymond and ultra right wing Taliban Christians.

I thought, “so much for the idea of getting together and singing the old Sister Sledge anthem of “We are Family, All my sisters and me”

One of the nastiest people I encountered on the Uselessnet was some one called Laura Blake aka Laura Masters who was very proud of having backed out of getting SRS as the gurney reached the Operating Room.

Laura Blake was the first person I ever heard use the terms “cis-sexual” and “cis-gender”.  Now perhaps she took those terms from Judy Butler who raised the unreadable jargon laden post modernist/deconstructionalist academic writing style to a high art.  I wouldn’t know as found Butler’s writing too stupidly painful to finish.

But cis-sexual and cis-gender are manufactured words for non-transsexual and non-transgender.  They are words you will not find on this blog except in quotes.

Another term I really hate is “gender variant” as that implies that there is such a thing as gender that isn’t infinitely variable from culture to culture and era to era. Gender is about masculinity and femininity and I find too much obsessing about it to be far more conservative in ideology than feminist or liberationist.

To paraphrase a recent quip from Paul Krugman’s Blog “What do you get when you cross a Godfather with a Post-Modernist Gender Theorist?  Someone who will make you an offer that you can’t understand.”

I started living full time and taking hormones in 1969 as a prelude to getting a sex-change operation three years later.  When I “came out”, which meant telling my friends I was transsexual and felt like I was trapped in the wrong body I used language they could understand without a degree in Gender Studies.

I told them I hated being male and wanted to have a sex change operation to become female.  My sum total of serious information on transsexualism was Dr. Harry Benjamin’s book, The Transsexual Phenomena. I didn’t even have the hard cover edition but instead a poorly produced paperback edition yet it was enough information for me to negotiate my path to finding initial medical treatment.

I started hormones and they started changing my body by altering my secondary sexual characteristics.  My nipples became sore and itchy and my boobs started growing.

It was all rather simple.  I met other sisters and eventually went to work at the Reed Erickson funded National Transsexual Organization.  Sisters helping sisters get their sex change operations.

We never really talked all that much about gender.  Some of us were feminist, in retrospect most of us were because that was a big deal in those days.

I had a boy friend and so to did many of my sisters.  My particular peer group mostly came out young and were described as primaries.  There was another group of people living mainly in the suburbs who came out in middle age and had wives and children.  They were called secondaries.  But when we met at the Stanford Program we discovered we had far more in common than different.

We were starting to learn that we in fact had more in common with those sisters who came out later in life and were attracted to women than we had with queens who were our age and were also attracted to men.

In the language of today the queens were transgender and were more about gender than about becoming female.

We used to say, “We’re all queens until the operation makes us real women.”

I wrote a term paper where I used the phrase “core gender identity” to describe that feeling of being trapped in the wrong body.  Were I to write that today I would probably use “core sex identity” instead.

Now what we called our ‘sex change operations” or simply “The Operation” goes by dozens of different euphemisms instead of the formal name of “Sex Reassignment Surgery”…  Gender Reassignment Surgery, Gender Affirmation Surgery, Genital reconstruction Surgery.

All of these seem aimed at erasing the reality that humans are sexed by the majority of people in the same basic way other animals are.  If the subject being looked at has a vagina she is female or conversely if the subject has a penis he is male.  all the cultural baggage of gender tends to be assigned to a person based on that visual examination.

Now transgender finds a space in generalized assumptions of gender being consistent with that sexual assignment of female or male and so it is possible to be socially accepted as a member of the a certain sex based on one’s performing of gender or the sex role behavior consistent with the expectations of a member of an assumed sex.

As you can see there is a linear progression into what seems to bear a resemblance to word games.

She is some one who was born with a condition that has been called by a number of different name.  Commonly called transsexualism with HBS or Harry Benjamin Syndrome growing in popularity among some people who have come to view the term transsexualism as carrying too much baggage.

Woman born transsexual or WBT is a political statement of self definition, a declaration of independence from the suffocation of the overly crowded big tent of the “Transgender Community.”

When we started out we were rather angry with the refusal of the transgender community to use the simple phrase transsexual and transgender with no particular priority given to placement.

We often share common oppressions but we are not the same.  Particularly true of those of us who have completed Sex Reassignment Surgery.  Indeed most often our sharing of community tends to be during a period of transition with those of us who have SRS leaving that big tent to assimilate into the world of women.

But the purpose of this blog is not to tear the scabs off old wounds and to return to a level of animosity similar to that of 2000-2001.

There are far more important issues than fighting with transgender activists.

Among those issues are the removal of Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM.  Ending the performing of reparative therapy on transkids.  Removing the pseudo-science of the psychiatric mob and all there pathologizing psycho-babble about gender from dominating the discourse regarding the lives of people with transsexualism.

People with transsexualism should be the people in control of the processes that affect our lives.

Access to truthful information regarding our medical options and peer counseling are preferable to the current system that has psychiatric professionals who are often too cozy with the people who pathologized homosexuality deciding the information we recieve and determining our access to medical treatments.