Women Born Transsexual

Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born but rather becomes a woman.”

I have always marveled at the stupidity of the phrase, Woman born woman in all its myriad of spellings.  Like the phrase, “But.. You were born a man.”

No one is born either a man or a woman.  We are all born babies and we grow into boys and girls and from there to women and men.

A far more accurate phrase is women born female, a phrase that takes into account the privilege of being “normborn”.

I describe myself with the phrase, “woman born transsexual”.  I was not “normborn”.  I was born different in a society where the abuse from cradle to grave of people born transsexual or transgender is the norm.

As an obvious transkid I was pretty much denied my right to go to school with out daily walking a gauntlet of physical and emotional abuse.

My path to womanhood was not nurtured or socialized by reward and encouragement.  Indeed parents and society tried to kill it to force me to grow into something that was so unnatural for me that it would have required me to live a complete fiction.

Now I can understand a feminist pharmacy providing that which is needed for the exercise of reproductive rights.

You see I am totally outraged at the fact that some faith based bigots have seen fit to deny women access to things like birth control, emergency contraception and RU 486.

I wonder if the women who would deny WBTs and TG women access to a safe place for them to also fill their prescriptions are aware that the Christo-fascists have taken it upon themselves to also deny us the filling of our legitimate prescriptions for hormones that we need to keep our bodies functioning.

The personal is the political.  Even if some people with born with transsexualism or transgenderism can hide it and stay in the closet at great emotional cost and in doing so amass a lot of male privilege there is very little in this world to compare with coming out trans for hitting the down button on the mobility elevator.

In parts of The Second Sex de Beauvoir talks about the misogyny directed towards feminine males and the US version was published some 4 years before Christine got her SRS.

In some 40 years of being a feminist and a WBT I’ve met some WBTs who embraced stereotypes but I’ve also met WBTS and WBTG folks who have a far better understanding of the oppression women face at the lower end of the social spectrum than many of those WBF with normborn privilege who have had the educations we were denied.

And the funny thing is we know women are not born women.  They grow up to be women in the same fucked up misogynistic, woman hating world we grew up in.

With one exception WBF are not treated as though they are mentally ill the way WBTs are.

On many level the rationalization behind the phrase woman born woman resembles the reasons given by the Christo-Fascists as to why we should not allow same sex couples to marry.  It is both bigoted ansd illogical.  Because it is faith based bigotry those discriminated against have all their arguments against the abuse being meted out by the dominant oppressor treated as the blitherings of perverts.

http://www.progressive.org/mpstannow062909.html

Transgender people should not be sentenced to rape

By Lovisa Stannow

June 29, 2009

Prison officials need to do more to protect inmates from sexual assault. And there is one group of inmates whose vulnerability has gone all but unnoticed — and that’s people who are transgender.

The majority of U.S. corrections systems house inmates based on their birth gender, disregarding other factors, such as physical appearance that may be entirely feminine (including breasts) or government identity documents that categorize these individuals as female.

Not surprisingly, while in men’s detention facilities, most transgender women are sexually assaulted.

A recent academic study of the experiences of hundreds of transgender women in California’s men’s prisons — a survey that was commissioned by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — revealed that 59 percent of male-to-female transgender prisoners had been sexually assaulted while incarcerated. A shocking 0 percent of these inmates considered prison officials to be allies in protecting their physical safety.

These statistics, alas, tell only one part of the story. Transgender women who have been raped behind bars speak about the additional abuse they suffer once they file a sexual assault report or request medical and mental health treatment. Rather than receiving assistance, many are met by cynical corrections officials who blame the survivors for the abuse, faulting them for being provocative or “asking for it.” In the worst cases, transgender women who report a rape are themselves punished — for having engaged in prohibited sexual activity.

Fortunately, as a result of litigation, new policies, and the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, several corrections systems have begun efforts to protect the safety of transgender prisoners. Some are heavy-handed and of little help, like placing all transgender women in protective custody — a punitive, isolating measure that deprives them of access to services, programs, and the chance to leave their cells. Others are taking a more nuanced approach. The Washington, D.C., Corrections Department created a new policy earlier this year that takes into account the gender identity of inmates, as well as their own perception of vulnerability.

At the national level, the plight of transgender women and other vulnerable inmates was addressed on June 23, when the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission released the first-ever binding national standards aimed at preventing and addressing sexual abuse in U.S. prisons, jails and other detention facilities.

Mandated by PREA, and created with input from corrections officials, prisoner rape survivors, advocates and other experts, these standards will require prison staff who make housing decisions to consider whether an inmate belongs to a known vulnerable population (such as being transgender). The standards will also spell out requirements for staff training, inmate education, and sexual assault investigations. In addition, they will require facilities to provide prisoner rape survivors with access to medical and mental health services, even if they are too afraid to testify against their attackers.

When the government takes away someone’s liberty, it takes on an absolute responsibility to protect that person’s safety. Prisoner rape is a perversion of justice and an affront to our society’s most essential values.

The new national standards finally have the potential to end this type of violence.

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Lovisa Stannow is the executive director of Just Detention International, an international human rights organization whose mission is to end sexual violence in all forms of detention. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

I’ve been reading a lot of what seems to be anticipatory fears of discrimination on the part of a new Women’s Pharmacy in Vancouver BC.

Now I followed the link to the site http://www.womenshealthcollective.ca/who.html and I looked through it and the subsections of the web site and I didn’t find anything that said either womyn born womyn or no women with transsexual medical histories permitted.

Maybe I didn’t look hard enough and someone will be kind enough to send me the exact location of one of these dreaded phrases.  A specific url would be nice.

In the mean time I would suggest that rather than going off in anticipation that people explain that we too are faced with pharmacists who will not fill our prescriptions for hormones or other drugs due to their religious prejudice in the same way as they will refused WBF (women born female) access to birth control and morning after or RU 486.

Same struggle, same fight, same enemy = common cause.

The Kimberly Nixon case is a different matter and was nearly a decade ago.  That has meant time for a shift in attitudes and we both the TS and the TG communities have made major strides in putting across the idea that discrimination against us is wrong and that we share with WBFs medical access issues that are by and large created by the same mindset of Christo-fascism.

On the other hand by throwing up a premature attack we are setting ourselves up as anti woman and anti-feminist.

I did this when Tina and I started the WBT mailing list and we wound up making enemies and having some real extremists flock to the label and take it further than we ever though it would be taken.

The TS/TG cause or issue set has far more in common with the feminist movement than it does with the gay/lesbian movement and we might do well to build bridges rather than blowing them up.

Monica Helms tackles one of the tougher issues in the Transsexual and Transgender communities, race.

Geez I’m glad we started exchanging e-mails a few years back. I’m also bothered that we probably both would have taken heat for doing so.

But racism along with its companion, classism are major issues and become layer oppressions that force people into situations of hopelessness.

July 8th, 2009
Embracing Trans Diversity is not a Luxury

By Monica F. Helms

Over the 12 years of living my life as Monica, I have been privileged to learn many things about the TBLG community, but mostly about the trans community. The biggest lesson in my short life as a woman has been the diversity of our people. Trans individuals have covered every segment of human experience since the dawn of time. We span all races, all sexual orientations, all gender identities, all gender expressions, all social and economic levels, all job experiences, all education levels, all ages and all health issues. If every American trans person populated just one city in America, it would be the third largest city in the country and every job in the city would be
covered.

When I moved to Atlanta in 2000, I received the most important part of my education on diversity, that of the African American community. Living in Phoenix most of my life, I received a big education on the Latino and Native cultures of our population, but not much on the African American culture. But, coming to Atlanta had been the biggest eye-opener for me in finding out about the rich history – and sometimes tragic history – of my African American brothers and sisters. Moving here has proven to be one of the best decisions in my life.

Continue reading at:
http://www.monicahelms.com/blog/transgender/embracing-trans-diversity-is-not-a-luxury.htm