From Feministe

Posted by: Cara in Crime, GLBTQ, Law, Trans

There is a verdict in the trial of Dwight DeLee for the death of Lateisha Green.  Green was a trans woman who died from gunshot wounds in November; DeLee was originally charged with murder in the second degree as a hate crime.

Just minutes ago, the verdict came back and was announced on Twitter (the AP also has a blurb).  A jury convicted Dwight DeLee of manslaughter in the first degree as a hate crime.

The Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund provided this description of the various potential charges in a blog post from yesterday:

Continue reading on Feministe

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/07/17/lateisha-greens-killer-dwight-delee-convicted-of-manslaughter-as-a-hate-crime/

From Infoshop:

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090716161617925

My calling upon my WBT sisters and MBT brothers to support the building of social support systems for pre-op TS and TG people doesn’t mean I am surrendering to the “We are all part of the transgender umbrella” paradigm of the late 1990s and early 21st century.

I still think people with transsexualism are inherently different from people with transgenderism.  Just as I believe that lesbians are different on many many levels from gay men and that saying both are homosexual (one element of their being) therefore gay should be the umbrella term lead to a nearly 10 year conflict in the 1970s that resulted in a compromise that led to what had been the “Gay Community” now being called the “Gay and Lesbian Community”, a compromise that would ease the working together of TS and TG people would be the acknowledging of our differences.

I have already started to notice greater proper usage of the label transsexual to people who identify as TS and not TG.  I also occasionally see LGBT/T or GLBTT.  It’s a start.

When I started this blog the first thing that happened is that a few people made snide remarks about Andrea James and Lynn Conway.  They wanted me to embrace things like “HBS” and “Classic Transsexual”.  I probably disappointed a number of folks when I embraced neither.

I actually like the term “Transsexual” for the name of what I was born.  Not so much as an identity but it gives clarity to the oppression I endured as a transkid and it doesn’t hide the reality of my life journey behind a bunch of jargon aimed at obscuring.

As for “classic transsexual”  I recognize it for what it is, a post-moderning term for heterosexual transsexual.  as such I tend to see it as both homophobic and as a slam against sisters who come out later in life.  It goes against my theories that the root cause of transsexualism is the same for almost all transsexuals and the truth can be found in the narrative.  Reading biography after biography leads me to this conclusion that actual people with TS knew as early as their first conscious memories.

The rest is a matter of existential circumstance.  I trust the veracity of our narratives more than the theories of the misogynistic psych establishment.

As for the homophobia.  I claimed bisexuality even before I came out.  I never hid being bisexual during the process yet it seemed like all my heterosexual sisters in the program I went through were surprised I was a lesbian when I came out after SRS.  Then many wanted me to provide them with their lesbian experience and I became a 1970s version of  The L-Word‘s Shane.  But some asked the snotty question, “Does this mean you are going back to being a guy?”

So even within WBT there is a lot of fighting over who is transsexual in the correct way.

As a lesbian WBT I pretty much have to be down with feminism, as well as those issues special to the LGBT/TQ communities anyhow because straights have this bad history of throwing all of us under the bus

In the late 1970s Anitia Bryant and the rabid right wing religious fanatics caused gay and lesbian people to shake hands and agree on respecting both and calling the result the “Gay and Lesbian Community” or communities if you are a grammar cop. Crisis brought unity, the AIDS crisis cemented that bond.

A similar compromise would be Transsexual and Transgender Communities.  LGBT/T  or TS/TG and putting those into usage.

This probably isn’t going to satisfy the straight CDs nor will it satisfy the straight WBTs but they locate their lives outside of the alphabet city of the non-straight minorities.  We are the ones who should work on working it out.

We have already worked together on an inclusive ENDA and Hate Crimes Bills.

I also realize there are ideologues on the “Transgender as Umbrella” side of this equasion who will be totally unwilling to compromise on this either but the continuing petty fighting among the various oppressed groups only divides us and means we accomplish nothing.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hmxKiiSIsM-k7nX2yECb7kGw1qhwD99FUN7G0

By JIM ABRAMS (AP) – 12 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday approved the most sweeping expansion of federal hate crimes law since Congress responded four decades ago to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The legislation, backed by President Barack Obama, would extend federal protections granted under the 1968 hate crimes law to cover those physically attacked because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

“This bill simply recognizes that there is a difference between assaulting someone to steal his money, or doing so because he is gay, or disabled, or Latino or Muslim,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said.

Voice vote passage came immediately after supporters cleared a 60-vote procedural hurdle imposed by Republicans trying to block consideration of the legislation. That vote was 63-28.

The hate crimes bill was offered as an amendment to a must-pass defense spending bill that the Senate is expected to finish some time next week. Several Republican amendments to the hate crimes legislation still could be considered on Monday, but Thursday’s vote determined that it will be part of the defense bill when it passes.

The 1968 hate crimes act covers violence related to a person’s race, color, religion or national origin. Federal involvement is confined to a narrow range of circumstances, such as when the victim is using a public facility or attending a public school, serving on a jury or participating in a government program.

The proposed legislation, in addition to expanding the categories covered, ends the “federally protected activities” requirement.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., now being treated for cancer and unable to be on hand for the debate, first proposed the bill in 1997. While coming close on several occasions, he has never been able to overcome opposition from those who contend it infringes on states’ rights and First Amendment rights to free speech. Former President George W. Bush said he would veto the bill if it reached his desk.

This time, however, pro-bill Democrats control both houses of Congress and Obama is a strong supporter. Attorney General Eric Holder has urged Congress to give his department authority to prosecute cases of violence based on sexual orientation, gender or disability.

The measure still has a way to go. Obama has told Congress he will veto the defense bill if it includes more money for an F-22 fighter program he is trying to terminate. The House in April passed a similar hate crimes bill, but did it as independent legislation not tied to a larger bill.

The Senate bill, also sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., only authorizes federal prosecutions of hate crimes when the state or local authorities are unwilling or unable to do so. It provides $5 million in grants to state and local law enforcement officials who have trouble meeting the costs of investigating and prosecuting these crimes.

Reid, D-Nev., recalled that Laramie, Wyo., was overwhelmed by the costs of pursuing the case against Matthew Shepard, the gay college student killed in 1998 whose name is attached to the bill. “When this bill becomes law, that will never happen again in Laramie, Wyo., or anyplace else in the country.”

Supporters also emphasized that prosecutions under the bill can occur only when bodily injury is involved, and no minister or protester could be targeted for expressing opposition to homosexuality, even if their statements are followed by another person committing a violent action.

To emphasize the point, the Senate passed provisions restating that the bill does not prohibit constitutionally protected speech and that free speech is guaranteed unless it is intended to plan or prepare for an act of violence.

The Traditional Values Coalition had expressed concern in a letter to senators that a pastor could be prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit a hate crime” if a sermon resulted in a person acting aggressively against someone based on sexual orientation.

Another opponent, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said it was “patently offensive” that violence against one class of victims would be considered worse than violence against others. “We cannot have a colorblind society if we continue to write color-conscious laws,” he said. “It violates all the principles of equal justice under the law.”

Some 45 states have hate crimes statutes on their books, and about half the states have laws covering crimes based on sexual orientation.

The FBI receives reports of nearly 8,000 hate crimes every year. Of those, about 15 percent are linked to sexual orientation, which ranks third after those involving race and religion.

The Senate hate crimes bill is S. 909.

The first documented  Transsexual Activist group that formed in San Francisco after the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria operated on multiple fronts.  First was the political aimed at abolishing the onerous 650.5 law that criminalized the wearing of clothing not associated with one’s genital sex.

Then there were the efforts at educating the public by giving talks at schools including the police academy.

But there was another side to the TCS/NTCU.  Along with transition advice we provided social support.  The people who ran the center before Jan and I did had advocated for the development of programs at both Fort Help and the Center for Special Problems that allowed those of us who were literally living on pennies a day to obtain free hormone treatment.

Now those were different times, a far fairer and more liberal era when it was possible to get welfare and when the states and cities supported public health clinics whereas we are in a depression caused by 30 years of neo-fascist malfeasance.

The ultra right wing free market policies of the last 30 years have shreaded the safety net we had back then.

Also in those days transsexual/transgender prostitution was easier and safer.  There was less violence and we were targeted less by serial killers and thrill killers.  The laws against low level pot dealing were far less severe.  It was easier to survive on the margins in 1970 than it is today.

For one thing rents were far lower and communal living was common.  Now various cities even have laws limiting the number of unrelated people who can share living space.

As a working class person who had already descended to the status of lumpen prole by become a hippie prior to coming out there wasn’t much downward mobility brought about by my coming out.

But for many now coming out in middle age in this time of depression, transition is going to be hitting the down button on the mobility elevator.  In times of low unemployment anti-discrimination clauses have meaning but if they are cutting the work force in your place of employment by 20% (an arbitrary figure pulled from a myriad of layoff reports) then there is a good chance you will be among that 20%.

Many of what were social services have been replaced by faith based government funded ones that are permitted to discriminate regarding who they will help.  Considering the hate speech many of them have been engaging in regarding people with TS/TGism…  Good Luck on getting a bag of food or helping hand from them.

Even if you have white skin privilege and the privilege of middle class status being TS/TG makes you a minority, no different from other minorities.  Your status is determined by your body.

As I write this I just flashed on Larry Kramer at the start of the AIDS crisis.

Over and above our political organizing we have to start thinking about issues such as homelessness and no health care.  Part time low paying employment for those of us who have jobs.

We have to turn our attentions from national political organizations to making sure the local gay and lesbian organization do not just include a T in their mission statements but actually provide services.  This means things like hormones, rap groups, employment counseling and even employment, emergency housing that is open to people who do not fit in a genital based sex binary.

I can now anticipate the hisses and boos from those who have taken WBT to a greater extreme than I have.  I fully expect some to condemn me for being a TG sympathizer.  I see that one as short sighted.  Like Tom Joad’s closing soliloquy:

“Well, maybe it’s like Casey says. A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul – the one big soul that belongs to ever’body. Then…then, it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be ever’-where – wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.”

Hard times are coming over the next few years and we are going to have to be there for each other organizing on a whole other level than we are today.  That means service organizations and support groups for everything from substance issues to employment.  We have the networking tools.

But mostly it is going to mean that TS/TG people who are in professional positions are going to need to think about more than securing their own positions of privilege and use those positions to generate support for a social structure similar to the one brought about by the AIDS crisis, indeed APLA and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis might serve as role models for the broad range of social services required.

From Infoshop

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2009recession-organize

Recently I wrote about cutting people slack and not saying things that are hurtful in response to their claiming they can’t get SRS because of the economy.

It’s official, from the New York Times business section.  20-25% real unemployment.  For minorities and older workers it is worse.

We are a minority and often discriminated against.  Our rate of unemployment/under employment is far worse>

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes

In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.

It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.

Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”

Continue reading at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?_r=1

I’m currently reading Smash the Church, Smash the State edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca.

Last month I wrote the obligatory 40th anniversary pieces about Stonewall along with my rationalizations for personal apathy regarding the events that immediately unfolded.

I was already in transition.  I was involved in the anti-war movement.  I didn’t identify as gay.

What I didn’t mention or may have glossed over was that if you were seriously transsexual or transgender the boys of Gay Lberation didn’t want you.

We had the Transsexual Counseling Center in San Francisco and our own organizations.

The Radical Faeries and the Effeminists actually had the balls to trash us for changing our sex.  We were betraying the gay movement.

One piece by Rumi Missabu tells how horrified he was to discover “Johnny” ( knew her by a different name that I won’t use here), a fellow member of the Cockettes as well as one of her friend were going to the Center for Special Problems to get female hormones and were in transition.

By 1973 Sylvia Rivera was pretty much driven from the Gay Liberation Movement.

I wound up in the women’s movement.

As the 1970s wore on the fashionable macho Castro Clone, I’m a manly man who likes other manly men became the norm.

I some times think it is a waste of time to make all the claims for inclusion based on a few who tried to be a part of the Gay Liberation Movement while ignoring those who were building parallel institutions that were contemporanious with but not actually a part of gay liberation.

Transsexuals and transgender although not the part time drag queens were even excluded via ID checks and dress code restrictioms from the most venerable of gay institutions, the gay bar.

By the way, it is a good book and helps in the understanding of why I used to search in vain for even a mention of TS/TG folks in the newpapers and anthologies of the early days.

I have a reputation of being a hard liner on SRS being a dividing point for people with transsexualism.  Thing is people assume I’m heartless on this point.

I do think it makes a difference and that pre-ops can’t understand that difference until after SRS.

Ironically a dear friend of mine jokingly called me a transgender sympathizer.  I wondered if she actually saw the photographs I showed her of my queen/transgender friends and lovers or heard me mention the hard lives they lived.

Lately I’ve been cutting people a lot of slack and tending to believe them if they say they can’t get SRS because of the cost.  I’ve read the unemployment statistics.  I too work only part time and not because I wouldn’t work full time but because I am an older worker and if they gave me full time they would have to give me benefits.

I’ve gone through hard times, depression and drug as well as alcohol issues.  I’ve been homeless and dependent upon friends for a place to stay.

We are in very hard economic times and those of us on the margins of society  are less likely to have work than those with normborn, white skin and class privileges.

Because of this I have decided to shut the fuck up and not be part of the problem and make someone feel worse if they say they want SRS but can not see it as an economic possibility.  Maybe in better times I might give y’all a harder time, but not right now.

I’m working class.  I know what it is like to be poor.

I’m in a stable relationship now with a family of friends.  It is not a time for loners.  It is a time for friends to band together and watch each others backs.

If you are still trying to save for SRS you might want to take a page out of the hippies book about sharing living expenses and communal living.  Everyone throwing into the pot makes eating cheaper and survival easier.

And for those of us who got our SRS in better times or who are economically well off today and can get SRS plus all the other things we want to look down on poorer sisters and say,”If we could so can you.”,  currently looks like and smells like arrogance and class privilege, something that come pretty damned close to the various isms we rightly condemn people for exhibiting.

From the Advocate on line
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid97484.asp

A 50-year-old civil rights organization founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is seeking to oust the president of its Los Angeles chapter over his support of marriage equality in California, reports The New York Times.

The Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference has threatened to remove the Reverend Eric Lee, who actively worked to prevent the passage of Proposition 8, the California ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage.

Lee told the Times that his work against Prop. 8 created tension with black clergy, but said he believes that banning same-sex marriage “is a clear violation of civil rights and I have to speak up on that.”

In May, Lee received a call and two subsequent letters from the national board of directors of his organization threatening him with suspension or removal. The organization has a publicly neutral stance on the issue.

The local board of directors, who confirmed Lee knowing his stance on marriage equality, stand behind the reverend and his actions.

Lee says he sees failures in the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; he told the Times, “Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now.”

A Christian Voice, USA

Mass Transgender Rights and Hate Crimes Law

July 11th, 2009

Filed Under: Featured • Homosexual Agenda

Tags: Christian Persecution • Homosexual Agenda • Massresistance

News from MASSResistance about a new Hate Crimes Law that if passed here will be one of the most oppressive hate crimes law ever placed in America.

On Tuesday, July 14, there will be a public hearing at the Massachusetts State House on the most extensive, oppressive, and far-reaching “transgender rights and hate crimes” bill ever seriously considered in America.

This bill forces the acceptance of “transgenderism”, cross-dressing, and other various “gender expressions” throughout virtually every part of society, under the threat of fines and jail
time for even disagreeing in public.

The bill is long and extremely comprehensive, covering a vast range of society, including schools, businesses, restaurants, government, labor unions, apartments, offices, and all public
accommodations, including any place “which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public,” and any public area. It includes all hiring and firing and employment benefits and insurance coverage. There is no religious exemption.

Coming to a home town near you! Read the rest of the story:

Public hearing this Tuesday, July 14, on extremely oppressive “transgender rights and hate crimes” law with fines & jail terms.
<http://www.massresistance.org/docs/govt09/tranny_bill/about_bill.html>

http://achristianvoice.com/2009/07/mass-transgender-rights-and-hate-crimes-law/

I find the Christo-Fascist bullshit totally insane.  Why don’t we treat these cults  as organized hate groups like the KKK and Aryan Nation.  Tax them like any other business.  Demand they obey the same anti-discrimination laws as every other business.

Bigotry in the name of some invisible imaginary sky daddy is still hate and bigotry.

No one is born a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew.  It is purely the product of indoctrination.  Among other groups that Christians have enslaved and waged wars off genocide against are people of color and indigenous people.

Pass the hate crimes bill with no exceptions for faith based hate groups that call them selves religions.

From:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/service_at_noon_to_remember_la.html

by John Mariani/The Post-Standard

Saturday July 11, 2009, 11:23 AM

Syracuse, NY — A memorial service will begin at noon at First English Lutheran Church for LaTeisha Green, whose shooting death on Nov. 14 is resulting in Onondaga County’s first prosecution of a hate-crime murder case.

The service also will include dance and song, and is to end with the release of doves and bubbles.

The church is at 501 James St., Syracuse.

The service takes place two days before Dwight DeLee, 20, is to stand trial in the case. Prosecutors say Green, a transgendered person, was targeted because of sexual orientation.

Gender Madness in American Psychiatry: Essay from the Struggle for Dignity by Kelley Winters Ph.D.

There was a time when the only books from women with transsexualism were biographical works.  Biographies and memoirs are an extremely valid way of putting our stories out there and humanizing our lives.  Indeed WBTs and MBTs are not the only people who have used this tool.  Other members of the LGB communities have as well.

The one short coming of such works is their tendency to focus on the teller of the personal story in a way that leaves the individual in almost a vacuum rather than as a part of a larger community.

For years the only books dealing with people with transsexualism as a demographic group have been normborns, usually male and usually with advanced degrees in the fields of medicine or psychiatry.

We get treated as ignorant, unknowing participants in our own lives.  I remember being told that it wasn’t possible for WBTs to speak or write objectively about transsexuals as a group.  Only outsiders were supposed to have that objectivity.

I have an extensive library on the matter of transsexualism as well as other LGB issues.  I have come to find the writings of normborns on the subject to be so bizarre and bigoted that when I read it I feel as though I am an African American reading the propaganda of the KKK or a Jewish person reading some extremely anti-Semetic tracts.

I can not help but see these writers as clueless.  Ms. Winter’s book gives me nearly 200 pages of reasons as to why I think these normborn misogynistic experts are no more than ignorant bigots who have written their faith based prejudice in pseudoscientific language.

She give us the tools we need when confronting the psych establishment.  Talking points that could be turned into a Power Point presentation.  She tells us what to say when the justifiable rage would otherwise reduce us to either sputtering or screaming.

Riki Wilchins was the first sister whose book actually attacked the multiple levels of transsexual and transgender oppression in a way I related too.

Since then there have been several books by a variety of authors including Viviane Namaste, Jay Prosser and several others, all offering us far more understanding of our lives than anything from non-trans people.   Ms Winters book has immediately moved to the top of my list of books ever WBTS or WBTG must read.  It well deserves a place on your book shelf next to Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl.

Any one who supports the removal of GID from the DSM must read this book.  Defenders of the GID diagnosis should read it too so they might learn the great harm their continuing support of the pathologization of people with transsexualism or transgenderism is doing to those women and men who have to deal with the effect of being labeled as mentaly ill.

As it is many of us find the fear of the stimatization results in silencing us and prevents us from speaking out against the abuse by a profession that has come to cause more harm than it corrects.

I highly recommend this book as a must read.  While You can go to Amazon you could also go to the following site and purchase it directly.

http://www.gendermadness.com/

From Advocate.com, USA

July 10, 2009

By Michelle Garcia

Two suspects have been arraigned on assault charges after allegedly attacking a transgender woman in Queens, N.Y., on Wednesday.

Nathaniel Mims, 25, and Rasheed Thomas, 22, are charged with attacking Carmella Etienne, 22, in St. Albans, a neighborhood in Queens. According to police, the two hurled bigoted slurs and threatened to slash her throat as they pelted her with rocks and beer bottles.

Etienne said the attackers told her that the police didn’t care about her and that they were immune to any force. They were eventually arrested at the scene, according to NY1, where Thomas said he was unaware that he and his friend “could get locked up for calling somebody names.”

“I called her a bunch of names,” he said, according to the New York Daily News. “I called her a [expletive deleted], but she didn’t see me throw anything.”

Etienne was treated at a local hospital for a large cut and later released.

The men are being held on $5,000 bail and are due back in court on July 23. They face up to 15 years in prison for the attack.

Another transgender woman was attacked about a month ago in Jackson Heights, a northwest neighborhood in Queens.

© 2009 Regent Entertainment Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid97397.asp

I consider The Second Sex to be one of those books every woman should plow through at least once in her life.  It definately should be mandatory for T to F people even though it is dated and the English translation is considered to be a poor one.

De Beauvoir highlights much of the development of misogyny and the role of women as inferior to men and in doing so manages hit on ideas that are basic to understanding both what has been called transphobia and the foundation of the pathologizing  wing of psychiatry.

I’ve long said that a field that owes so much to Sigmund Freud, a man who as a child, prayed, “Thank you god, for not creating me a woman.” was bound to grow up a misogynist.  After all male supremacy is god ordained so how could he not be overly enchanted with his having a penis that was at once symbol and source of supremacy.

It all flows down hill from there.  I mean isn’t most of the pathologizing of people with transsexualism directed at T to F based on the following line of thinking?

From The Second Sex pg 161 ff

It is a question whether the horror inspired in man by woman comes from that inspired by sexuality in general, or vice versa.  It is noteworthy that, in Leviticus particularly, nocternal emission is regarded as a defilement, though woman is not concerned in it.  And in our modern societies masturbation is popularly regarded as a danger and a sin:many children and young people who are addicts practice it ony with horrible fear and anguish.  It is interference of society and particularly of parents that make a vice of solitary pleasure; but more than one young boy has been spontaniously by his ejaculations: blood or semen, any flowing away of his own substance seems to him disquieting; it is his life, his mana that is escaping .  However, even, even if a man can subjectively can subjectively go through erotic experiences without a woman present, she is objectively implied in his sexuality: as Plato says in the myth of the Androgynes, thew organism of the male supposes that of the female.  Man discovers woman in discovering his own sex, even if she is present neither in flesh and blood nor in imagery, and inversely it is in so far as she incarnates sexuality that woman is redoubtable.  We can never separate the immanent and the transcendent aspects of living experience: what I fear or desire is always an embodiment of my own exestence, but nothing happens to me except it comes through what is not me. The non-ego is implied in nocturnal emissions, in erections, if not definately under control in the form of a woman, at least as Nature and life the individual feels himself to be possessed by a magic not of himself.

Indeed, the ambivalence of his feelings towards women reappears in his attitude towards his own sex organ: he is proud of it, he laughs at it, he is ashamed of it.  The little boy challenges comparison of his penis with those of his comrades: his first erection fills him with pride and fear at once.  The grown man regards his organ as a symbol of transcendence and power; it pleases his vanity like a voluntary muscle and at the same time a magical gift: it is liberty rich in all the contingency of the fact freely wished; it is under this contradictory aspect aspect that he is enchanted with it, but he is suspicious of deception.  That organ by which the thought to assert himself does not obey him; heavy with unsatisfied desires, unexpectedly becoming erect, sometimes relieving itself during sleep, it manifests a suspect and capricious vitality. Man aspires to make Spirit triumph over Life, action over passivity; his consciousness keeps nature at a distance, his will shapes her, but in his sex organ he finds himself again beset with life, nature, and passivity.`

Wow…  No wonder the psychiatric dicks can’t imagine why some one would give up something that implies all that in order to be female, a mere receptacle for some man’s magical sex toy.

But of course if a person were to do as the memorable phrase from one of the books I have read so succinctly , “Do the unspeakable to his unmentionables>” the only possible reasom would be in order to provide a warm wet hole for a man to ejaculate into.

These dicks can only see through their penises and it colors every single bit of their pathologizing of T to F people.

From the Dallas Voice

http://www.dallasvoice.com/artman/publish/article_11503.php

By Steve Warren Contributing Film Writer
Jun 30, 2009 – 5:05:47 PM

The festival hit ‘XXY’ tracks the travails of romance for an intersex teen

The Internet Movie Database lists 10 films, most of them documentaries, dealing at least in part with the intersex condition — all made in this century. There’s a longer but less accurate list under “hermaphrodite.” “XXY,” which screens this week at Out Takes Dallas, clearly belongs on both lists.

Alex (Inés Efron) was born with the organs of both genders to parents Kraken (Ricardo Darin) and Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli). They now live in a Uruguayan coastal village, where they hope to escape notoriety and gossip.

Now 15, Alex has been raised as a girl and has until recently been taking hormones to prevent “masculinization.” It’s nearing time for Alex to make decisions (some involving surgery) about her future, but no one in the family wants to discuss it.

Alex comes on sexually to Alvaro, the 16-year-old son of a doctor. He resists at first but soon they have an encounter that’s surprising to him and the audience, leaving both teenagers with a better idea of their sexual identity.

The film’s strengths are also its weaknesses. The genitalia in question, for instance, are never shown. That’s good — showing them would be exploitative. On the other hand, the viewer can’t help but feel teased by shots where they’re barely covered or hidden in shadows creating an annoying coyness.

There’s minimal dialogue in the script, written by director Lucia Puenzo (based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio). Again, good — we don’t need the subject talked to death — but it also leaves much of the film opaque, both in terms of exposition and the feelings of the characters. And does first-time director Puenzo really expect us to take the heavily symbolic carrot-slicing scene seriously?

One unequivocally good thing is Efron’s performance, especially in a near-rape scene that, intentionally or not, evokes memories (with more tragic results) of “Boys Don’t Cry.”

While it deserves a rating nearer ABB than XXY, the film — which has won numerous awards at various festivals (GLBT and general) — probably doesn’t deserve all the accolades it has received.

From Georgia Straight, Canada

July 9, 2009

By Charlie Smith

The Vancouver Women’s Health Collective says transsexual/ transgender women will not be served at its new pharmacy on the Downtown Eastside. And that has a neighbourhood transgender activist alleging that the collective is discriminating against women like herself.

“That’s not acceptable,” Jamie Lee Hamilton told the Straight in a phone interview. “No city license should be given out to any business that operates in the city of Vancouver if it chooses to discriminate.”

Hamilton added that she plans on filling her next hormone prescription at Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women, which opened on July 7 at 29 West Hastings Street.

The collective’s executive director, Caryn Duncan, told the Straight in a phone interview that her organization’s steering committee discussed whether or not to extend service to all “self-identified women”. In the end, members decided to serve “women born women”.

“We are an organization that has for almost 40 years supported women around their battle with breast cancer or unwanted pregnancy or delivering a baby with a midwife, [and] celebrating or dealing with menopause,” Duncan said. “It’s about bleeding—or wanting to bleed or not bleed. It’s about being a woman, and the physiology of being a woman.”

She claimed that the pharmacy doesn’t have the expertise or capacity to serve transsexual/transgender women. “I think we’re being very reasonable,” Duncan said. “I believe the massive groundswell of support for our pharmacy and for our work is evidence that what we do is supported in the broader community.”

The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld women-only organizations’ legal right to restrict membership to women and not admit transsexual/transgender people. Hamilton, however, claimed that the court’s ruling dealt with organizations and not with a business that provides a health service.

© 2009 Vancouver Free Press

http://www.straight.com/article-238663/trans-activist-opposes-pharmacy-ban

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.

-

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.