The Transgender Borg and Transgender Inc put out a massive quantity of bullshit about identity and identifying as a woman, about how that identity trumps both physical reality and the perceptions of others. Based on the claims of some to be considered a woman all one has to do is claim to identify as such.
Being considered a woman doesn’t require being assigned female at birth. Doesn’t require surgical sex reassignment from an initial birth assignment of male. Doesn’t require the removal of testicles and definitely doesn’t require the surrender of one’s penis. One isn’t required to live 24/7/365 in a socially accepted female sex role. One doesn’t have to have electrolysis or even wear women’s clothing, according to Transgender Borg ideology to be considered a woman based on “identifying as a woman.”
Neither assigned female at birth nor later surgically reassigned as female women are permitted to have a say in this matter, but instead have to swallow the entire reactionary pile of crap regarding gender that we spent years fighting against. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was all about how gender (sex) roles were used to trap women and limit their ability to function in the world as whole people with the agency to make their own decisions regarding the course of their lives.
For all of the Transgender Borg/Inc.’s BS about deconstructing gender most of their philosophy seems deeply grounded in the reification of gender stereotypes as defining who is a man or who is a woman.
Indeed their ideology of “Transgender Umbrella” and “Transgender Community” seems intent upon stifling genuine attempts at breaking free from sex role/gender role stereotyping. It is terribly oppressive to have your life colonized and be berated by the Borg/Inc for not embracing “Transgender as Umbrella” once they have decided you are part of a class that they have decided belongs under the “Transgender Umbrella.”
Speaking of “process”. Isn’t there something incredibly phalliocentric happening when one group composed largely of penis people and their sycophants get to decide when some one is part of the “Transgender Community” or not, without the consent of the person or class of people being colonized?
I am well aware of Christan Williams attempts to write a form of revisionist history where “Transgender” is a self chosen collective noun that was embraced as early as the late 1960s/early 1970s by women with transsexualism.
How does it feel, Christan, to be a sycophant toadie for a bunch of people who have advocated violence against feminist women, who had the courage to say no to the demands of phalliocentric transvestites and their demands to share the women’s room based on “identity”? Identity with out actions that actually change your sex is meaningless, nothing more than a con game played by penis people who want to violate women’s privacy.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed the attempts at rehabilitating Angela Keyes Douglas, a psychopathic douche nozzle from the 1970s who hindered the integration of post-transsexual women into the feminist and lesbian communities with his androcentric “transgender superiority” and his calling lesbian feminists “ugly cunts” and “fish”.
BTW that word, “Fish”… That’s the word that set the feminists off when it was used by Saint Sylvia during her drunken Pride Day Parade episode back in 1973. Do you think that really gave post-transsexual women a big boost in the feminist community? Or did it hurt us?
Many of us look upon SRS as ending a chapter in our lives and with the end of that chapter come an end to membership in a shared class that has come to be called “The Transgender Community”. At that point we face a life choice. One road means we continue the process of becoming women, a process that can only happen if we drop the “Trans”. That means dropping the “Transgender Community”. It means embracing the bare unadorned label, “woman” with out the prefix “trans” much less the adjective “transgender”.
In spite of the TG Borg/Inc.’s protestations to the contrary one cannot identify as a woman and as transgender. The two are mutually exclusive. One might identify as a “trans-woman” or as a “transgender woman”, one might even identify as transsexual, although the term transsexual implies actual actions taken to permanently physically change one’s sex. But as long as one either has to stick a prefix or adjective, or voluntarily sticks that prefix or adjective in front of the word woman then one is identifying with the modifying prefix or adjective and not with the noun being modified.
Being woman identified might have all sorts of readings and levels, take all sorts of forms from spiritual to political.
But one thing should seem obvious. Living one’s life in transgender-centric surroundings is not conducive to taking the final step in the process of becoming part of the community of women. It is continuing to live in the transgender ghetto. One does not have to be hostile to genuine transgender people nor wish to deny genuine transgender people their rights. But who is actually transgender? This is a reasonable question. I had a hostile transvestite who goes by the on-line name of Carolyn-Ann come here a while back with his penis waving transvestite BS. He got pissy when he found out I wasn’t about to be bullied by him and has periodically trashed me on his blog ever since. Do I have to consider him a woman, or welcome him into women’s space?
Speaking of women’s space… Many of us have been welcomed into women’s space based upon our work within the feminist and lesbian communities, our personalities. Even the Michigan Women’s Music Festival quietly expanded its policies to permit women identified post-transsexual women into the festival. Yet Camp Trans continues as many will not be satisfied until people with penises can invade any and all gatherings of women.
I have been accused of being a “genital surgery essentialist” by Autumn Sandeen. Monica Roberts, who has advocated violence against Cathy Brennan and Elizabeth Hungerford, suggesting they should be pimp slapped and condoning a transvestite named Anthony Casebeer suggestion that these women be attacked with a baseball bat. Monica Roberts, who often points out racial injustice is equally often given to hyperbole and regularly engages in phalliocentric dismissals of post-transsexual women, snidely implying that women born transsexual has racist connotations with her oh so cute”WWBT” and her disparaging of our bodies as having man-made vanilla scented neo-coochies.
Nice going Monica. You have insured the heightening of the contradictions.
One can be woman identified or one can be part of the phalliocentric Transgender Borg Collective. One cannot be both.
I consider the attacks upon Cathy Brennan and Elizabeth Hungerford to be unwarranted, nor do I see any real merit in the arguments coming fron the TG Borg/Inc. The inclusiveness of the “Transgender as Umbrella” paradigm is its weakness not its strength. They use post-transsexual women as a front when so many of them are men in their daily lives. The refusal to limit Transgender to people who live 24/7/365 when writing legislation that grants entry to restrooms and other spaces where women expect a reasonable level of privacy, causes many women to be reasonably wary, to ask just what this means.
When post-transsexual women who have been around the scene and know what is going on because they have seen the reality take sides in this issue one may justifiably ask, “Do you stand with women, or do you stand with transvestites?”
I have been called a “radical feminist” by some in the TG Borg/Inc. I guess I am, if that means I put the interests of women either assigned female at birth or surgically reassigned as female at a later time ahead of the interest of either transgender people or transvestites.
I put women without a prefix or adjective and their interests first, because that is what being woman identified requires. Being woman identified isn’t an identity or make-up and clothing. It is a commitment to women, both because you are a woman and because you put the interests of women first.
