Sometimes when I listen to TG/TG folks I get the impression that they think they are the only people in the world who are oppressed by discrimination with regards to access to medical care.
In case people missed, it the war against transsexuals and SRS paralleled the rise of the religious right and the war on abortion.
There is one harsh truth people need to face: “Religions, virtually all religions, hate women.”
They hate non-conformity as well hence the hippie punching, liberal punching that goes along with homophobia and transphobia.
Julia Serano points out that transphobia is actual a variation on standard misogyny. That alone should be reason enough for TS/TG women or women of TS history to be feminists.
There has been a lot of focus on Janice Raymond and her infamous book, a book which grew out of a doctoral thesis. I’m researching Raymond at this point looking for the smoking gun that actually shows Snopes survivable evidence that she was the one who caused insurance companies to stop covering SRS in 1980 or thereabouts. (If you have actual evidence as opposed to hearsay evidence contact me with it)
Prior to 1980 SRS wasn’t covered by most insurance policies because transsexualism was either deemed a pre-existing condition or SRS an experimental procedure. The change was that policies began codifying this exclusion during the rise of Reagan and the neo-fascist right wing/Religious Right.
Gaining even minimal coverage under the neo-fascist right wing corporate pandering state that has risen since 1980 has been an up-hill battle because the Religious Right fights every gain and because we don’t have National Health that requires coverage of everyone. Instead we have private corporations who profit from the suffering and deaths of those they insure. Every needed medical treatment they don’t pay for helps fund another Mercedes for some rich fuck.
The fanatical Religionists are a major problem, everywhere on the planet. We are staring at an Armageddon, but not the one those fucks imagine. The unmitigated disaster we are facing is due to having created the perfect environmental storm: We’ve exploded the population bomb instead of heeding Malthus and Ehrlich. Now we have passed the point of peak oil. Have runaway climate change. Etc, etc.. . We have ceded the power of people to self govern to the rich who own corporations. Globalization has destroyed the ability of nations to govern themselves, as corporations can bring legal action against nations that act in the interests of their own people, or to protect their people from ravagement by the corporations.
Add to this a political mix of religious fanatics that couple the politics of Nazism to the fanaticism of fundamentalist Muslim clerics and you have a war against women having any rights including the right to control the most intimate portion of her own life, her ability to decide to reproduce or not.
Is there a transsexual or transgender person out there who thinks that a group of people who would insist that a rape victim bear the fetus of the rapist would actually let transsexuals have sex change operations?
Particularly since the mindset encouraged by these right wing neo-Nazis is at least partially responsible for creating and encouraging male behavior that holds women in contempt, particularly women who fail their standards of being a “good woman”. Women who fall out side that definition are considered fair game for any sort of violence or abuse that befalls them. All transgender, transsexual and post-transsexual women fall outside the territory of “good women”. Even the right wing born again upper crust women of transsexual history, who think they are part of the dominant group.
Maybe in the pre-computer days. Maybe in the days before computerized womb to tomb tracking. The target may be smaller, but it is still there, just like it was for the Jews who thought they were German first.
Standing up in support of women’s access to abortion and contraception is absolutely vital. It should be obvious that if the religious fanatics and neo-Nazis take that away that our access to medical treatments we need go with it.
Any society that permits that level of misogyny is pretty fucking twisted. I wouldn’t count on the Dominionists having the level of sensitivity shown by the radical clerics in Iran who sanction SRS as a cure for homosexuality. These are people who would “final solution” us.
02/23/2012 at 2:15 pm
There is no essential difference between a woman’s right to control her own body and a woman born transsexed to have control over her own body in the form of surgical correction. None, nada, zip. Where are the feminist of transsexed history? I question I have also been asking for many many years.
02/23/2012 at 2:19 pm
I agree.
02/23/2012 at 2:37 pm
There are an awful lot of post-transsexual women out there who condemn me for being a left wing hippie and Second Wave Feminist. One even thought she was insulting me when she called me a Rad Fem.
Which is interesting since it is really kind of a contradiction to be both a hippie and a Radical Feminist since one requires rigid conformity of the sort demanded by the Transgender Borg and the other is free thinking, free love, anti-authoritarian. I’m more an Anarcha-Feminist, down to my purple and black star tattoo on my left shoulder.
When the Borg say once trans always trans it as if they have decided trans is the central aspect of their life. For me that central aspect was being part of the 60s radical/hippie experience. I made the ethics and way of thinking I learned from that experience a core of my being.
02/23/2012 at 2:50 pm
As a late transitioner, I had no idea the level of misogyny in society. I had no clue about MY level of misogyny.
It took a couple of years for me to really understand that much of what I saw as “transphobia” was really misogyny by another name. I thought it was great insight on my part, only to realize lots of other folks saw it all along.
In the past I’ve said, “transition does not end with SRS” — a lot of folks disagreed – very vehemently. I saw that as very strange. I also thought it strange that so many WBT’s/post-ops did not consider themselves feminists.
Why, I wondered? Doesn’t every advance for women also mean an advance for WBT’s/post-ops? Did these folks who proclaim at the top of their lungs — “I’m a WOMAN!!” — not believe it themselves? Did they have to remain separate? Was it “separate but equal” — or, as some AFAB (assigned female at birth) folks say, “separate but superior”? Which one is it?
Do all the years of “male programming”, even though you don’t fit in, leave you conditioned/brainwashed? Does it take some time, and a touch of self awareness to overcome this crap?
Is that what folks complained about when they denied the simple fact that transition continues AFTER SRS?
02/23/2012 at 3:22 pm
@ Tina. Since you asked this …”Did these folks who proclaim at the top of their lungs — “I’m a WOMAN!!” — not believe it themselves?” Let me give you my observation. I have never met a woman who had to assert that she is a woman.
02/23/2012 at 3:33 pm
Helen Reddy…
02/23/2012 at 3:46 pm
Suzan the operative words were “who had to”. But I did enjoy your retort.
02/23/2012 at 4:02 pm
Dominionists policy is quite clear. Anyone can look it up. women to be chattels of the men, any religion practised openly that is not theirs punishable by death, ditto for homosexuality or anything else they see as “deviant”. They are total nut cases, and have people in very high places in the US administration…………..
They’ll have to kill me twice; once for being transsexual and again for being a Witch.
The spiritual system of neo-paganism and witchcraft embrace women and their power wholeheartredly, with no reservations whatever.
The Goddess lives….. and She is making a huge comeback in the world. The extreme monotheists know it, which is the reason for their waging a(so far) political/legal war against it as their churches empty ever more quickly because the fallacy of their doctrines become more obvious to their “flocks” with the advent of the information highway.
I thank my Lady every day that I live in a country that actually believes in religious freedom in a real and practical way.
Sure, in New Zealand we have our religious right too (notably the Denisty ….oops Destiny church, and the extreme wings of the Roman and Islamic sects), but the law limits what they can legally do about those that hold different views.
The situation in the USA vis a vis these religious bigots is quite alarming, and those of us viewing it from outside are naturally concerned that such a powerful nation looks like being controlled by people whose ideas closely mirror those of the Afghan Taliban and Al Qeada, and in the not too distant future.
02/23/2012 at 5:49 pm
It is quite alarming. Over the years, the USA has gone through a number of “great awakenings”, periods of extreme religious fervor. We usually calm down after a bit — leading to times of “secular superiority”, and pronouncements like “god is dead”.
I think what happens is that an awful lot of these folks want to impose this ON YOU. When it begins to curtail THEIR activities, THEIR lives, it is not quite as appealing.
It’s like the “Contract With America” Gingrich and his fellow crazies tried to impose on America back in the mid 90′s. When folks realized THEIR specific forms of “welfare” were going to be limited — they did not like it quite as much.
It seems those folks want to do it to YOU – they don’t want those same rules to apply to them — because they are “different”, they “earned” their perks.
Those “other” folks – read, mostly black, brown, and poor – did NOT. Those “other” folks are “freeloaders” — WE are NOT.
Stupid — YES! Self defeating — YES! Working against their self interest — YES!
I am afraid they are going to go too far this time. The great majority of folks really do not support these nut-jobs. Even the ones that do might think twice when their children, relatives, family, are targeted as “public enemies”.
Lots of current “pro-life” folks might well think again about it when their daughters, wives, DIE from pregnancies that should have been terminated.
Of course, if this crap is accompanied by an economic collapse — well then, who knows what the hell will happen.
02/23/2012 at 6:14 pm
Anyone who did not figure out years ago, that once women lose the right to birth control and HRT, that transsexual people will have no treatment of any kind, needs to attend a doctor to check there eyes an ears or make an appointment with Raymond Blanchard.
Something a lot of people are not figuring out.
Anyone who thinks that HRT will be safe if birth control goes, is deluding themselves.
I have heard more than one priest rant against HRT when I was a child.
02/23/2012 at 6:24 pm
Oh Andrea, how silly of you. Don’t you know that many post-transsexuals as well as TG folks are conservatives and good church going Christians, who think any woman who has recreational sex with a man is garbage and deserves god’s punishment. And if the woman is married bearing children is the imaginary sky god’s punishment for all women because supposedly six thousand years ago some ignorant woman got taken in and conned by a snake that this imaginary sky god made talk to her and con her?
I’m totally amazed with how many right wing brain washed TS/TG folks there are.
I’m even further amazed at how they go to war over the most trivial of matters while ignoring how the whole damned house is burning down around them. This is why I think so many of them are virtual.
02/24/2012 at 4:02 am
I honestly think there are about 100 people posting under numerous names all over the place, making themselves into the voices of thousands.
I would assume most of them are not even transsexual.
Regarding the HRT thing.
A lot of religious people oppose us having access to HRT and would have it stopped in a heartbeat. That is a clear and present danger that most can not seem to wrap there heads around.