Women Born Transsexual

One of the things that struck me as a tad different between my life experiences of the 60s and 70s vs the on line transgender world was how everyone considered themselves lesbians.  Even part time cross dressers in heterosexually privileged married lives. I found that one to be a sort of flaunting of heterosexual privilege given how same sex marriage is only possible in two states at this point.

Now in the name of openness and accuracy I am life partnered with a sister who is also WBT so I am not casting stones or aspersions regarding same sex attraction among WBTs.

Some times I feel like I’m one of the few sisters on line who has had seriously lustful relationships with men that have caused me to wander around well satisfied and so in love singing the Laura Nyro song, The Confession.

My first serious relationship was with a man.  Over my lifetime I’ve had relationships with both men and women.

Where are the WBTs on the Internet who are in relationships with men?

Or even those like myself who will even own up to being bisexual in orientation?

Part of why I had sex reassignment surgery was so I would be female and able to make love as a female whether that meant letting a man enter my pussy or to stick my own fingers in my pussy or to be female in a relationship with another woman.

Why is it taboo to own up to being sexual and to admit to liking being penetrated in the act of sex.

There is something neutered about making everything about gender.   It is as though we are appealing to those who want us to be asexual rather than experiencing female sexuality.

When they sexed me at birth in the same way they pretty much sex the majority of babies they decided I was male based on my having a very small penis.  Even though I had non descended testes there was enough for them to say I was male.  If I had a vagina they would have classified me as female.

As I grew up I came to see myself as being transsexual or having transsexualism.

I was one of that 25% or so of  Dr. Benjamin’s patients that he described as having physical variation that made me physically more feminine than masculine  i.e. I would have given him an erection if he were still capable of achieving one.  Mostly that is a way of saying I was a transkid who couldn’t walk down the street without being attacked for looking more like a girl than a boy.

That didn’t make me a woman, a female or a girl.  It made me a transkid.  A teen queen that the older queens called, “Princess” and said it wasn’t a matter of if I became a girl I would be one of the cutest ones in the ghetto but rather when I decided to do it.

It was my acting that made me first a girl and much later a woman.  Having little knots in my boobs didn’t make me female, adding hormones and the process of development shifted the secondary sexual characteristics from androgynous to feminine.

Those of us in San Francisco circa 1972 knew the difference between those of us who got the operation and those who didn’t.  Aleshia Brevard knew the difference in 1960.

There were differences in our approaches to life.  Often times the queens had a lot more money than we had.  At least to spend because we had to save 4-5000 dollars at a time when most of us were lucky to get straight jobs that paid the two dollar an hour.  Both of our groups did sex work.  We scrimped and saved, the queens bought expensive clothes.

We talked about becoming real and our lives after SRS.  The queens were afraid they wouldn’t have orgasms as intense as those those they had with their penis.

When transgenders think they are being original with their “inverted penis” slur they should be aware they are using the same slur the drag queens used against us 40-50 years ago.

The same slur the coiner of the term transgender used against those of us who got SRS 40-50 years ago.

When I got my operation it made me female using the same criteria as I was initially sexed by.  Pull down the panties and see what’s there.  It was the bigots including the CDs, drag queens, TVs and later transgenders who were first in line with the same sort of hate speech I hear from the religious reich as to why I wasn’t really female.

The only new twist is the post-moderning of woman away from adult female to meaning someone with a whole arsenal of word games.

Now I call people by their chosen name and address them as members of the sex they appear to be, but I’m also a woman and a feminist and that means I put the interests of women first.

We don’t need to be defined as women based on our mode of dress and social role. Woman as adult female serves me and the majority of women just fine.

I started hormones and all just about 40 years ago.  People’s Park in May caused me to put off going full time for about a month.  At that point  my boobs were pretty obvious and  couldn’t pull off androgynous baby butch anymore.

It just so happened that Women’s Liberation was hitting Berkeley big time.

And for the next dozen or so years “sex roles” not “gender roles” were a major topic for many serious consciousness raising sessions.

Yesterday I wrote of contradictions.  Here’s one I was what sisters called a “Natural Beauty Wonder” and yet I cared more for militant left wing and feminist politics than I did for glamor at a time when many of my equally beautiful sisters couldn’t fathom my blase attitude towards expensive glamorous clothes and expensive jewelry.

I considered them hung up not in gender but stereotypical sex role behavior.

Mostly before I hit the Stanford Clinic if I though of gender it was in terms of Latin, French and Spanish nouns having masculine or feminine genders.

When I wrote a paper for a feminist psych class I called the sense of self as male or female “core gender identity” but now I think I sould have chosen “core sex identity” instead.

I find placing so much importance upon gender tends to reinforce stereotypical sex roles for men and women and I consider that rather reactionary.

I know too many gay men who are feminine and still men, too many butch dykes who are still women not to see through “gender”.

Classifying someone as male because of how they, dress, act or their career tends to support male supremacy since those jobs in life tend to carry more authority and pay better than the roles designated as being the spheres of women.

I don’t base my being a woman on gender or adherence to either gender or sex roles.  I base it on being an adult female albeit one with an atypical medical history.

Perhaps it is because I went rather seamlessly from transkid to the process of changing sex and surgery and have spent the last 37 years of my life as female that I don’t get the whole thing about “gender”.

“Gender Identity Disorder” wasn’t invented when I got SRS, hell “Gender Dysphoria” didn’t come along until I was a couple of years post-SRS.

My peers joke about passing the doctor’s hard on test. Meaning all the rest of the screening was moot if we gave the Doctor an erection.

I read some of the stuff today and it seems as though there are thousands of pages of blah, blah, blah trying to rationalize something we got across with a wiggle in our walk and a giggle in our talk.

I’m reading Aleshia Brevard’s Biography, “The Woman I was not Born to Be”.  She got her SRS 10 years before I did yet much of her language for describing what she felt and her process is closer to my life experiences and reality than what I hear from non-op transgenders of today.