Women Born Transsexual

There is a fair amount of wisdom in that little Internet abbreviation.

Your Mileage May Vary.

The only thing we all have in common is a starting point of being born with TS/HBS.  From that point forward the forces that shape us into people, adults are as varied as can be.

I grew up working class, small town, public school with Catholicism rammed down my throat.  I am pretty much left wing and anarcha-feminist as well as militantly atheist.  This is because of how I experienced life.

I was a Folkie/Hippie/SDS/Weatherman before I started living as a woman.  I was part of Weather Nation after as well as working with one of the earliest for us, by us peer to peer support groups for people in the process.

I can see why “transition” gets used.  It isn’t heavily value laden and most people have a fair amount of processing to do.  Not to mention a fair number of medical procedures to go through including the major one of SRS.

How we view this process and speak about it depends on our vocabulary that we use and the contextualizing of our individual experiences.

Some of us intellectualize the process more than others do.  We are the ones with the huge libraries on the subject who put up web sites and blogs.  Others only contact with sisters come through aliases and touching base here and there with a friend or two.

There isn’t a right way or a wrong way.

Take Kate Bornstein.  We’ve met on a couple of occasions and I like her a lot.  I admire her creativity and her ability to tell of her own experiencing of dealing with TS/HBS based on her own life  experiences.  The problem comes when people read her telling of her story and life experiences and try to universalize Kate’s point of view into some sort of universal list of rules and directives that everyone who has the same birth condition MUST FOLLOW.

Some WBTs are as capable of Stalinistically dictating rules to be obeyed as some of the transgender activists are.  Different rules mind you but equally confining and equally demanding of contriteness on the part of those who choose to march to the beat of a different drummer.   Some of the rules generated by some who live deep stealth sound as rigidly adhering to stereotypical roles for women as the ones followed by some of the religious cults.  They may work for that individual and not for others.

I’m no more fond of that brand of judgmentality  than I am of the version pushed by transgender activists.

There is no right way or wrong way.  There are though life paths that are much more high risk than others that verge on the wildly self destructive.

That is true for everyone.

Evangelina made a comment about “transgenders transition”.

I really don’t think transgenders particularly came up with this term.  Rather I think it came form those dear caring multitude of post 1960s psych professionals in search of clients to pay them so they too don’t have to work the sales floor in a big box.

I also tend to think that as a term it is probably more applicable to those who try and hide who they are behind masks until it becomes unbearable in mid life.  then it becomes pretty much like any other mid-life change of course.

When transkids like I was get into a position where they can control what happens to them and they obtain medical care that helps them make the change then it is probably less a transition than growing up.

But the psychobabbling post moderning of our culture to the point where everyone has a paathology that can hopefully be billed to an insurance carrier even calls going from high school into college a transition fraught with risks.

Same for graduation from college and entering the job market.

I’ve come to look at psychobabble particularly about us as more aimed at both pathologizing us and making us into life long clients of psych professionals than anything else.

I used to say I “came out” because that was the language we used in 1969.  Mostly that meant telling my friends, getting medical treatment and starting to deal with living as a woman prior to getting SRS and becoming a woman.

It wasn’t some major change, more an act of becoming.

But I’ve been around a long time and have helped many different sisters over the years and for some there is a far greater disconnect between who they were before coming out and after they “transitioned” so maybe for them it is appropriate although it still seems psych. profession generated.