Women Born Transsexual

In Clit Notes Holly Hughes tells about her parents taking her to doctors because she liked looking at her father’s Playboy magazines.  They examined her thouroughly, she says and told her parents that even though she was not normal she could still have a normal life if she chose to.

I was born in a small town, a toxic waste site, really. Eventually we moved to an even smaller town that I fondly remember as Buttfuck, Nowhereville.  People tended to stay there not because gravity or inertia held them there but because the place sucked so bad it sucked the lives out of people.

I was born different, I dreamed and read.  I had an imagination… along with being a transkid… I was an angry little rebel and told people how their conventional thinking sucked.

When I was about 10 I started hearing about poets and beatniks and I thought…  Well for want of a better word..”Groovy”, “Cool”

By the time I was 15 I wanted to run off to Paris and work in a drag bar and get my surgery.  But I also wanted to wear black clothes and write poetry and live in the Village.

When I read Betty Friedan I discovered that her idea of breaking out of the Feminine Mystique which was a really suck trap for middle class women of my mother’s generation didn’t involve living in the Village.

But I persevered and when I went to college I discover SDS and pot.  Rebellion… well that went from protest to resistance as I turned on, tuned in and dropped out.

Some where along the line I got further and further from the stereotypical idea of a “normal life”.  Of course being born different had something to do with that. But I made existential choices too and each one moved me further away from the possibility of ….  Not that I really wanted…

I remember having philosophical discussions about children and listening to sister tell me how bad they wanted to have kids and how they would pay anything if there was a surgery that would make that possible.  Me?  I got my fill of taking care of kids, baby sitting my brother for some 8 years.  The idea of being responsable for a kid.  Not a chance.  I would have paid extra to not have them if the ability went with the operation.

I’ve had boyfriends.  I even busted one out of a Navy Hospital, very Sutherland & Fonda in “Steelyard Blues”.  We even got a license but never followed through.

I am bisexual…  I didn’t have to be a lesbian..  I chose to be lesbian because men really don’t respect women, most don’t even much like them.  Most like their buddies better.

If they really respected and liked women rape and prostitution wouldn’t exist, nor would employment discrimination or wage inequality.

Very few of the sisters I’ve know over the years live truly conventional lives, but then neither do most people I know.

I’m not even sure I know what normal is.  I look around and so many people are all freaky in their own special ways.  Maybe normal is something sold to us as a desirable commodity, a gray conformity of enslavement that means the machine runs smoothly with out anyone protesting being nothing more than a cog in a machine.