Women Born Transsexual

About 12 or 13 years ago in LA I lived in an area where East Hollywood met Los Feliz met Silverlake.

It  was a nice semi boho area with great Thai restaurants, a decent used bookstore, a couple of independent bookstores, a couple theaters (both live and movie), art galleries,  and a real coffeehouse with poetry readings and all that.

You also couldn’t turn around without bumping into one of our brother kinfolk.

I was a volunteer at the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Center and I met a couple of academic brothers, one of whom convinced me I was an important person in history.  He introduced me to Susan Stryker but that is another story.

Now I’m a big believer in using our power to name rather than having outsiders impose it on us.  This is why I say I was treated for transsexualism and not for GID or Gender Dysphoria (Never mind that neither of those had been socially constructed when I got SRS)  I borrow the initials of an African American Clothing Design house for this process FUBU (For Us, By Us)

Anyhow one of the brothers I met refused tocall himself F to M.  Instead he used T to M.  Part of the origin of WBT arises from my taking this concept from him

As some of you have noticed I use “Transkid” a lot.  This meshs with the idea that before surgery we were transsexual and assigned as male (or female as the case may be) and later when our being transsexual and not male (or female as the case may be) we had sex reassignment surgery that changed our genital sex assignment.

I know this leaves metaphysical questions but T to F works better for me than Male to Female.  Particularly since I wasn’t all that male to begin with.

Words have strength, words have meaning.

This is why I don’t do post-modern.

To me a man is an adult person with a penis, a male.  A woman is an adult person with a vagina or more properly vulva, a female.  Man and woman are not some gender based social constructs although “gender” is in and of itself a social construct. see feminine/masculine/manly/womanly.

What I have hated most about transgender as umbrella is of it messes with language to deceive.  Some who are brutally honest would say lie.

They claim transsexual and transgender are synonyms when they are discrete terms with different meanings.  Transgender people live full time as members of the sex not associated with their current genitals and are not working heart and soul to get SRS.  Transsexuals want and get SRS and move heaven and earth to do so.

I hate the terms cis-sexual or cis-gender in part because the first person I heard use them was Laura Blake/Laura Masters, a thoroughly disagreeable transgender/transwoman on the Usenet.  I know Julia Serano, who I adore because she is both cute and bright as well as giving great slam poetry, is very fond of those terms but I am not.

To understand where I am going with this I shoud give a little back-story.  Now days when I refer back to the 1960s and going to the Haight I say I was a “hippie”.  Back then I described myself as a politico, a radical, a freak, anything but a hippie because outsiders considered hippie a synonym for “flower child” and I was most definitely not one of those.

When I came out in 1969 one was either a queen or a trannie, the equivalent of transgender and transsexual.  When you got surgery, had the operation, had your sex change operation it made you into a real woman and separated you from both the queens and the trannies.

Now lots of folks give me shit about calling it a sex change operation and I’m equally comfortable with the more genteel sex reassignment surgery.  However changing/reassigning from male to female was what the operation does.  Since they label you at birth based on the appearance of what is between your legs and equality demands no more or no less upon completion of the surgery that we be sexed by the same standard.

This brings me to a great new term by Sophia Siedlberg, “Normborn”.  I wanted to use the term “normie” for those born with out the burden of having been born in-between in the same way as I used to call heterosexuals “breeders” back in the days before “gaybabies” produced by turkey basters, adoption and immaculate conception.  By contrary to popular belief I don’t seek out getting trashed and flamed for being honest.  It just happens because people are very enchanted with pretty word, euphemisms to disguise and erase our having been born different and as a result growing up to go through an operation that treats our being born with transsexualism by reassigning our sex to the sex that is a better match.

Besides the fucks at Focus on the Family will still lie about us and use us to beg money from their stupid followers no matter what pretty and obscuring language we use.

I know academics love complex language because they can use it to to write scholarly articles for their Journals.

But me…  I’m an anarcha-feminist and I think the best way to deliver a message is to tape it to a brick and heave the brick through a big plate glass window.

So “normborn” is a word for today