Women Born Transsexual

I made the mistake of reading Lisa Harney’s Blog “Questioning Transphobia”.

I’m not going to attack Lisa. I read her “About”, I actually like her.  I even like the premise of her Blog because Transphobia like the more general misogyny of which it is a subset is real.

Dealing with it is painful.  Wanting the world to be different is good and putting energy towards changing it is pretty awesome.

The thing is I have been part of the rise of various movements and I have seen their deterioration and fall.

Most notably Second Wave Feminism.  I was part of some pretty radical feminist groups.  I was even a lesbian separatist for a short time.

The fatal disease, the rotting tooth that destroyed so much of the will to create and sustain a positive movement came not from external forces of repression.  Indeed repression from without tends to create cohesion.

What damaged the movement so much was the empowerment of the loudest whiner, who made the claim to the greatest level of oppression.

Last night I read an essay from Alice Echols book “Shaky Ground”.  This was about the Sex Wars, or more specifically the anti-pornography campaign waged by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon.

Now I’ve always felt trapped when confronted by the contradiction of having to defend something I don’t particularly like, indeed may hate because failure to defend that which I may find abhorrent leaves me out on a limb when it comes to defending something I hold near and dear but which others may see as obscene.  Pornography is just that.  As vile and hateful as the skin magazines in the XXX Porno stores are I can remember how in my teenage years so much information about transsexualism was treated in an identical manner.

Now I have been a sex worker, specifically I worked the ads.  Yes it was degrading but so to is homelessness or dependence upon a single man who may well be more abusive.

I sort of followed Dworkin’s writing arc and it came to sound more and more like the ramblings of someone deeply disturbed.  Here was someone who achieved relative success as a feminist author, some one who commanded four if not five figure speaking engagement fees talking about personally suffering a life worse that that which I was seeing my drug addicted sex worker sisters as suffering.

There was a fatal tendency to give the one who whined the loudest and exhibited the most scars the greatest credibility.

This brings me back to Lisa’s blog.  Some of her followers show that same tendency.  It is almost a “Night of the Living Dead” zombie like need to attack anyone who voices optimism or worse yet contradicts their world view that being born transsexual lays one open to more oppression than anything else in the world possibly could. The idea that to be either transgender or WBT is to automatically be subjected to the absolute worst that humanity has to offer.

Now I’m a bleeding heart who has seen the documentaries and photo journalist articles about the ravages of war.  Hell I’ve seen the squats and shooting galleries of San Francisco and Los Angeles.  On a the Lexington ave train from mid town down to the Village I listened to a pair of child male hustlers talk about living a life that would probably kill them before they saw adulthood.

There are far worse things than being transgender or born with transsexualism.  Hell we have doctors, lawyers, engineers and all sorts of other people leading successful lives.

Even a former substance abusing sex worker like myself can clean up and become a productive member of society living clean and sober as well as showing the always hungry mind of an autodidact.

Lynn Conway’s pages of success stories show that it isn’t only a few exceptional people who escape the projected lives of degradation and horror.

Yet if a post-SRS woman says she has pretty much assimilated into ordinary life the hungry zombie issue forth warnings about, “What will happen if_______?”

The answer of living one day at a time, the AA message and that I deal with those things that are within my control to change and work to cope with those which are beyond my control are not messages they want to hear.

My living based on certain AA principles is exceptionalism and means I don’t care about the horrors of all the oppressed transgender masses.

Well, I have my own causes and my own hobbies and loves.  Often I have too little time to enjoy my own life. I’m an atheist.  I do not believe in saints.  I certainly have no aspirations to be one, it is enough to strive to live up to my own ideals of ethical behavior in a world where ethics are often shed in the name of profit.

I am not a counselor.  I’ve found what more or less works for me.  It took a lot of struggle to do that.

SRS freed me to focus on the many other causes in my life.  Yet it would be equally okay if someone’s only cause in life was to be married and supported in order to work out, sun and spend money.  I might be judgemental and regard that as a waste of one’s life but I do not have the right to dictate to that person that they need to go off and feed the starving children of Somalia or some other act of do goodism.

BTW I got trashed for supporting freedom of speech during the Sex Wars.  I wound up marching the length of Market Street topless and in leathers during a pride day parade with the sex positive group Samois.

It is important to stand up to the whiners rather than let their negativity drag you down to their level of misery.

Worse yet dwelling in both misery and hopelessness prevents action to change those things which oppress.

[There is a phrase that hits my eyes and ears with all the soothing melody of fingernails dragged down a black board.  That phrase is: “In non western cultures” followed by blah blah blah about how wonderful it is that in a place like India there is a cultural niche for transgender and people with transsexualism.  It is located some where below untouchable and serves the purpose of giving the untouchables someone to look down upon.

Needless to say I take living in modern western cultures over any overly romantacized lesser developed world alternatives.]

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/news/zijlijn/6255632/Transsexual-woman-pestered-into-moving

Published: Sunday 12 April 2009 21:14 UTC
Last updated: Sunday 12 April 2009 21:14 UTC

A transsexual woman from the Utrecht district of Zuilen has moved away as a result of bullying by a group of about 30 young Moroccans.
Earlier, two lesbian couples left Zuilen because they no longer felt safe there. Utrecht Mayor Aleid Wolfsen said the situation was extremely regrettable.

Last year, the city council took a series of measures to prevent this type of incident, including CCTV supervision and so-called ‘street coaches’, Moroccan parents appointed to tackle problem youths about their conduct.

Want to lose the transgender oppression Olympics?

It’s pretty easy.. Really.  All you have to do is challenge the idea that the absolutely worst thing that could happen to one is that they are born with transsexualism.

Or even worse yet point out that a lot of people in the world, a huge minority if not the majority of people have far suckier and more oppressed lives than they do.  Especially if they come from a middle class white heterosexual background.

You know like being a kid in Africa with a local warlord given to arm chopping or working in a sweatshop in Indonesia making Nikes might just trump being born with transsexualism if one is fortunate enough to be born in a modern western society where one can get SRS and they don’t tip walls over on you.

But hey, hate crimes and employment discrimination are pretty fucked and I can get down behind supporting legal measures aimed at punishing those transgressions against equality and human dignity so it is not like I’m saying, “Fuck off, I hate you.”

The thing is I am capable of supporting more than one cause at a time.  I learned that one way back during the Vietnam war.  Others may not but for some 10-15 years I considered my main occupation to be if not a revolutionary then a radical.

One of the things I learned from the employee’s manual, the one by Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals” is to only fight for things I care about.  So I have my pet causes that happen to be rather varied.  I’m anti-war, feminist, pro-union, and I hold down a job.

I whine more about my feet and back hurting than most things.  But the general lot of part-timers and that is a standard for older workers pretty much sucks.  Especially in retail.

I live in a post-industrial society and I’m working class.

Life isn’t always easy but I don’t feel constantly oppressed because of the birth defect I had fixed so many years ago.  Having had SRs doen’t play much of a role at all in my life.

So when I hear people treating it like having won a triple gold medal in the oppression Olympics  I think, “How defeatist.”  Yet it is like validation through suffering and often a need to claim some form of other handicap upon top of that.  It is so totally the opposite of the people on Lynn Conway’s list of Success Stories.

Sometimes the whining just has the opposite effect of evoking sympathy.

Of course at that pint anything you say in your own defense only makes you more transphobic.

Any suggestion that your own personal life isn’t filled with transoppression  brings forth a torrent of abuse and a wishing of misfortune.  Accusations of bigotry and hatred etc.

If it weren’t so potentially damaging to getting GID removed from the DSM I’d just write these sort off but their symptoms of mental illness get used to tarnish the rest of us.