I never used the term transgender with regards to myself. I do not use gender when I mean sex. I’m an Edu-Punk and autodidact not given to the use of euphemisms and jargon when plain words will clarify the academic spectacle.
Therefore I would tend to use the word ‘perversify’ where Julia Serano uses ‘sexualize’ even though this changes the point of attack directed at the same problem considerably.
I was reading a piece by Tom Hayden recently, about the trial of the Chicago 8. He said the charges were as much about the defendants living an unauthorized highly contagious lifestyle rather than the ostensible conspiracy charges..
Transsexuals and transgenders (along with L/G folks) live (not talking about the being but rather the acting on the being) lifestyles deemed by right wing religious factions to be both unauthorized and contagious.
I remember when transsexual autobiographies never mentioned having hot horny sex. Then during the 1970s it became legitimate for us to actually like having sex.
With the reactionary shift that started with the rise of conservatism and Christo-Fascism came the delegitimizing of sex in general and more specifically all sex outside of the proscribed heteronormative patriarchal defined context of marriage between one man born male and one woman born female.
Those of us who had gone through the surgical process during the era of sexual liberation were some what appalled at the erasure of transsexualism and the idea of surgical sex change from the landscape and the replacement of it by transgender and its attendant hegemonic colonization of our life experiences.
I was dismayed by the Dworkin/MacKinnon anti-porn/anti-sex faction and how anti-liberationist right wing it appeared. My anarchistic reaction was to join the lesbian sexual outlaws group Samois and defiantly march topless down San Francisco’s Market Street during Pride Day 1982.
Now people with transsexualism and by extension transgender identified folks find every element of their sexuality subject to discussion by a class of people who demarcate their class by both jargon and degrees, academic credentials which exclude the very people who are having their sexualities studied and perversified from the discourse regarding the hegemonic nature of being objectified by these “professionals”.
Many years ago during Second Wave feminism I learned from my feminist WBF friends that my personal sexuality and the things that turned me on, even if they were sometimes guilty un-feminist pleasures like looking at and fantasizing with Vogue Magazine were pretty much the same things that turned them on.
So imagine my surprise when the perversifing perverts of psychopathology entered the picture in the 1990s and started using post-modern pathologizing misogynistic jargon to make my sexuality into something strange. But there is a subtext to all this and it is a very misogynistic one that promotes the idea that the only legitimate sexuality women can have is a Freudian one of cock craving.
Unfortunately this is one of those sexualities more found in men and more specifically gay men.
In too much of the world it can be lethal for women to express too much interest in sex with men and even excessive zeal with a husband can be seen as evidence of adultery and punished by divorce or murder.
Freud may have found anything other than cock craving a sign of immaturity on the part of women coupled with the misogyny that assumes the formation of male identity and its disconnection from mother identification is superior to that female continued identification with mother. In reality is women have a large element of identification with women as part of their sexuality.
Hence both men’s and women’s magazines tend to show naked sexy clad women with the men objectifying the women in their magazines and the women identifying with the women in theirs. Of course the patriarchal politically correct party line is that women only look at fashion and fashion magazine as a way of attracting the desired cock.
But attracting desired cock is easy. As the Waitresses’ song went “I know what boys like, I know what boys want. Boys want me.” or put in more anarcha-punk feminist language by Valerie Solanis, “Men would walk nostril deep through a mile of puke if they though they would find a willing pussy on the other side.”
Rather than deny being sexual and there is a difference between being sexual and being objectified, exocticized or perversified we need the power to name, claim and define our own sexuality in positive life affirming feminist terms.
To have our own vagina monologues or cunt songs. Rather than permitting others to define our sexuality as perversion and defend against that by denial we have to speak out loudly and forcefully in defense of ourselves as having sexualities that are every bit as legitimate as those defined by heteronormative Freudian religious fanatics.
Women Born Transsexual 