Women Born Transsexual

A few years back I got put on moderation on a number of mailing lists for a quip that was bitchy enough to have come from Michael Musto or Perez Hilton.

The offending quip was, “There are two kinds of lesbians, bisexuals and men.”

The original incident that caused me to make that quip was when Pat Califia became  Patrick Califia and with his T to M partner became the original pregant man.

Now transmen dropping babies has turned into a common place thing barely worthy of a reporter springing for a fast food lunch much less a flight to NY for an interview.

Now Chastity becomes Chaz.  Okay…  Cool…

Over the years I got really tired of butch lesbians giving femme lesbians crap for being feminine.  It was almost likewe were getting knocked for not being male identified the way so many of masculine identified women were.  Now it turns out that an awful lot of butchs were and are T to Ms who have sort of used the lesbian community as a safe place.

At the same time many of these newly emerging T to M folks were trashing T to F people who were really good lesbian feminists.  Salt of the earth women identified women.

I’m glad y’all are coming out.  Congratulations Chaz, as a LGBT/T activist you have been a star.  Always ready to do the money raising, the organizing so this gripe isn’t directed to you.

Internalized transphobia is hell to overcome and coming out is easy once you say the magic words in front of others.

No doubt you will encounter some of the same mindless bigotry that your T to F sisters have.  Give them hell like you’ve been doing as an activist for the last 20 years or so.

BTW I knew there were a lot of brothers among the butches from when I came out some 40 years ago.

So Chaz Congratulations

I’ve been growing more and more exasperated with people who obsess on either the genetics of transsexualism or their sometimes very dubious claims to science defying forms of intersex.

Lots of those claimed can run to the truly strange and show a remarkable ignorance of basic biology particularly coming from people who have actually fathered children.

But far more important than these claims is the failure to realize what a waste of time it is to base claims to basic civil/human rights on something biological.

Looking for the biology to validate one’s humanity ignores the enslavement of African American people for several hundred years followed by the last hundred and fifty years of Jim Crow discrimination.

Or the unequal treatment of women.

Biology has never beaten faith based bigotry and that is what many forms of bigotry are.

Nor has biology beaten the political forms of bigotry that result in certain groups being scapegoated and even marked for genocide.

In 1973 when gay and lesbian people got homosexuality removed from the DSM they didn’t argue biology.  The organized a grassroots movement and went out and won a political victory.  They let the APA know that as long as they were pathologized the APA would be facing picket lines and protests.

They argued that pathologizing lesbian and gay people was oppressing them.

In 1973 lesbian and gay people had the power of all the 1960s movements if not actually supporting them standing as an example of people standing up and saying, “No justice, No peace.”

Then came thirty years of Reaganism/Thatcherism that poisoned even the liberals and nearly destroyed progressive movements.

I was actually a supporter of the Transgender Movement at first.  In 1995 it seemed like a good idea.  Then I became aware that they were in the process of erasing transsexualism as a unique entity.  I was also bothered by the inherent misogyny involved in turning woman from meaning an adult human female into a “social role”.

None the less the idea of human rights is a sound one.  As is the idea that one shold not be denied certain basic rights based on having a gender presentation that is at odd with the stereotypical gender presentation for a person with that particular set of genitals.

GID as well as numerous other rights WBTs expect and in some cases erroneously believe they have are matters of politics and not genetics.  Those arguing against those rights use the Bible or religion written in terms of pathology to achieve political ends.

Sitting around dwelling on why or why not you aren’t like other transsexuals is an exercise of looking into the mirror in narcissistic rapture.  It may feel good and may help you to self validate but in the words of a Jefferson Airplane song, “It doesn’t mean shit to a tree.”

Meaning it won’t change anything.  Change comes from action.  Action can take many forms from marching to signing petitions to arguing points on line.

Humans should have human rights because that is what equality under the eyes of the law is about.  You shouldn’t have to prove your humanity by arguing genetics or scientific studies.

Letter from Lynn Conway to Catherine Whiteside, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Vice-Provost, University of Toronto

June 10, 2009.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/News/US/Zucker/Complaint/Academic_Misconduct_by_Ken_Zucker.html

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/News/US/Zucker/Complaint/Academic_Misconduct_by_Ken_Zucker.pdf