I’ve been seeing this one getting a lot of air play lately and I wondered what it was code for and what particular values it embraced.
See I know what a classic guitar is. It is one with nylon strings, 12 frets and a slotted machine head whereas my Martin has steel strings, 14 frets and a non-slotted machine head.
I know what classic cars are and if “classic transsexual” meant someone more than 25 years post-op I wouldn’t find it problematic.
But that would preclude some of the nasty twits using it. One in particular from San Francisco who likes writing nasty crap about me.
I noticed that some of the people using it had a seriously homophobic element to their writings.
They also displayed a propensity for obfuscation when asked for a definition. Not a good move especially in the invoking of Dr B. to some one who had him write a letter to Dr. Laub as part of her surgery recommendation.
Embracing “Classic Transsexual” is sort like embracing autogynephilia. Indeed Bailey uses it as a synonym for androphilic or homosexual transsexual. I was sort of amused to discover this one because the other couple of people I banned were self identified autogynephilics. Neither set particularly strike me as folks I would want to hang out with.
Language can be a tricky thing and it is all to easy to slip into oppressive modes of usage out of shear laziness.
I used to use primary and secondary a lot. I used them in a non prejudicial way as short hand to describe a couple of different demographic groups and because I thought them less prejudicial than the Bailey/Blanchardisms. Then I reread Stoller’s Sex and Gender and discovered the baggage those terms carried.
So now I use young emerger and middle age emerger. A few more letters to delineate the same basic demographic sets but with less baggage.
Words have meaning, words have weight and carry concepts some more biased than others. Anyone of any group that has had their life at one point or other affected by a trans-prefixed word has to dance on the knife edge of words and their meaning for those words can cut both ways. It is difficult to to embrace one side of the BBZL coin without embracing the entire pile of bigoted BS.
This isn’t the first time I’ve cast a jaundiced eye on horizontal hostility and I doubt it will be the last.
Women Born Transsexual 