Women Born Transsexual

I remember not only the ideals but how often my country has failed to live up to those ideals.

Sometime everything about my country seems like a lie.

For all the sloganeering about freedom it seems in damned short supply if you are not a rich white Protestant man of a certain class and breeding.

So let us see What should I celebrate on the Forth of July?

Shall I celebrate the genocide of nearly an entire race of people who once inhabited this fair nation and the relegation of the rest to the meanest most barren, isolated and desolate parts of it?

Shall I celebrate the enslavement of people originally from Africa but now American upon whose whip scarred backs the original wealth of the nation was built?

KKKonservative historical revisionists call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression.  A monumental  act of denial on the order of that of Nazi Symps who deny the holocaust and the murder of not only 6 million Jews but also millions of others.  War of Northern aggression my ass, more like the War of Southern Treason. Slavery isn’t one bit prettier if you try to disguise behind the current Southern Republican racists’ pet phrase, “Atlantic Triangular Trade”.  It was the fucking slave trade.  The buying and selling of human beings.  God Bless America…

Now we abuse the economic refugees from Mexico just as we did the Irish, the Poles, Italians and thousands upon thousands of other immigrants from Europe and Asia before them.

Platitudes tell me how how equal we are.  Jim Crow laws from my childhood replete with lynchings give lie to that one.

Busted heads on picket lines, beatings for peaceful sit down strikes, black lists and employment terminations make the very idea that we have freedom of speech a joke.

In the 1960s it was illegal for someone with transsexualism or transgenderism to dress in a way that reflected who they knew themselves to be.  Sodomy was a criminal offense in almost every state in the nation.

For a bright and shining moment we called the 1960s and the 1970s it looked as though we would finally actualize the ideals of this nation.

But with the election of Reagan and the subsequent neo-cons and neo-libs we have descended once again into the swamp of bigotry, imperialistic wars, denial of rights.

The lies that are told about the 1960s do to that era what the right wing historical revisionists have done to our entire history and that is replace history with mythology.

[2010-07-04 Latin American Herald Tribune]

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=359746&CategoryId=12395

Sunday July 04, 2010

Transsexuals Take Leading Role in Madrid’s Gay Pride Parade

MADRID – Thousands of people paraded Saturday [2010-07-03] through downtown Madrid in a festive, colorful march giving visibility of transsexuals, a group that took the leading role in this year’s Gay Pride demonstration in Spain.

The parade attracted, according to the organizers – the State Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals, or FELGTB, and Madrid’s COGAM gay-rights organization – more than a million people, a number similar to previous years.

The banner at the head of the parade, with the slogan “For Trans Equality,” was carried by Spain’s minister of equality, Bibiana Aido, who joined in minutes after the event began, together with other representatives of leftist political parties.

Marching with them was the Israeli transsexual Suku Alexander, representing the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals of Israel, after the organization barred the presence of the Tel Aviv float for not condemning the attack on the so-called “Freedom Flotilla.”

Both the politicians and the organizers voiced their complaint that even now in the 21st century transsexuals are officially considered sick people.

Spain’s minister of equality recalled that the Spanish government has urged the World Health Organization to remove transsexuality from the international classification of illnesses.

For his part, the president of the FELGTB, Antonio Poveda, said that “transsexuals, the most vulnerable group in our world, must have the same rights that we already enjoy as lesbians, gays and bisexuals.”

Besides transsexuals, the March of Pride commemorated this year the fifth anniversary of Spain’s enacting the law allowing same-sex marriages.

For that reason, the first of the more than 30 floats in the parade was for diverse families: a double-decker bus in which families of lesbians, gays, transexuals and bisexuals displayed the realities of their lives.

The organizers again insisted that the demonstration is basically a protest, though in fact it becomes a festival of fun to attract participation.

To the rhythm of drums and the sound of songs that have become classics in parades of this kind, such as “A Quien Le Importa” (Who Cares) by Alaska, the demonstrators crowded the streets of downtown Madrid dressed in the most widely diverse and flamboyant costumes while carrying flags with all the colors of the rainbow.

The manifesto read at the end of the march insisted that transsexuals have the right to be treated as they were born, as what they have really always been.

And to achieve that, they have asked for an overhaul of the educational system because it does not acknowledge the existence of this diversity; of the health system, so that “in every community the transsexualizing process can be attended to”; of the mind of those who believe that transsexuality is a sickness; and of the workplace with its measures of discrimination.

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