Women Born Transsexual

While I find Sex Reassignment Surgery a reasonable formal description for what we used to call our sex change operations, most of the Transgender Borg generated euphemisms are an epic fail.

WTF is “Gender Affirmation Surgery”?  Sounds like they permanently graft high-heels onto your feet or something.

Now we have Autumn Sandeen trying to claim a castration is “gender affirmation surgery”.

Is it any wonder society at large has started lumping post-transsexual women in with the full time drag queens and heterosexual transvestites?

Post-SRS women get censored and condemned as classist and racist, as genital surgery essentialists for speaking the simple truth about the experience of having had a sex change operation.  Surgery makes it real and it really is a different life experience to live with a pussy between your legs instead of a dick.

Instead we have to put up with feminine gendered penis people denying us the right to speak about our life experiences.  Who really has the experience of having been pre-op and now being post-op.  Post-transsexual women (and men) or pre-op transgenders with their original plumbing.

Okay hit me with the excuses as to why you haven’t had SRS even though you have the money to travel all over the country working for transgender rights…

I’ve been hearing those excuses since before I came out, since 1968 when I first started meeting actual drag queens as well as other transsexuals.  I used to believe them.  I’m far more skeptical these days.

I was skeptical about the whole Camp Trans thing too.  Like the Michigan Women’s Music Festival is the only music festival in the US.  I mean you didn’t even start protesting there until some ten to fifteen years after the heyday of Women’s Music, something that lasted almost as long as the folk music scare of the early 1960s.

I’d be willing to bet that most transgender folk who are so riled up about this particular festival would be hard pressed to name one artist  other than perhaps Cris Williamson who recorded for Olivia Records. (I know some one will use Wikipedia and Google to find all the names in order to prove me wrong, so don’t bother.  It’s beside the point.)  Most people making the stink aren’t part of the Women’s Music scene.  Most haven’t actually read any of the classic feminist books either.

Transsexual women, particularly long time post-transsexual women took a lot of shit back in the late 1990s for using the trope, “I felt like a woman trapped in a male body.”  I think most pick up the idea of challenging us on that one from Riki Wilchins, bless her little heart, who wrote some good stuff but in the long run had a negative impact on the lives of post-transsexual women.  The same is true of Kate Bornstein.  They made a schtick out of material that in the long run invalidated the lives of post-transsexual women.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with the cultural feminists and the Transgender Borg, but we also have to put up with post-op quislings like Christan Williams, bless her little old heart, generating tons of Borg inspired revisionist history. See… “In the 1970s, “transgender” meant transsexual and “transgenderist” meant full-time heterosexual crossdresser.” Which is a pile of happy Transgender Borg meadow pies (bullshit).  Right from the get go in the mid-1970s, “transgender” was a synonym for full time drag queen, often of a heterosexual back ground.  They used that term to disassociate themselves from the drag queen sex workers. Transgenderist is to transgender what feminist is to feminism.  Virginia Prince may have used it for himself but most of the actually heterosexual (as in attracted to women) transgenders used “transgender”.

I sure Christan will dig up something, some where, obsessives always do.

But consider what Christan is trying to do and how androcentric it comes off.  Christan is trying to discredit women who were there and who had their sex change operations 30 to 40 years ago.

Because no one is as much of an expert about the lives of post-transsexual women as the Transgender Borg.

How come I feel the urge to pull out the post-transsexual holy water and throw it in their desperate Transgender Borg vampire like faces?  The phrase that goes , “Men have dicks, women have pussies.”

Because SRS really is a sex change operation and in spite of all the wordy rapping games, in spite of all the anti-transsexual hate the Borg have managed to stir back up we still have pussies when we pull down our jeans and they do not.

Game, Set, Match.

Oh and what caused me to know I was transsexual even before I was an adult…  I felt like a girl trapped in a male body, or more accurately I felt like a girl trapped in a body that confused people as to whether I was male or female.

Yesterday, in the comments section of the post: Transgender Borg Tell Post-Transsexual Women Who Do Not Embrace the TG Umbrella, “STFU!” I explained the euphemistic way, the genteel Texas manner of bestowing a “Bless your little heart.” in stead of saying “Fuck you, shit for brains.” the way I used to.

I know this series of articles is going to bring me hate mail.  this is why I am thankful  Word-Press includes several firewalls.  I have always had the Spam Blaster set to Max. Which means even regular posters often have their mail held up.  Which causes some regular posters to wonder why they are moderated even though they are not.

On the other hand those who blast me with inchoate rage filled hate mail wind up on the moderated list.  Where I get to see their hate mail and decide if I will let it through or not.

I tried hard for the first couple of years to avoid the ad hominem attacks in either posts or comment sections that one sees on so many post-transsexual or Transgender Borg Blogs.

I have tended to attack stupid ideology rather than people.  But I have found there are actual people behind the vile hatred.

Back to the comments section of the above mentioned post.

This morning I was greeted by a piece of hate mail, which I let through while slapping the poster on to the moderated list.

The funny thing was how it could have come from either a “radical feminist” or a member of the Transgender Borg Collective.  Their opinion of post-transsexual women is so identical as to be virtually indistinguishable.

I decided to bestow a heart blessing upon the sender and treat the sender as a member of the Borg due to a careful parsing of the post.

But honestly this begs the real questions.  Are the the ‘radical feminists” members of the Transgender Borg Collective?  Or.  Are the Transgender Borg really “radical feminists”?

From The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-redford/keystone-xl-pipeline_b_978835.html

By Robert Redford
Posted: 9/24/11

When you challenge Big Oil in Houston, you can bet the industry is going to punch back. So when I wrote in the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that we should say no to the Keystone XL pipeline, I wasn’t surprised when the project’s chief executive weighed in with a different view.

The corporate rejoinder, written by Alex Pourbaix, president for energy and oil pipelines for the TransCanada Corp., purported to cite “errors” in my oped. Let’s set the record straight, point by point.

First, the Keystone XL, as proposed, would run from Canada across the width of our country to Texas oil refineries and ports. It would carry diluted bitumen, a kind of crude oil, produced from the Alberta tar sands. On those points, we all agree.

I say this is a bad idea. It would put farmers, ranchers and croplands at risk across much of the Great Plains. It would feed our costly addiction to oil. And it would wed our future to the destructive production of tar sands crude.

That’s where the disagreement begins. Pourbaix claimed it was “not accurate” for me to call tar sands crude “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” He cited a report by the Royal Society of Canada that compared Canadian tar sands crude to oil from Libya, Venezuela or the Middle East.

The fact is, producing oil from tar sands generates 17 percent more of the carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions that are warming our planet than conventional oil in this country. It’s 19 percent dirtier than Middle East Sour, 13 percent dirtier than Mexican Heavy and 16 percent dirtier than Venezuelan crudes.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-redford/keystone-xl-pipeline_b_978835.html

From The New York Times:    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/eurovillains/

By Paul Krugman
Sept. 23, 2011

It took bad thinking and bad policy by many players to get us into the state we’re in; rarely in the course of human events have so many worked so hard to do so much damage. But if I had to identify the players who really let us down the most, I think I’d point to European institutions that lent totally spurious intellectual credibility to the Pain Caucus. Specifically:

– The OECD, which a year ago demanded both fiscal austerity and a sharp rise in interest rates, because, well, because. Recently the OECD surveyed Britain, concluded that inflation is likely to decline, unemployment to rise, and that the UK should therefore … continue with fiscal austerity and raise rates. As a correspondent wrote, “What planet are they living on? What planet am I living on?”

– The ECB, which bought totally into the doctrine of expansionary austerity, despite overwhelming evidence that it was false, and proceeded to raise rates in the face of a deeply depressed economy — possibly the straw that breaks the euro’s back.

– The BIS, which called for tighter monetary policy just three months ago, to fight a nonexistent inflationary threat. Did I mention that inflation expectations, as measured by the difference between yields on ordinary and index bonds, have been plunging like a stone?

Complete article at:  http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/eurovillains/

 

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/23-13

by Nathan Schneider
Published on Friday, September 23, 2011 by TruthOut.org

A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That’s where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.

At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they’re viral. But for those looking to understand even the basic facts about what is actually going on—before September 17 and since—the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything else.

For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as implementation, it’s painfully easy to see which news articles take their bearing entirely from a few Google searches. Some reporters come to Liberty Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They’re briefly disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it’s a bunch of people—from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to zealous students—spending most of their time in long meetings about supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza’s limited space and what exactly they’re there to do and why. And that’s the point. More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.

As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on July 13 for an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the extent of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest to others. The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme floaters, too.

The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July 14, and it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the movement’s progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about 50,000 unique visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and woman who met through the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit.

Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O’Brien, an IT content management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform—”One citizen. One dollar. One vote.”—and decided to peg her efforts to the September 17 action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities around the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer in New York could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be coffee and cigarettes.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/23-13

From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html?_r=2

By DANAH BOYD and ALICE MARWICK
Published: September 22, 2011

THE suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old boy from western New York who killed himself last Sunday after being tormented by his classmates for being gay, is appalling. His story is a classic case of bullying: he was aggressively and repeatedly victimized. Horrific episodes like this have sparked conversations about cyberbullying and created immense pressure on regulators and educators to do something, anything, to make it stop. Yet in the rush to find a solution, adults are failing to recognize how their conversations about bullying are often misaligned with youth narratives. Adults need to start paying attention to the language of youth if they want antibullying interventions to succeed.

Jamey recognized that he was being bullied and asked explicitly for help, but this is not always the case. Many teenagers who are bullied can’t emotionally afford to identify as victims, and young people who bully others rarely see themselves as perpetrators. For a teenager to recognize herself or himself in the adult language of bullying carries social and psychological costs. It requires acknowledging oneself as either powerless or abusive.

In our research over a number of years, we have interviewed and observed teenagers across the United States. Given the public interest in cyberbullying, we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain.

This didn’t mesh with our observations, so we struggled to understand the disconnect. While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as “drama.”

At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html?_r=2

From World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/econ-s24.shtml

By Barry Grey
24 September 2011
Three years after the Wall Street crash of 2008, finance ministers, central bankers and economists assembled in Washington for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank present a picture of perplexity and fear as the crisis spins out of control and lurches toward a full-scale depression.

Following a massive sell-off on world stock markets Thursday, the finance ministers and central bankers of the G20 leading economies, meeting on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank conferences, issued an unannounced and hastily composed late-night communiqué. Its aim was to shore up investor confidence and calm the markets.

The one-page document declared the commitment of the G20 countries to “supporting growth, implementing credible fiscal consolidation plans, and ensuring strong sustainable growth.”

Claiming that the G20 ministers and central bankers were “taking strong actions to maintain financial stability, restore confidence and support growth,” the statement asserted, “We commit to take all actions to preserve the stability of banking systems and financial markets as required.”

However, apart from vague language about increasing the flexibility and maximizing the resources of the European bailout fund, the communiqué offered no specifics. It did little to inspire confidence in the financial markets, which opened Friday in the red in both Europe and the US but ended the trading day slightly higher. The minimal gains did little to relieve the sense of gloom and crisis that produced a 5.9 percent drop (675 points) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over Wednesday and Thursday combined.

In a Friday article headlined “Grim Mood in IMF and World Bank,” the Financial Times quoted Eswar Prasad, former head of the IMF’s China division and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, as saying: “The crisis of confidence cannot be stanched merely by broad statements of concern and noble policy intentions at a time when decisive and concerted policy actions are sorely needed.” He added: “In the absence of specific and decisive policy measures, markets are unlikely to be calmed by such broad statements.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/econ-s24.shtml

From The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/163549/can-movement-save-american-dream

On October 3 activists from across the country will gather in Washington at the Take Back the American Dream conference, in the belief that only a citizens movement can save an American dream that grows ever more distant. In the face of a failed economy and a corrupted politics, the only hope for renewal is that citizens lead and politicians follow.

The modern American dream was inspired by a growing middle class that was the triumph of democracy after World War II. Its promise was and is opportunity: that hard work can earn a good life—a good job with decent pay and security, a home in a safe neighborhood, affordable healthcare, a secure retirement, a good education for the kids. The promise always exceeded the performance—especially with regard to racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and women—and America never did as well as Europe in lifting the poor from misery. But a broad middle class and a broadly shared prosperity at least provided the possibility of a way up.

Now that middle class is sinking, imperiled by an economy that does not work for working people. Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in six people lives in poverty, the highest level in fifty years.

Every element of the dream is imperiled. Wages for the 70 percent of Americans without a college education have declined dramatically over the past forty years, although CEO salaries and corporate profits soared. Corporations continue to ship good jobs abroad, while the few jobs created at home are disproportionately in the low-wage service sector. One in four homes is underwater, devastating what has been the largest single asset for most middle-class families. Healthcare costs are soaring, with nearly 50 million uninsured. Half of all Americans have no retirement plan at work, pensions are disappearing and even Social Security and Medicare are targeted for cuts. College debt now exceeds credit card debt, with defaults rising and more and more students priced out of higher education.

Continue reading at:  http://www.thenation.com/article/163549/can-movement-save-american-dream