Women Born Transsexual

To the Transgender Borg I’m an evil “Transsexual Separatist” when I had already grown into post-transsexual some twenty years before I ever heard of there being a “Transgender Umbrella’.

People tried to draft me into that ideological block and I refused to go along with it saying, “I support your rights but I think your ideology is quite insane and potentially harmful to women.”

Some Transgender Activists understand where I’m coming from others revile me as being all sorts of things.

As for me…

Screw it…

I’m involved in so many other things I don’t much feel compelled to hang out with people who have an ideology I consider insane and who call me names.  Life is too fucking short for me to be bothered.  I can just hop on over to my music or photography pages, hang out with leftie hippies and folks into various DIY stuff.

Maybe get a new recipe.  Or learn about a local concert I would otherwise miss. Hear about a book I should read.

What I don’t need in my life is a bunch of obsessed folks into calling others names.

Over the last few days I’ve posted material written by Sable and Natalie Reed.

This has sent the HBS in to a fit of clucking.

I’ve become Face Book friends with Natalie and added her Blog to my Blogroll:  Natalie Reed.  We have something in common.  We are both Free Thinkers.

We have something else in common.  We have both been trashed in the extreme by the vile San Francisco psychopath J.U.

It’s almost a mark of honor, being trashed by JU.  It means you might actually be sane and have a streak of humanity.

When I first started blogging the HBS set flocked here.

I never quite got why they thought they could draft me into their hateful cause.

Many of them consider me a traitor to the Last Real women with the Harry Benjamin Syndrome Cause.

Which is pretty fucking pathetic considering how Dr. Benjamin wrote one of my surgery recommendation letters.

The HBS set dishonors him as much as the Transgender set misinterprets the meager writings he left.  He wasn’t a saint, the was a humanist who did what he could to help people who were in desperate need.

Getting SRS and having a pussy may well make one’s life different from the lives of transgender people who don’t have SRS.  It sure as hell put my life on a different arc.

But having a cunt between your legs doesn’t make you special, if for no other reason than the fact there are approximately three and a half billion other people on this planet with cunts between their legs.

Further it takes a real case of megalomania to think you got SRS for the “proper reason” and that most other people are just sick pervs…

Or to think that being able to get it when I got it means that if I were in the same sort of position today I would do the same thing.  I was able to get SRS because a credit union allowed me to borrow half the money I needed on basically a smile and a paycheck stub.  Try that one today.

As I said I’m tired of both faction.  Neither has anything to offer me.  I support the rights of transgender people because I’m a secular humanist and don’t feel threatened by their having rights.

Fuck it all I’m going to go in the kitchen, chop some onions, jalapenos and poblamos into some beans and pulled pork and make some inner…

Happy Festival of Oestre

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/obama-gay-marriage_b_1407991.html

Michelangelo Signorile
04/ 6/2012

We all got a laugh when Van Jones, asked if President Obama would lose some support in the black community if he came out for marriage equality, quipped that the president wouldn’t lose such support even if he “came out as gay” himself.

“I don’t understand this strategy,” Jones said. “It’s not a hard-core issue for many African-Americans.”

Jones not only got it right in alluding to the fact that there’s really not one constituency among Obama supporters in the Democratic base, or among independents, that would vote against the president on this one issue; he was also right to conjure up the closet.

Obama is very much in a closet on gay marriage even though he’s been outed several times. Like others who’ve been outed, his past came back to haunt, in his case when a questionnaire surfaced from 1996. The White House spin and denials have been as comical as former Senator Larry Craig trying to explain he had a “wide stance.”

Everyone, including his enemies, knows Obama supports gay marriage, to the point where there is uproarious laughter when TV commentators are sitting around discussing Obama’s claim that he is “evolving.” It’s bordering on ludicrous. Obama’s closet on gay marriage is about as well-guarded as Liberace’s was on being gay.

And it’s time for Obama to now kick down the closet door. It’s no longer a matter of whether he can or should. He must if he wants to win the election.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/obama-gay-marriage_b_1407991.html

From Other Words:   http://www.otherwords.org/articles/the_99_percent_spring

The people aren’t powerless in the face of extreme inequality.

By Chuck Collins
April 2, 2012

In the coming weeks, millions of Americans will take to the streets as part of the “99 percent spring,” echoing last year’s “Arab Spring.”

At the root of this discontent are the extreme inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have emerged over the last four decades.

The richest 1 percent now owns over 36 percent of all the wealth in the United States. That’s more than the net worth of the bottom 95 percent combined. This 1 percent has pocketed almost all of the wealth gains of the last decade.

In 2010, the 1 percent earned 21 percent of all income, up from only 8 percent in mid-1970s. The 400 wealthiest individuals on the Forbes 400 list have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

These trends among the 1 percent are bad for the rest of us. Concentrated wealth translates into political clout — the power to use campaign contributions to rent politicians and tilt the rules of the economy in their favor.

Websites dramatizing the “We are the 99 percent” movement are full of personal stories of young people who are saddled with debt and no futures, and middle class families that have seen the American Dream collapse around them, losing jobs, homes, and hopes for the future.

“I used to dream about becoming the first woman president,” one woman wrote. “Now I dream about getting a job with health insurance.”

Reading these stories, I’m struck that the underlying conditions that have squeezed millions of Americans aren’t going away. The current political system, captured by large corporations and the wealthy, is incapable of responding to their needs.

Continue reading at:  http://www.otherwords.org/articles/the_99_percent_spring

I’m white.  Nazis are scum and do not represent me.

From New Times Miami:  http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2012/04/heavily_armed_neo-nazis_patrol.php

By Michael Miller
Fri., Apr. 6 2012

Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are “prepared” for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect “white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. “We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it,” he says. “We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.”

Because nothing diffuses racial tension like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge community.

Schoep, whose neo-Nazi group is based in Detroit, tells Riptide the patrols are a response to white residents’ fears of a race riot.A group called the New Black Panther Party recently offered $10,000 for a citizens’ arrest of George Zimmerman, Martin’s shooter. Schoep said the bounty is a sign that “the possibility of further racial violence… is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets.”

The patrols are comprised of between 10 and 20 locals and “volunteers” from across the state, including some from Miami, he added. He couldn’t go into specifics on what kind of firepower, exactly, the patrols had with them.

Continue reading at:  http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2012/04/heavily_armed_neo-nazis_patrol.php

From Truth Out:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/8301-in-worlds-richest-country-the-uninsured-wait-in-line-overnight-for-a-chance-at-health-care

By Rose Aguilar
Tuesday, 03 April 2012

Stan Brock never expected to see adults and children shivering in line in the middle of the night, hoping to get free medical, dental and vision care in the wealthiest country on earth. Now that he’s seen it for years, he’s no longer surprised. “It’s quite common,” he said. “People line up many, many hours before the event opens, which is normally at 5:30 in the morning.”

Brock is the founder of Remote Area Medical (RAM), an all-volunteer mobile medical clinic that’s been traveling to cities across the United States offering free health care since 1992. Brock founded RAM in 1985 to provide care to people living in the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest. Seven years later, he was asked to bring the clinic to Knoxville, Tennessee. The invitations have since increased.

“You can close your eyes and stick a pin on the map of the United States and go there, and you’re gonna find people by the hundreds, and in many cases by the thousands, that need services,” said Brock.

“It’s simply unaffordable, particularly in dental and vision care. A very, very small percentage of people in this country have insurance that covers those two key items. We’re still seeing people dying of bad teeth in the United States,” he said. “I’d like to see us work ourselves out of a job so we can concentrate our efforts where we began, in places like the Amazon and Haiti, of course, but we’re bogged down here in the United States, I think, for years and years to come.”

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/8301-in-worlds-richest-country-the-uninsured-wait-in-line-overnight-for-a-chance-at-health-care

From The Guardian UK:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/06/nasa-scientist-climate-change

Prof Jim Hansen to use lecture at Edinburgh International Science Festival to call for worldwide tax on all carbon emissions

Severin Carrell
guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 April 2012

Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.

He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an “injustice of one generation to others”.

Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.

In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.

“The situation we’re creating for young people and future generations is that we’re handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control,” he said. “We’re in an emergency: you can see what’s on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction.”

Now 70, Hansen is regarded as one of the most influential figures in climate science; the creator of one of the first global climate models, his pioneering role in warning about global warming is frequently cited by climate campaigners such as former US vice president Al Gore and in earlier science prizes, including the $1m Dan David prize. He has been arrested more than once for his role in protests against coal energy.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/06/nasa-scientist-climate-change

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/06-2

– Common Dreams staff
Published on Friday, April 6, 2012 by Common Dreams

A renowned Australian research scientist has expressed concern over a possible “global economic collapse” that may occur in 2030 if humans fail to check expansion and preserve the world’s already diminishing resources.

Physicist Graham Turner says the 1972 MIT study –“The Limits to Growth” — claiming the world could suffer from a “global economic collapse” and “precipitous population decline” if people continue to consume the world’s resources at the current pace is still on track, nearly 40 years after it was first produced.

The new issue of Smithsonian Magazine writes that Australian physicist Graham Turner, who works at the CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, says “the world is on track for disaster” and that current research from Turner coincides with the 1972 MIT study.

“The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.”

The study created a computing model to forecast different scenarios based on the current models of population growth and global resource consumption. The study also took into account different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection efforts. Over twelve million copies of the 1972 report were sold and distributed in at least 37 different languages.

Turner says that perhaps the most startling find from his current research is that the real world data since 1972 were nearly identical to those predicted in similar computer models used 40-years ago as the basis for “The Limits to Growth.”

“There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” Turner said. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/06-2

From The Washington Post:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-blasts-republican-budget-plan-as-radical-vision-for-the-nation/2012/04/03/gIQANpJPtS_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics

By David Nakamura
April 3, 2012

President Obama delivered a stern and stinging rebuke of the Republican vision for the country Tuesday, castigating the GOP as a “radical” party that has strayed so far from the political middle that its policies represent an affront to core American values.

Singling out GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney for the first time, Obama sought to lump all Republicans under an ideological umbrella that, he argued, has shifted far from the days of the party’s more moderate icons such as Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Reagan, he said, would be unelectable in the modern Republican Party.

“This isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party,” Obama said. “This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they’re running on.”

Mocking Romney for calling the House budget “marvelous,” the president added that the plan, which aims to trim $5.3 trillion from federal spending over the next decade, would create a form of “social Darwinism” pitting the poor against the wealthy.

Continue reading at:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-blasts-republican-budget-plan-as-radical-vision-for-the-nation/2012/04/03/gIQANpJPtS_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics

From Truth Out:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/8308-unarmed-black-woman-shot-and-killed-by-chicago-police-officer-less-than-a-month-after-trayvon-martin

By Rania Khalek
Friday, 06 April 2012

“Her death certificate says killed by police, but I feel like my sister was murdered,” says Martinez Sutton, whose 22-year-old little sister, Rekia Boyd, was shot in the head by an off-duty Chicago detective on Wednesday, March 21. She died the following day at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Boyd’s death comes less than a month after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, leaving many troubled by the regularity with which unarmed people of color are shot, particularly by individuals claiming self-defense. And for those left grieving, the failure of authorities to hold the shooter accountable is the greatest injustice of all.

In the case of Boyd, Chicago police almost immediately echoed the account of the off-duty detective responsible for her death. Police say the officer in question drove up to a group of people in Chicago’s Douglas Park around 1 AM on Wednesday, March 21, to investigate a disturbance near his home. He rolled down his window and asked them to quiet down at which point police say 39-year-old Antonio Cross pulled out a gun forcing the detective to open fire in self-defense, hitting Cross in the hand and striking Boyd in the head.

But neighbors, witnesses and Cross paint a vastly different picture. Cross told WGN News that he was unarmed and on his cell phone at the time of the shooting. When Cross asked why the officer shot him, he says the officer’s response was, “I thought your phone was a gun.” Cross has since been charged with a misdemeanor of aggravated assault.

Local news outlets initially reported that police failed to recover Cross’ alleged weapon. However, Police would not confirm or deny this to Truthout and referred all further questions to the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority (IRPA), the outside body tasked with handling the investigation. The IPRA’s Deputy Chief Administrator William Weeden declined to comment on any details as well, saying, “We cannot comment on an open and ongoing investigation.”

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/we_dont_need_new_roads/singleton/

By David Sirota
April 6, 2012

Interstate 70 in Colorado, one of the nation’s best-known arteries, is the latest thoroughfare to incite an archetypal fight. Running at capacity as it cuts through Denver, this gateway to the Rocky Mountains is about to be expanded over the objections of residents whose low-income neighborhoods will be sliced apart.

No doubt, the road will probably win — as roads almost always do in these battles. Indeed, the story of I-70 summarizes the 60-year tale of urban development in modern America: Instead of beefing up public transit, cities build neighborhood-destroying highways, cars fill up those highways, cities then build more highways to alleviate traffic, and then yet more cars flood the roads, creating even more traffic. Known as the “fundamental law of highway congestion,” this cycle perfectly embodies the “If you build it, cars will come” axiom confirmed in 2011 by researchers at the University of Toronto.

In the past, of course, road fetishists could claim that such catch-22’s aside, our nation is inherently reliant on cars, and that adding roads — any roads — is intrinsically worthwhile. This, in fact, is the assumption woven into the bipartisan federal stimulus bill and President Obama’s new budget, both of which target transportation dollars to building roads. Those new highways may not reduce congestion, energy consumption or pollution, but they will enrich an array of powerful interests, including automakers, fossil fuel companies, trucking firms and road contractors. And so they are repackaged as cure-alls by politicians in our money-dominated democracy.

But what happens when America suddenly tones down its love affair with the automobile? At that point, could we still justify destroying neighborhoods to make room for bigger roads? Could we still pretend that more roads are truly necessary? Could we still overlook the fact that road construction creates fewer jobs than public transit projects? In short, could we still ignore all the contradictions and problems that accompany our road fetish?

The United States is a nation whose car romance presents itself in everything from high-minded literature (On the Road) to middle-brow music (“Paradise By the Dashboard Light”) to low-brow films (“Road Trip”) — and all the SUV commercials in between.

Pondering a less car-dependent society may therefore seem like an academic exercise. But it’s a more relevant endeavor than you might think.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/we_dont_need_new_roads/singleton/

From Ms Blog:  http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/04/05/masters-of-sexism/

by Martha Burk
April 5, 2012

Today’s tee-off at the Masters Golf Tournamentin Augusta, Georgia came and went without a single woman arriving at Augusta National Golf Club in the icky green jacket that denotes membership. The club never announces new members; members announce themselves by showing up at the tournament in the aforementioned green.

Not having a woman in Augusta National is not news. The club has always been men-only, and it resisted extreme pressure 9 years ago from women’s groups to accept female members. What is news this year is that the lead sponsor of the golf tournament, IBM, has a new CEO–and her name is Virginia. IBM CEOs have always been given memberships. Until now.

In the run-up to the tournament there was much press speculation as to whether the club would at last dump their dinosaur image and admit Rometty. And if not, what would IBM do? We found out on Thursday. IBM did nothing, and in doing nothing swallowed its company integrity and hung Rometty out to dry. The silence sent a loud and clear message: “We respect the boys at Augusta National Golf Club more than we respect our woman CEO.”

Close your eyes and imagine a little different scenario. IBM has a new CEO. He is African American. IBM CEOs have always been members of Augusta National. The club has never had an African American (as was true until 1990). Does one of the world’s most successful corporations continue to pour money into Augusta National and underwrite racism? Of course not.

But this time it’s different–it’s only a girl. And girls don’t count. They may be OK to put out front to show the world IBM is a progressive company, but they don’t really have any authority, and they don’t really deserve the same respect as former CEOs.

Continue reading at:  http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/04/05/masters-of-sexism/

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/05/us-sexual-humiliation-political-control

Believe me, you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. And yet, it’s exactly what is happening

Naomi Wolf

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 April 2012

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that “former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex”. There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the “underwear bomber” to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the “pornoscanner”.

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/05/us-sexual-humiliation-political-control