What the fuck is “Mainstream Society”?
Seriously…
HBS assholes throw this one around and use it as a club to beat on other TS/TG people, but just what is “mainstream society”?
I’m Polish-American, second generation. On my father’s side, my grandmother barely spoke English and was illiterate.
In the small Towns of upstate New York the children and grand children of Eastern and Southern European ancestry were consider not quite white. Just as the Irish immigrants and their children a century before them.
Antisemitism was still a factor.
What does this have to do with the concept of “mainstream”?
At a time when WASPs were the standard for “mainstream” all those groups were defined as “outside the mainstream”.
Who was “Mainstream” in those post-World War II days?
Well there was an emerging middle class and there were families on TV like Father Know Best and Leave It To Beaver. The only problem with those families is they were fictional.
Disney became one of the worst generators of this garbage.
“Mainstream” was sort of an advertising slogan, a propaganda buzz word that demanded a sort of Orwellian level of conformity and obedience to artificial standards most blue collar people could never meet.
The censuring of non-conformity or worse yet holding that level of conformity in disdain was persecution. The persecution could range from teasing and ridiculing to black listing and subjecting certain minority groups to random police abuse and capricious arrests.
While the 1950s were generally prosperous and did have pockets of freedom like Greenwich Village, Berkeley and North Beach it pretty much sucked to be obviously different.
It especially sucked for transsexual and transgender people.
Medical assistance in the US was virtually non-existent outside of those aforementioned places.
But it also sucked to be a woman who dreamed of having a career or enjoying any sort of self fulfillment.Those wonderful days of yore with supposedly traditional mainstream families excluded well over half the people in this country.
See Stephanie Coontz: The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap
The idea that straight, upper class White Anglo Saxon Protestants are the “mainstream” is the wet dream of right wing conservative thinking as it manages to exclude all those people of color, working class whites, immigrants and let’s not forget the Jews.
America has never been a melting pot, where all immigrants become part of a white bread homogenized Pat Boone version of culture. It has always been more of a stew where every immigrant and minority group that is part of America has added their own unique element.
While cultural purists decry the ripping off of other people’s culture most Americans including creative people just keep on trucking stealing an influence here, putting it together with something from some where else. Culture gets intermarried the same way people do and along the line there has been a synthesis that has formed American culture.
When people expound on tradition, I am forced to ask: Whose tradition?
You see the majority of American people do not belong to that minority culture that touts itself as “mainstream.”
“Mainstream” is a fiction an advertising wet dream, a psy-op aimed at the soft underbelly of our collective insecurities, our fear of not belonging unless we buy this particular product.
More over it is one of those words that is used as a weapon of choice by all sorts of bigots.
Recently one of my readers pointed me to a blog titled “Purple Speaks.” This reader was justifiably horrified at the hatred and bigotry poured forth by the HBS “True Transsexual” who runs it.
Like so many transphobic trans-blogs this one reeks of contempt and hatred for any transsexual who doesn’t share this person’s hatred and bigotry of transsexual and transgender people.
Since only one person out of 100 to 200 people who had SRS is considered a real transsexual and since one has to be a right wing bigot and Taliban Christian fembot to be a true transsexual, I guess I’m one of the 99% who “aren’t real transsexuals.”
Funny thing is Dr. Benjamin told me I was one of the purest cases of transsexualism he had met.
I whizzed right through all the screening in spite of being a hippie, bisexual feminist.
It was like fitting in with my peers, the young hippie activists of Berkeley impressed them a whole lot. I was also working as a counselor, helping my sisters find their way through the various programs that helped people transition.
What I’ve found odd about many of the HBS assholes is how many live really marginal lives while I live in suburbia, where I’m a member of the local community center/health and fitness center. My partner and I are a pair of slightly bohemian Democratic Party stalwarts who voted for Obama.
In spite of the attempts of HBSers to paint us as “radical leftists” our politics are pretty “mainstream” after all our candidate won the election by a landslide.
Turns out some 20-25% of people in this country are atheists or agnostics like us. That’s about the same as the number of born again Xians.
We are among the 65 or so percent of people who want the Republicans to keep their filthy hands off Social Security and Medicare.
We don’t believe in ghosts, angels or UFOs. We do believe in evolution, which puts among the Brights.
My partner and I are post-transsexual, many years past all the struggles of transition. But we aren’t self hating heartless assholes who want to make life harder for those who are still in or even facing transition in the future. For that matter we support equality and protections for all transsexual and transgender people just as we support those rights for all sorts of other minority groups.
We may think a lot of transgender ideology is stupid but we also think a lot of transsexual ideology is equally stupid.
That’s what being a secular humanist is all about, respect for the rights of others, the same respect one expects for oneself.
I’m not going to concern troll and say I feel sorry for HBS assholes, because I don’t.
The hatred they project towards others is reflective of a self hatred they feel.
How can one believe one is the only pure one out of one or two hundred other people who got the same operation you got? Doesn’t it seem odd that all but one percent of people getting this surgery deceived their doctors or aren’t really transsexual?
But the HBS assholes are blessed with an utter lack of self examination. They are so consumed with hatred that it never ever dawns on them that maybe they are the ones who aren’t really transsexual but rather deceived themselves into believing they were.
I mean the 99% of the post-transsexual communities are made up of some really amazing people who have overcome so much and who have accomplished far more along the way than most of the HBS assholes seem to have accomplished. Most of us tend to support equality for all the people of the the queer alphabet soup. And even for straight post-transsexuals too.
And they have often had to overcome a great deal of adversity to do so.
That by itself should demonstrate their having a better grasp on reality than the bigots and haters.
In the meantime I think I’d rather be part of the 99% of transsexuals who have more productive things to do with their lives than stew in a kettle of hatred and bigotry.