Kaethe Voherden Comment on: Can We Finally Bury the Transphobic Slur that Labels Male to Female TS/TG folks as Having Male Privilege?
To some extent I agree with your post. The issue I see with male privilege is that even if kicking and screaming someone grows up with both the curse and the privilege of being seen as male, losing those behavioral patterns is not about simply saying I was not privileged because I was trans whatever, but rather stripping them out of your behavior.
A bit of checking has led me to assume that the person who posted this comment is a cis-gender privileged TERF.
Kaethe has made a number of posts/comments around the blogosphere that sound as though they came directly from the GenderTrender/Focus on the Family/ Pacific Justice Institute axis of hate groups.
Therefore she has zero credence here on my blog. Observations based on bigotry no matter if that bigotry is based on race, sexism, homophobia or transphobia negates the argument presented by the bigot.
It just so happens I was one of those obvious transkids. I had my education destroyed by cis-gender bullies, including AFAB cis-gender bullies.
I’m an old woman now and actually enjoy some hard won rights that are the result of L/G as well as trans-activism that has included the educating of the general public regarding the lives lived by TS/TG folks.
I was an activist before I came out and transitioned.
I was too young for much of the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. I was in time for the anti-war movement, feminism and the LGBT movements.
When I first went out in public as Suzan it was still illegal in most states for people to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex” in public. One night in the Haight I was arrested for that offense. I wasn’t wearing “women’s clothes”, I was wearing “men’s clothing” but I was walking by a lesbian bar (Maud’s) and was assumed to be a baby butch dyke.
By that point I had already been hounded from college and told by my father to get out and never come back.
At this point some of the TERFs would throw me a bone and pat me on the head, accept me as a good little token they might us if I were willing to be a useful idiot and help them in their campaign of bigotry.
I don’t fucking think so.
I’ve been post-op over forty years, long enough to feel post-transsexual.
That’s a lot of years of openly living the reality of a life impacted by transsexualism. I’ve out lived most of the people I knew back then because being TS/TG means the odds of having a very hard life, a life filled with pain, loss and bitterness are very high. All that pain, loss, abuse and level of inequality takes its toll.
I first started hearing the TERF crap in the 1970s.
Like other women I was struggling with social changes, trying to make my way as a photographer, a skill I learned after transition.
I internalized all the bullshit about TS/TG women having male privilege and never applied for grants or scholarships that might have let me fulfill my dream of being seen as a serious photographer. I watched as the TERFs beat up on Beth Elliott and Sandy Stone, who were acquaintances.
We used to internalize a lot of abuse in those days, we were so fucking isolated and couldn’t easily compare notes.
Our sense of self, our self esteem was so shot to shit we just internalized the abuse.
We ate bitter, sucked it up and went on.
Now we are organized. We are no longer terrified into accepting abuse and now we are calling bullshit when people try to abuse us with the TERF crap Kaethe brought here.
Fuck you and your overly privileged cis-gender bullshit.
Women Born Transsexual 