Women Born Transsexual

 ¡Ya basta! Enough already!

I’ve fucking well had it.

Women are adult females. I respect the womanhood of non-op transwomen who live as women 24/7 based not on their “identity” but rather on the basis of social politeness, which means you do not question the femaleness of a person presenting as female, nor do you question the maleness of someone presenting as male.

But I have to admit I am somewhat of a physical essentialist.  I didn’t have “Gender Conformation Surgery.”  I had a Sex Change Operation aka Sex Reassignment Surgery.  Like we said back when nearly 50 years ago, the surgery makes it real.

For most of us back when it also cut the ties that bound us to what has become known as the Transgender Community.

A few days ago a friend of ours called us and told us her son had come out as transgender and was becoming a woman.  Of course she used the wrong pronouns.  But when she told us how her child was going about this we were horrified because she had gotten DD breast implants after only 3 months on hormones and never living as a woman.

I don’t remember stuff like this happening back before all this gender identity thing. Dr Benjamin told me I was as perfect a candidate for SRS as anyone he had seen but that I still had to live as a woman for at least a year.

The process was one of physical change of becoming female or male as the case maybe.

After SRS I grew and became more and more feminist.  I saw my oppression in terms of sexism and misogyny.

“Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind,
She’s always controlled and always confined
Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife
A slave to her husband the rest of her life”

Joan Baez “A Wagoner Lad”

To me Gender, the social roles and their constraints that defined proper masculine men and feminine women were always part of the problem and not part of the solution. My heroes were women who didn’t conform to the proper roles dictated by gender.

One way to step off the road described in that folk song was to never marry and not have children.  Another was to ignore the dictates of gender because having a cunt between my legs made me a woman, not wearing high heels, high fashion, perfectly manicured nails and make-up. I could be a woman tech tracking down a problem with a data probe or o-scope and I was just as much a woman as the perfect ten fashion model.

I support Trans-Rights because I support Equality for all people along with the right to live in dignity.

I cannot in good conscience support the erasure of women as adult human females.  I cannot in good conscience join people who say that having a vagina between one’s legs and going through life with that vagina isn’t a major part of womanhood.  Particularly when so many in the  Transgender Borg World have cut themselves off from the life experiences of non-trans women and men by their sneering contempt towards “cis-gender” folks.

After SRS I took my place in the world of women, a world where having a vagina between one’s legs makes a real difference in one’s life experiences. I’ve had a vagina between my legs for nearly two thirds of my life.  I’ve forgotten what it was like before or even what it was like going through the process.

I’ve been an adult female most of my life and I am offended by the banning of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues based on their some how not being inclusive of transwomen.

As far as I am concerned the Transgender Borg are so off base on this as to show their absolute cluelessness about what it means to actually be a woman.

Furthermore Eve Ensler has in the past staged readings of the Vagina Monologues with transwomen who have read their own vagina monologues.

I’m just going to put up the links to post regarding this latest TransWorld Controversy.

Reason: Women’s College Cancels ‘Vagina Monologues’ Because It Excludes Women Without Vaginas

Advocate: Vagina Monologues Playwright Responds After Show Canceled for Not Being Trans-Inclusive

Huffington Post: Kids Do the Darndest Things! The Vagina Monologues in the Context of Historical Ignorance

Time: Eve Ensler: I Never Defined a Woman as a Person With a Vagina

Huffington Post: Community Civility and a Response to the Controversy Over The Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke

For the record I don’t shave my body.  Not my pubes, not my arm pits or my legs.  Now I will admit I am not particularly hairy but sometimes it is the thought that counts.  I’m not much into gender and gender defining me as a woman.  Real women have body hair on their pubes, underarms and legs.  It is gender that tells us it is improper for women to have hair in those places.  It is the bullshit of gender that guilt trips women who do not conform by shaving those areas.  Further gender come up with stupidity such as labeling us gender outlaws and deviants if we don’t obey the socially imposed dictates of gender.

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/23/women-visible-pubic-hair-shocking-censored

Now that more women aren’t depilating, we see depictions of what naturally happens when women don’t shave banned from view

Jessica ValentiFriday 23 January 2015

Shaved, trimmed, left alone, waxed out of existence or Vajazzled, we are both fascinated and utterly repelled by what women do and don’t do with their hair “down there”. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about pubic hair – and it’s always that what someone else is doing is a little weird.

Earlier this week, Instagram deleted the account of Australian magazine Sticks and Stones after it posted a picture of two women in bathing suits with (apparently natural) pubic hair sticking out on the sides. In 2013, the social media platform did the same thing to Canadian photographer Petra Collins when she put up a photo of her unaltered bikini line. (Neither photograph displayed anything approaching actual nudity – just pubes poking out the edges of underwear.)

“I did nothing that violated the terms of use. No nudity, violence, pornography, unlawful, hateful or infringing imagery,” Collins wrote at the time. “What I did have was an image of MY body that didn’t meet society’s standard of ‘femininity.’”

Instagram is hardly alone. The television show The Bachelor has been accused of putting a black bar over a woman’s pubic hair, and earlier this year a painting was removed from a London exhibition because it was deemed “pornographic” for displaying a woman’s pubic hair.

So when did the hair at the high tide line become more shocking than a nipple?

Even as social media sites, television shows and museums are censoring any minute display of women’s pubic hair, a natural look is making a comeback. Last year American Apparel featured mannequins with full bushes in a store window and The New York Times Style section claimed “a fuller look is creeping back”. The Guardian even called 2014 “the year of the bush!”.

Lest you worry that bikini waxers will be going out of business by the handful, they too are changing with the times: you can now purchase a “full bush Brazilian” which involves “removing all hair from the labia and butt crack while leaving the top untouched”. (That sounds to me like a vaginal mullet – “business in the front, party in the back”.)

Continue reading at:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/23/women-visible-pubic-hair-shocking-censored

From The Jerusalem Post:   http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Transgender-woman-denied-access-to-Western-Wall-386979

When she approached the women’s section she was turned away by an Orthodox woman patrolling the site who said she is not a woman.

By JTA
01/07/2015

A transgender woman was denied access to both the women’s and men’s sections of the Western Wall.

Kay Long, who designs wedding dresses, evening gowns and costumes, on Monday visited the Western Wall with a friend visiting from Madrid.

When she approached the women’s section she was turned away by an Orthodox woman patrolling the site who said she is not a woman. She was not allowed into the men’s section because she does not look like a man and in any case would not wear a yarmulke.

“From an early age we are taught that if we place a note at the Kotel our prayers might be answered,” she wrote Monday using the heading “Dilemma” on her Facebook page, under a photo of her outside the Western Wall plaza with the Kotel in the background. “All that’s left now is to take a picture and say a prayer from afar with the hope that it will be answered. Because God is everywhere and loves us all.”

After hundreds of comments and likes, Long on Tuesday morning posted a clarification, saying that she had no intention of praying at the Western Wall during her visit, and believes that it is more important for the Orthodox worshippers to be there than for her to make a scene.

“Inside, I believe that God is everywhere,” she wrote, adding that she believes in a live and let live motto.

“The point is, I decided to respect humans wherever they choose to be, and they didn’t respect me,” she wrote.

“Your prayers will be answered because you are a pure person and more wise than all of those who prevent you from coming close to the Kotel,” one of her Facebook friends responded, who also decried “gross discrimination,” against transgender people in Israel.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-wilson/the-gender-police_b_6460848.htm

Olivia Wilson
01/13/2015

The lady blocks my way as I try to walk into the bathroom, I go to walk around her, she’s looking me right in the face and when I try to dodge her she sidesteps into my path again, we do a little dance, her challenging me, me trying to walk in the door, coincidentally I need to pee.

Eventually, she lets me in with a suspicious little squint in her eye and when I’m sitting on the toilet I can see her sensible shoes standing guard outside. For some reason I make sure to pee loudly. She lets me leave and I’m struck with a bad case of the staircase wit, Treppenwitz the Germans call it, where one’s mind is suddenly flooded with witty retorts to a situation you’ve just left. In my head they get more and more aggressive, going as far as remaining silent and just flashing my boobs at her. If anything grants entitlement to the ladies’ bathroom, surely they do.

Because that was her problem, she thought I was a man. This isn’t unusual for me, it happens all the time. People are just usually less defensive about the whole thing; they’ll stride into the loos, see me, stop in their tracks and do a double take on the sign on the door, confirm that they really did see a stick figure with a skirt and then proceed with caution and a few stares as I wash my hands and try not to do anything to make them uncomfortable, like stare back.

Life is just fine for me in every other aspect of life, I frolic freely in my androgyny and it’s not until those moments when your gender is asked of you that confusion ensues. Everyone does the calculations, you have to: He, she, her, him. What shall we call our baby?

There are the odd perks, the airline employee who when inspecting my boarding pass declared I couldn’t possibly be Olivia. I am and after a slightly too long pause with a jetlagged sigh told her so. The apologetic mortification that she felt lead to exceptional in-flight service and bottle of wine to take home. Then of course, the times when the ladies’ has a line stretching to infinity and I stride with confidence into the near-empty mens’.

The cringe factor is the extreme embarrassment people feel when they get it wrong. They have mistaken your place in the most basic division of humanity. The fact is that the world cradles gender identity at its core, and its only when you hover in the in between that it is blindingly obvious.

So when I see a fellow androgyne it warms my heart.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-wilson/the-gender-police_b_6460848.htm

I have long noted a tendency among the politically correct in the various trans-communities to engage in a form of social terrorism against other members of various trans-communities for using words or phrases to describe their life experiences that are not on some list of PC terms for proper transgender warriors to use.

The tizzy in a tea cup over the word “Trannie”, a term that was in common usage among transsexuals and queens some 50 years ago when I was coming out is but one example.  All the politically correct terms for what we used to call a sex change operation or sex reassignment surgery is yet another.  Hell even using the word transsexual as a self descriptor rather than the politically correct word transgender causes all sorts of PC folks to get their panties all twisted in a knot.

Last week we saw where the whole PC thing goes when taken to insane extremes.  Me?  I’d rather live in a world where we have freedom of speech and thought.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoe-dolan/lets-talk-about-sex-chang_b_6418690.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

Zoe Dolan
01/08/2015

Sex-change surgery gave me my life. I would not be who I am without it.

Nevertheless, public discourse around the subject is governed by media guidelines that operate to suppress discussion, such as this one from GLAAD: “Journalists should avoid overemphasizing the role of surgeries in the [gender] transition process.”

For me, you could not overemphasize the importance of sex-change surgery if you tried.

Consider one risk of the politically correct script of deflection: It undermines the medical necessity of sex-change surgery for many of us.

People have questions: Do you have a vagina? Can you have sexual intercourse? Is there sensation down there? Are you able to have orgasms?

So I decided to start being open about my operation, beginning by mentioning it in a talk at Chicago Ideas Week.

You may say that I’m a contrarian, but I’m not the only one.

My story is that in fourth grade I learned a word that describes me: transsexual. It was during recess, and I was in a field of grass, talking with a couple of friends, including the deaf play buddy I was paired up with to practice sign language.

Years later I would date a deaf guy for like five minutes. I thought that he, of all people, would understand the challenges of being judged based on how I was born, but no. He grimaced, stood up, and walked out of my apartment within minutes of learning about my past.

The horror of locker rooms and swimming pools began in high school, during puberty. I changed in a corner, or maybe in a bathroom stall or under a towel, to avoid the light of day in the presence of others.

Then there was the period of being in-between as an adult, after I had transitioned but before the surgery. Oh, how I loved to swim! And how I hated what my bathing suit revealed.

And then there was dating. I met a number of men who identified as straight while professing attraction to pre-operative or non-operative transgender women; two men who blinked at me in confusion during a series of questions, until they said that I was pretty and then kissed me; and a gorgeous young Italian man who made out with me in Amsterdam, then yelled and slammed the door behind him after I interrupted his caresses to explain.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoe-dolan/lets-talk-about-sex-chang_b_6418690.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/why-psychiatry-holds-enormous-power-society-despite-losing-scientific-credibility

By Bruce Levine
January 6, 2015

“What’s a guy gotta do around here to lose a little credibility?” asked ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger in a 2012 piece about top Wall Street executives who created the financial meltdown but remain top executives, continue to sit on corporate and nonprofit boards, serve as regulators, and whose opinions are sought out by prominent op-ed pages and talk shows.

Wall Street is not the only arena where one can be completely wrong and still retain powerful influence. Influential “thought leader” psychiatrists and major psychiatry institutions, by their own recent admissions, have been repeatedly wrong about illness/disorder validity, biochemical causes and drug treatments. In several cases, they have been discovered to be on the take from drug companies, yet continue to be taken seriously by the mainstream media.

While Big Pharma financial backing is one reason psychiatry is able to retain its clout, this is not the only reason. More insidiously, psychiatry retains influence because of the needs of the larger power structure that rules us. And perhaps most troubling, psychiatry retains influence because of us—and our increasing fears that have resulted in our expanding needs for coercion.

But before discussing these three reasons, some documentation of psychiatry’s lost scientific credibility in several critical areas.

Psychiatry’s Lost Scientific Credibility

DSM Invalidity. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible, the DSM, was slammed by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the highest U.S. governmental mental health official, offered a harsh rebuke of theDSM, announcing that the DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and he stated that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Also in 2013, Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, published his book, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.

Biochemical Imbalance Theory Debunked. It was a great surprise for NPR reporter Alix Spiegelin 2012 to discover that the psychiatric establishment now claims it has always known that the biochemical imbalance theory of depression was not true. Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times stated in 2011, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” NIMH director Insel had already told Newsweekin 2007 that depression is not caused by low levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. However, psychiatry made no serious attempt to publicize the fact that the research had rejected this chemical imbalance theory, a theory effectively used in commercials to sell antidepressants as correcting this chemical imbalance—an imbalance psychiatry knew did not exist.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/why-psychiatry-holds-enormous-power-society-despite-losing-scientific-credibility

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-kerr/24-year-old-trans-man-die_b_6401542.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

Sue Kerr
12/31/2014

On Saturday, December 13, 2014, 24-year-old Andi Woodhouse died by suicide near the 10th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh. Andi was from Lebanon, PA. He was in Pittsburgh temporarily for some services and he worked at a local McDonald’s.

I remember reading about his death, but he was misgendered in the original article. I had no idea he was part of our community.

Andi’s ex-girlfriend Kasey saw my post about Leelah Alcorn and reached out to me on Facebook. Andi’s family is grieving very deeply and hopes to organize some sort of closure event memorializing Andi as well as encouraging other young trans people. The tentative plan is to meet Saturday, January 3 near the 10th Street Bridge.

Andi’s family has requested that memorial contributions may be made to Mental Health America of Lancaster County, 630 Janet Ave., Lancaster, PA 17601 or Transgender Foundation of America, 604 Pacific Street, Houston TX 77006.

I did not expect once again to be blogging about the impact of the death of a young trans person, not 24 hours after my most recent post. Do I just copy the words from the previous day? Do I focus on setting up a memorial? What do I do except feel angry and sad?

Andi was right here. He walked the streets that I walk, his life ended on a bridge I cross regularly. He was right here in Pittsburgh and we didn’t know. He was right here, just blocks from community resources that I help to build and support and promote. He was right here.

I knew this day was coming, a day that I wrote about the death of a member of our community here in Pittsburgh. I just did not anticipate how much it would hurt. And how much it would be about my feelings.

Andi is the third trans person to die by suicide in a month in addition to Leelah Alcorn and Jay Ralko. Pittsburgh police are also searching for 34-year-old Andre Gray, a gay man of color who has been missing since October.

Rest in peace, Andi. I hope we can help your family and friends find peace, too…

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-kerr/24-year-old-trans-man-die_b_6401542.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

I abhor vigilantism and lynch mobs.

They generally accomplish nothing and generate sympathy for those targeted.

For some 50 years I have listened to non-violence activists warn of the dangers of becoming as bad as those who do violence against us.

Leelah’s suicide is a tragedy.

Having had friends I loved commit suicide I can empathize with the pain and recriminations her parents must be facing at this time.

Hounding them won’t bring Leelah back, nor will it prevent more trans-folks from taking their lives.

It is a new year…

Time to support organizations like Trans Lifeline  1-877-565-8860.

Make a donation in Leelah’s name.  The next time a Facebook Friend writes a message of desperation on their wall reach out to them with an encouraging word.

Answer pleas for help.

Last fall, Tina and I issued a plea for help when we were in a desperate situation and many of our friends responded and their help saved us from foreclosure.

Community isn’t just about activism or identity it is about being there and being sensitive when one hears a cry for help.

We can end reparative therapy and sue those practicing it until they are homeless.  That would be a good thing.

But with age I have gained some measure of wisdom and experience tells me no good will come of trashing Leelah’s parents.  Indeed more good might come from showing them kindness and sympathy.