Women Born Transsexual

When we first started the idea of WBT (Women Born Transsexual) back at the end of 2000 we were denounced as traitors to “The Community” for daring to propose a few simple ideas:  1. Transsexual was something you were born with, a medical condition amenable to medical treatment.  2. That after transition we were women, not trans-women.  3. That there was never A Trans-community but rather many different trans-communities. 4. We did not accept the “Transgender Identity” and saw it as a trap that kept us from assimilating into post-op lives as ordinary women or men in the case of F to M people.

In short nearly 20 years ago we divorced ourselves from the “Transgender Community”.  Not from from caring about friends and or strangers who see the “Transgender Community” as a path to liberation but rather from the on-line political games of purity and proper thinking.

It has been one year shy of 50 years since I first started hormones and began transition.  It took only a couple of years after SRS to start leaving the community and moving to the lesbian feminist community.

People are surprised when they discover the same thing happening in their own lives, many of the most vocal activists of even ten years ago have found that life has given them new priorities.

The following article is by yet another woman who has discovered a life post-trans.

From Tablet Magazine:  http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/257446/divorcing-the-transgender-community

I thought I’d found a warm and supportive home, but being Jewish made that difficult

By Gretchen Rachel Hammond
March 13, 2018

“You’re a fucking kike!”

It was not a single thought expelled in one, rapid sentence, and the tone was so much more than mere hatred. It was maniacal rage that curled around each word and threw it down the speaker of my phone before pausing to pick up another. The last sharpened piece of flint was aimed directly at my head with relish.

I’m usually very good at come-backs. I am a movie fanatic. Rather than the occasional piece of annoyingly catchy music which shows up like a mosquito on a summer evening to persistently circle around one’s ear, my days tend to recall random pieces of screenplay that match how I’m feeling. Thus, I have a library of borrowed quotes for every occasion.

The caller did not immediately hang up. They were waiting for a response. Maybe something from Eric Bogosian?

“Tell me something. I’m curious. How do you dial a phone with a straitjacket on?”

Or Bob Clark?

“You aren’t even smart enough to be a good bigot!”

Either would have done. Anything would have done. Instead of just sitting there in thunder-stuck, ineffectual silence.

It was June 28, 2017, and I was an adult, but I might as well have been my 11-year-old, effeminate, half-Indian school-kid self again, reliving the day in 1981 when at least a half-dozen of my classmates at North Cestrian Grammar School in Manchester, England telegraphed their latest attack with “Paki Puff!”

It was their invitation for me to run. They liked it when I ran because it marked the beginning of the hunt and I was always the easiest prey to catch.

That morning, I didn’t manage to get out of my chair fast enough. So, they picked me up and sandwiched me between the wall and the heavy wooden classroom door. With their collective weight, they pressed against it until I could not move and then could not breath. I grew increasingly more faint; unaware of the blood streaming from my nose which bore the brunt of the first assault. If their look-out hadn’t suddenly yelled the name of an oncoming teacher, they would have killed me.

You would think, in 36 years, I might have learned something about fighting back.

But as I gripped the phone, my breath stopped in my throat. Any physical or mental defenses were useless.

I recognized the voice of my attacker—a transgender person who participated in a transgender liberation rally in Chicago that I had covered earlier in the year in my capacity as a reporter for the city’s LGBTQ newspaper.

Members of the transgender community filled the frozen streets of the Chicago loop that night to demand their civil rights and fight back against society’s bullies; something that had become a life goal since my school-days.

Now that I was the focus of their rancor, ‘paki’ had become ‘kike.’ The boys behind the door were members of my own community, and I didn’t know what the hell to do or feel about it.

For four years, I had watched the transgender community eat its own to the point where becoming dinner was accepted as an inherent risk of belonging to it. As the call continued, I didn’t feel like dinner so much as the scraps thrown down the garbage disposal.

“What did you say?” I finally whispered.

The invitation was accepted for the door to be pressed harder.

“Oh, you fuckin’ heard me. Your story was a lie and your bitch ass is finished as a reporter.”

“Why are you doing this?” I was beginning to shake. “It wasn’t a lie….and I know you…I….”

The voice was gone.

Continue reading at:  http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/257446/divorcing-the-transgender-community

Shulmith Firestone passed away a few years back, alone and mostly forgotten, after battling years of mental health issues.  But I remember her writings from nearly fifty years ago and the white hot heat of Second Wave Feminism, how much strength it provided me with when I was coming out.

From Tikkun Magazine:  https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/missing-shulamith-and-the-dialectic-of-metoo

by Martha Sonnenberg
February 14, 2018

I was 24 years old in 1970, when I read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, a year younger than she was when she wrote the book. The book catapulted me from the limitations of the Left organization of which I was a member into the world of Women’s Liberation.  There was no going back once I saw and felt the chauvinism of the Left, how women’s issues were  seen as tangential to the more important priorities of  “real” radical politics, rather than seeing feminism as “central and directly radical in itself.” Women in my organization typically played a supportive role to the men, the theorists, the writers, the speakers—we made coffee, mimeographed pamphlets, passed out the pamphlets, sometimes we spoke at meetings, and even had a women’s caucus within the organization, but, as Firestone told us, we were still “in need of male approval, in this case anti-establishment male approval, to legitimate (ourselves) politically”.

When Shulamith Firestone died, at the age of 67, in 2013, ravaged by mental illness and forgotten by many, her sister, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone said in her eulogy, “She influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives.  I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.”  I was one of those women.

Recently, I took my dog eared copy of The Dialectic of Sex down from my bookshelf as the #MeToo movement evolved, and was once again astounded by the incendiary brilliance of the book, now nearly 50 years old.  Shulamith Firestone was the first, and maybe the only, to probe the depths to which a misogynistic patriarchy permeated our society, developing a concept of a “sexual class system” which ran deeper than economic, racial, or social divisions.  With prescient analytical perspective, she placed the traditional family structure at the core of women’s oppression.  She wrote, “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biologic family—the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled—the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.”  While the establishment press characterized her ideas as preposterous, many of her notions of how patriarchal social organization would be “uprooted” have come to realization—in vitro fertilization, how children are socialized, children’s rights,  gay rights and the legalization of  gay marriage, the whole LGBTQ movement, ending traditional marriage roles,  the freeing of gender identity from biologic destiny.  And it is within the context of these historical developments, upending the socio-economic buttress of traditional gender roles and identities that #MeToo has emerged. These factors have given #MeToo  a power and force that previous “waves” of women’s liberation lacked, not because previous issues or efforts were any less important, but because they were unable to reach women in all levels of society, transcending class, race, profession, and age. #MeToo , with its revelations of the ubiquity of abuse and violence against women,has reached all these women.  Importantly, too, it  is a movement that began not with “leaders”, but from grass roots in communities all across the country, and, in fact, all across the world.

The history of #MeToo has been obscured by the media frenzy that concurrently emerged.  Tarana Burke, an African American woman, created a non-profit organization called Me Too in 2006, to help women of color who had been sexually abused or assaulted. This was not about naming perpetrators or holding them accountable; it was only to give the affected women a voice. This, the media ignored.  But in 2017 two things happened which did get media attention:  The New York Times published revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse of Hollywood women, and following that, an actress, Alyssa Milano, who became aware of Tarana Burke’s work, wrote in social media, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”  What followed was the flooding of social media with stories of abuse and harassment, and a way for women to tell their experience and stand in solidarity with other abuse survivors. In the first 24 hours of Milano’s post, more than 12 million “MeToo” posts appeared.   All these aspects of #MeToo, its mass base and its revelation of the pervasive and perverse alignment of misogyny and power, make it dangerous to the established power structure.  Not surprisingly, that power structure has responded quickly in its attack on #MeToo.

Power and patriarchy defends itself

Efforts to maintain current power structures and cultures take multiple forms.  One of the most insidious forms of preserving the current power relationships lies with the established media.  While the “media” is not an autonomous entity, the individuals who contribute to it, the writers, the pundits, the “newsmakers”, promote in various ways the dominant culture of institutionalized sexism, and the undermining of #MeToo.  It does so in the following ways:

Continue reading at:  https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/missing-shulamith-and-the-dialectic-of-metoo

From The Guardian UK:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/vaginas-far-right-progressives-identity-politics?CMP=fb_gu

Identity politics ought to unite the left, not divide us. No progressive should be at ease while macho misogyny thrives

Marina Prentoulis
Thu 8 Mar 2018

From Donald Trump’s “locker-room banter” about grabbing women by the pussy, to the instructions of the Philippines president to shoot female guerrilla fighters in the genitals, a clear target of contemporary fascistic and “alt-right” politics seems to be vaginas. This isn’t a case of hidden patriarchal structures supporting gender inequality. It’s explicit and unashamed references that identify women either as the enemy or the subhuman other, subordinate to the pleasure of macho men. And it’s a trend that’s spanning the globe.

In Britain, the victim of this emerging culture was the MP Jo Cox. Some will argue that Thomas Mair, her murderer, was an isolated case, a disturbed Nazi sympathiser from whom we cannot generalise. But before we dismiss his crime as a one-off we should remember that gender identity, specifically masculine identity, is at the centre of fascistic discourse. Crime – against women or ethnic minorities – is often a resource for those who feel their masculinity is threatened. It is a way to be “male” again.

In Russia, the bare-chested Putin is endlessly pictured plunging into icy lakes or riding horses. It’s all designed to promote a particular type of masculinity but also a particular type of political ideal: of macho, authoritarian leadership, strong and ruthless towards its enemies. The enemies in question are often women who question the patriarchal status quo (Pussy Riot being a prime example). But other religious or ethnic groups are feminised too.

As the professor and activist Cynthia Enloe has argued, it is high time to rethink this relationship between leaders’ macho posturing and the type of politics they are likely to advocate. The personal is political because men in leadership positions with misogynistic attitudes are probably going to promote policies reinforcing intolerance. There can be no truly progressive politics while such misogyny is allowed to continue. Similarly, when an industry tolerates harassment and violence against women, that says a lot about the type of product it creates. The Harvey Weinstein scandal comes to mind here: how progressive can his movies be when he treats women as objects?

And to push it even further: how progressive can a country be if it permits this industry to go on unreformed? The micro paves the way for the macro.

Too often on the left these calls have fallen upon the deaf ears of a movement that is unable to recognise any struggle as important if it isn’t centred around class. Identity politics have been wilfully misinterpreted by parts of the left as an explanation for the advance of the far right – it’s political correctness driving them to it. This is done in the hope of promoting class politics, but it demonstrates that the left is sometimes stuck in an orthodox past, before the big “identity” movements, from the suffragettes to civil rights, took place. Across the world, it is the left that is struggling to articulate something meaningful while the far right is advancing.

Eric Hobsbawm, writing in 1996, contrasted the narrowness of identity politics with the universality of the working-class movement, which demands equality and justice for everyone.

Complete article at:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/vaginas-far-right-progressives-identity-politics?CMP=fb_gu