Women Born Transsexual

This is blog head quarters featuring the senior editorial staff

WBT or Women Born Transsexual is a sort of shorthand, a meme coined  15 years ago by my partner, Tina and myself.  It is a way of saying transsexuals  are born this way.  The corollary for our brothers is MBT or men born transsexual. It is like being gay/lesbian or left handed.  Having red hair.

It may make us different from the majority of people but it doesn’t mean we are sick, evil or perverted.

We coined it in reaction to the women born women meme.  It is in some ways more accurate because no one is born a woman or a man for that matter, to quote Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born a woman but rather becomes one.”

People tried to repurpose WBT, to use it as a synonym for HBS or any other number of abusive purposes.

WBT is about who people are and why they feel the need to take hormones and have surgery to alter their sexual characteristics.

Women Born Transsexual or WBT isn’t about patrolling borders. It doesn’t matter what age you were at transition or self awareness.  It doesn’t matter if you are straight, lesbian, bisexual or asexual.  Attractive or not.  Stealth or out.

It is about claiming your humanity, dignity, pride and equality.

Transsexual and transgender are equally valid ways of describing something people feel.   We do not need to justify our existence to demand full human rights and equality.

I use the word transsexual to describe myself, others who have had basically the same sex reassignment surgery I had prefer transgender.  Semantics have divided us for way too long.  The wars over ideology have become like religious wars.

About this blog:

Whether people realize it or not I’m one of the pioneer transsexual activists.  I was a patient of Dr. Benjamin, who wrote one of my surgery recommendation letters to Dr Laub at Stanford.

My activist roots are in the anti-war movement of the 1960s  I became anti-war after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soon after that Silent Spring made me an environmentalist.

I’m old, I had SRS a long time ago, this makes me more post-transsexual than part of a community filled with people struggling with transition.

Hopefully age has brought with it a little wisdom and some perspective.

It has allowed me to see many  trans-issues as  an extra burden we have to carry, but even without that extra burden we still face every single issue non-trans people face.

I have hippie roots in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

I am a registered Democrat.

I am a senior citizen now, something I wasn’t when Tina and I coined the WBT meme.

I loathe Identity Politics and their divisiveness.

Lastly I am a photographer and a writer as well as a person in history.  I enjoy art museums and have an eclectic taste in music.

Email:  Suzan.WBT@Gmail.com