Investigating the Lesbian Klan: The Rise of Cultural Feminism

September 21, 2011 — Suzan

Not all lesbians are members of the anti-transsexual Klan.  Nor are all lesbian feminists or even many lesbian separatists.

There is nothing inherent in the left/liberal precepts of lesbian feminism that requires the systematic bigotry that a minority within the lesbian community have deployed towards transsexual and post-transsexual women.

In spite of their claiming the label “Radical Feminists” their over all policies share little or nothing with the original “Radical Feminists” who grew out of the left and had more in common with the women of Weatherman, and the Trotskyites than they do with with those who claim that label today.  In the early 1970s to be a Radical Feminist meant that one acted radically rather than sitting around theorizing and engaging in vicious word games.

As early as 1972 there was a divergence from that form of feminism, which tended to view women’s oppression within the context of the oppressions of race and class.  This meant erasing the contributions Marx and Engels made to analyzing the origins of the family.

One of the early demands of what Red Stockings came to describe as “cultural feminism” came in the form of Robin Morgan’s “Good-bye to all that…“ *1

Women had played a major role in every aspect of left wing movements in the US since the days of  the Abolition Movement.  They were part of the Labor Movement (Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurly Flynn) They were part of the Communist Party (Dorothy Ray Healy).  The Anarchist Movement (Emma Goldman Lucy Parsons) The Black Civil Rights Movement (Angela Davis, Elaine Brown)  The Anti-war Movement, the Environmental Movement ETC.

In “Good-bye to all that” Morgan demanded women leave movements where they had worked for years, movements they had committed their lives to working with all to join what was at the time a middle class white women’s movement.  She laid out all the crimes of the alternative hippie communities yet never much focused on the misogyny of the mainstream media or corporate America.

This actually kept me from fully committing to feminism as I was working class and saw how oppressions of class and race meant that while all women were oppressed by sexism, many women carried much heavier burdens of oppression than others.

You see I was part of the anti-war movement and the counter-culture being trashed by Morgan, a well to do, former child star.  We were trying to build a new society and dealing with sexism wasn’t the only issue.

A couple of years later Jane Alpert, an acolyte of Morgan wrote “Mother Right“:

Letter from the Underground:

Dear Sisters in the Weather Underground:

I am addressing this piece to you, in spite of the fact that my concern at this point is with a far broader spectrum of women than your tiny band of forgotten leftists, because it was our arguments of the past year that convinced me to publicize my conversion from the left to radical feminism. I realized after these arguments that for me to keep silence would only support the illusion that the “underground” is united around the male politics which you still espouse, and these politics and practices are too reprehensible to me as a feminist to protect them by silence. I know that seeing this letter, which you thought you would receive as a private communication, here in print will shock you and that you will regard much of its content as a breach of the tacit code of honor among political fugitives. Nevertheless, my own politics demand that I share with all women my knowledge of the sexual oppression of the left, if only to warn other sisters against the pain that has been inflicted on us. Perhaps you personally will never open up to feminism; yet the experiences I am going to relate may speak more effectively to women involved in other branches of the left, from McGovern organizers to Socialist Workers Party members. And I have some hope that the impact of a public statement may do what none of my private arguments have succeeded in doing: persuade you to leave the dying left in which you are floundering and begin to put your immense courage and unique skills to work for women-for yourselves.

This letter and Morgan’s overt support of both Jane Alpert and this position struck me and many other left wing feminists as a betrayal on the order last seen by those who named names at the HUAC and the McCarthy hearings during the Red scare of the 1950s.

But even more insidious was another part of “Mother Right” which renounced the truly radical thinking of Shulamith Firestone while furthering the separation from the Left and counter-culture that had been started by Morgan.

“Mother Right” argued against the idea of women as female people  endowed with same abilities as male people.  While earlier feminists asserted that differences were not biological but  rather the result of patriarchal conditioning “Mother Right” introduced the idea of biological essentialism, the concept that men and women were completely different and didn’t share a wide variety of overlapping traits and talents.

For centuries feminists have asserted that the essential difference between men and women does not lie in biology but rather in the roles that patriarchal societies ( men ) have required each sex to play. The motivation for this assertion is obvious: women’s biology has always been used to justify women’s oppression. As patriarchal reasoning went, since “God” or “nature” or “evolution” had made woman the bearer and nurser of the species, it logically followed that she should stay home with the children and perform as a matter of more-or-less ordained duty all the domestic chores involved in keeping and feeding a household. When women work outside the home, we have the most menial and lowest-paid tasks to perform, chiefly because any labor a woman performs outside the home is thought to be temporary and inessential to her, no matter how she herself might be inclined to regard it. Naturally, then, the first healthy impulse of feminism is to deny that simply because women have breasts and uteruses we are better suited to wash dishes, scrub floors, or change diapers. As newly roused feminists, we retorted to evidence that women might be intrinsically better suited to perform some roles than others by pointing out that men have been forcing these roles on us for at least five thousand years. After such time, conditioning and habit are so strong that they appear to be intrinsic and innate.

However, a flaw in this feminist argument has persisted: it contradicts our felt experience of the biological difference between the sexes as one of immense significance To begin with, it seems obvious that biology alone would, in primitive societies, have dictated different roles and different powers as appropriate to each sex. And biological scientists have indeed assumed, for the most part, that the physical passivity of the female mammal during intercourse and the demands of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing clearly indicate a role of women as biologically determined, and inferior. In response to this, Shulamith Firestone, with the publication of The Dialectic of Sex in 1970, articulated the definitive feminist antithesis to this idea by denouncing biology as reactionary. Agreeing that biology had necessarily been an all-powerful determinant of social roles in the past, Firestone went on to argue that the advances of technology made this tyranny potentially obsolete. Women are still enslaved to their bodies not because of biology but because the patriarchy will not permit the use of technology to interfere with men’s power over women. However, in Firestone’s view, the dialectic of history, in which the sexual relationship underlies all other power relationships, indicates that A feminist revolution is inevitable. This revolution will put technology to work to literally free women from biology, from pregnancy, childbirth, and the rest, thereby eliminating the last difference of any importance between the sexes and ultimately causing the sexual difference itself to wither away, in the course of evolution, together with all forms of oppression.

I think that Firestone is visionary in perceiving the sexual relationship as the basis of all power relationships, and in predicting that feminist revolution will therefore result in the end of all oppression. However, the evidence of feminist culture, which has accumulated largely since the publication of her epochal book, suggests that her analysis of the role of biology was deficient and that a third possibility, which is indeed a new synthesis of the previous views, may well be correct. The unique consciousness or sensibility of women, the particular attributes that set feminist art apart, and a compelling line of research now being pursued lay feminist anthropologists all point to the idea that female biology is the basis of women’s powers. Biology is hence the source and not the enemy of feminist revolution.

The root of this idea lies perhaps in buried history. It has increasingly been acknowledged that the most ancient societies worshiped a female diety or deities, and that menstruation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and all other phenomena associated with female biology were surrounded with taboos. Furthermore, a number of these ancient societies were matrilineal: property and social identity were inherited through the mother rather than the father. Whether women had any secular power in these societies is a subject of dispute, and most archaeologists and anthropologists have felt that women didn’t have any power except over a few religious rites. But most archaeologists and anthropologists have been men, whose imaginations could not quite grasp a society in which women held real power, even a pretechnological society. (For example, the section on “Amazons” in the authoritative Oxford Classical Dictionary spends all of one sentence dismissing the notion the Amazon tribes ever existed–though these tribes were acknowledged by nearly every ancient historian who wrote about preclassical times.) Feminists in many branches of science and historical research have been reexamining the evidence for the existence of ancient gynocracies, or women-ruled societies. Among the more visionary and lyrically persuasive (if somewhat factually problematic) of these recent studies is The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Davis hypothesizes that patriarchal society began only after barbarian male tribes violently overthrew the ancient, peaceful, and relatively advanced gynocracies, in which women were not only worshiped but were actually temporal rulers. These ancient gynocracies may have existed throughout Asia, northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and the Mediterranean area and persisted as late as 2,000 B.C. in some areas, such as Crete. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that Davis may be proved correct in the near future, and her thesis has been stated in a more tentative style than hers by several other highly respected scientists.

Those of us who considered ourselves radical feminists in the original sense of the term i.e. left wing Marxist-Leninist feminists felt utterly betrayed by the direction Morgan and others seemed to be moving in.

Eventually our branch of feminism became known as “Liberal Feminism”.  The branch that goes out and demonstrates for rights.  Some times in a manner that is reformist and sometimes in the case of those who fight globalization and the corporatocracy, radical.

Cultural Feminism, also referred to by some as “gender feminism” diverged from political feminism which was denounced as “reformist”. Something I always found strange given the reactionary positions masquerading as radical thought one found in in the writings of the cultural feminists.

As an atheist, I found it very difficult to get caught up in and devote much energy to the whole goddess worship movement that seemed to be an essential part of cultural feminism.  If the concept of a sky-god already seems absurd, it doesn’t much matter if that god is male or female.  Honestly I found some of the “research” on pre-historical matriarchies to be sketchy at best and requiring the same level of skepticism I used in reading Erich von Däniken’s “Chariots of the Gods”

Dancing naked around a fire with a bunch of other women was edifying in terms of fun and a fuck of a lot less work that working to elect a candidate that would support the ratification of the ERA. Except, it somehow seemed less relevant to smashing the patriarchy than doing the hard work of organizing.

Yet the cultural feminists started using their essentialism to dominate the political discourse.  They did this by claiming ultimate victimhood and wearing that ultimate victimhood as a badge of honor that gave them veto power over the political feminists and lesbians.  After all it was their goddess ordained, mother right, to have the voice of authority.

This essentialism along with ultimate victimhood became a tool of personal power and dominance.  A tool for shutting down the politicals and assuring the destruction of any sort of broad based feminism that worked on a wide scope of issues.

The attacks on transsexuals starting with Beth Elliott showed the basic elements of what became cultural feminism.  Particularly the essentialist elements.

There was a popular feminist button in 1969 that read, “Biology is not Destiny”.  I remember this button because I had one and wore it.  It was a statement of liberation that said one was not limited by their biology to specified roles.  In those days we talked about the sameness of men and women, the overlapping of talents, skills etc.  How male dominance was a product of social engineering.

Incidentally Dr. Benjamin and others who pioneered the treatment for transsexualism reinforced the idea of an over lapping of the sexes rather than a sharp dividing line.  Dr. Benjamin spoke of the many criteria of sex differentiation.

The essentialism of cultural feminism on the other hand was very much into the “Women are from Venus/Men are from Mars”  dialectic.  This like any other fundamentalist line of thinking  requires that ideology trump any possible form of contradictory evidence. Even when that contradiction is a living, breathing, thinking person standing there messing with your theory.

Transsexuals mess with Cultural Feminism’s Essentialist Theory

In later posts on this subject I will go into some of the contradictions the existence of transsexuals create for the Cultural Feminists prime theory of essentialism.  Like creationists they tie themselves in knots, presenting arguments not supported by evidence.  They will resort to lies, slander and false accusations to gain support for purging not only post-transsexual women from the ranks of lesbian feminism but anyone who supports post-transsexual women.

Who can blame them.  Transsexuals are the contradiction that devastates their ideologically self contained world.

1.  I confess to a love hate relationship with Robin Morgan.  Many of the books she compiled and edited are and have been a part of my essential feminist library since the early 1970s.  On the other hand I have felt that Morgan’s claiming to be a lesbian while in a heterosexual marriage and enjoying heterosexual privilege was an insult to actual lesbians.  While other women who wrote the works featured in many of Morgan’s anthologies were being trashed as seeking stardom for the mere act of putting their names on the writings they worked to produce, Morgan was never shy about putting her name on the anthologies she produced and edited.

Posted in Cultural Feminism, Essentialism, Feminist, Gender, Gender Feminism, History, Innateness, Lesbian, Religion, Transphobia. 6 Comments »

A Forgotten Fight for Suffrage

August 25, 2010 — Suzan

From The New York Time Op-Ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25stansell.html?ref=opinion

By CHRISTINE STANSELL
Published: August 24, 2010

LOOKING back on the adoption of the 19th Amendment 90 years ago Thursday — the largest act of enfranchisement in our history — it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. We’re inclined to assume that the passage of women’s suffrage (even the term is old-fashioned) was inevitable, a change whose time had come. After all, voting is now business as usual for women. And although women are still poorly represented in Congress, there are influential female senators and representatives, and prominent women occupy governors’ and mayors’ offices and legislative seats in every part of the United States.

Yet entrenched opposition nationwide sidelined the suffrage movement for decades in the 19th century. By 1920, antagonism remained in the South, and was strong enough to come close to blocking ratification.

Proposals for giving women the vote had been around since the first convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848. At the end of the Civil War, eager abolitionists urged Congress to enfranchise both the former slaves and women, black and white. The 14th Amendment opened the possibility, with its generous language about citizenship, equal protection and due process.

But, at that time, women’s suffrage was still unthinkable to anyone but radical abolitionists. Since the nation’s founding, Americans considered women to be, by nature, creatures of the home, under the care and authority of men. They had no need for the vote; their husbands represented them to the state and voted for them. So, in the 14th Amendment’s second section, Republicans inserted the word “male,” prohibiting the denial of voting rights to “any of the male inhabitants” of the states.

Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25stansell.html?ref=opinion

Posted in Constitutional Rights, Feminist, Gender, History, Human Rights, Politics, Sexism, Social Justice, Unequal Treatment. Comments Off on A Forgotten Fight for Suffrage

One Little N-Word

August 18, 2010 — Suzan

Laura Schlessinger, who may have a doctorate just not in psychology or psychiatry has been spewing hatred and bigotry towards LGBT/TQ people for years.

For those of you unfamiliar with this self appointed dispenser of advice from the fetid swamp land of ultra right wing hate radio and television Dr. Laura has had a radio show for years.

During that time she has told women it is their own fault if they suffer spousal abuse but that they will go to hell if they divorce.  Unlike so many for whom I use the label of Christo-fascist Dr. Laura is different, she is a Judeo-fascist.

This makes her an oddity as there is this incredible history of Jewish support for so many truly progressive causes here in America.  The neo-con movement has been the exception rather than the rule.

In some ways right wingers have been given a pass for their spewing of hate.  I guess it sells in Peoria, a mythical standard of heartland America.

The reality is the full force of the state has been used and abused in the silencing of nearly every progressive cause that has reared its head in America.  This has included laws that make it difficult if not impossible to form labor unions capable of wielding power equal to that of the corporations.

The labeling as Red of anyone who dares speak the dreaded word “equality” or stand for the subversive cause of social justice.  Speaking of the labeling of people as “communist”.  why is there no equivalent of Godwin’s rule regarding red-baiting?

Dr. Laura is part of a tradition of hate speech on the radio and television, protected because it sells products without too much “blow back”. What makes Dr. Laura different from many of the spewers of bigotry is that she is not some dubiously credentialed fundamentalist preacher spewing misogyny and homophobia from the sanctity of the pulpit, nor is she some ignorant pundit reading ultra right wing neo-Nazi talking points that pass as political analysis to gown and hood wearing bigots stoked on “White Panic” and “Gender Panic”.

While working on this I received a bulletin from Media Matters for America that had two parts related to this essay:  http://mediamatters.org/research/201008180029

Malkin, other conservatives voice support for Dr. Laura

Following Laura Schlessinger’s announcement that she will end her radio show in the wake of widespread criticism for her use of a racial slur, Michelle Malkin and other conservatives have responded by praising Schlessinger and her comment that, by quitting the show, she will regain her First Amendment rights.

Michelle Malkin, aka “the rabid Shihtzu” is engaging in a typical right wing tactic of lying with regards to the First Amendment.  Freedom of Speech is no guarantee of a platform. Were this defense of Dr. Laura but a thread in a tapestry, a history of defending free speech on the part of the “rabid Shihtzu then perhaps it would not be such an egregious distortion. But I have never once seen or heard anyone on the right wing ever once support “Free Speech” for anyone on the left.  I’m not referring to a commercially financed platform for where one gets paid for speaking their piece. No, I’m speaking about the right wing defending say the rights of protesters to gather, march and present their position.

If anything the right wing spewers of hate use their platforms to not only belittle the opinion of their opposition (much the same way as I use my platform to belittle them) but they use state power to deny their opposition any platform at all.  It has long taken great courage in this nation to support progressive cause such as equality and social justice.  Too often people on the left have had to face blacklisting, spurious laws enforced by the state, police state type tactics directed at even the most innocuous of groups (hence my using the example of “Quaker Vegans for Peace” as organizations subjected to fascist police state tactics). Too often demands for equality and social justice for people who Dr. Laura slurred by use of the N-word have been met by Concerned Conservative Christian Citizens and their lynching rope.

Schlessinger announces end to show after racial rant
 Schlessinger: “I articulated the ‘n’ word all the way out — more than one time.” On August 10, Schlessinger launched into a racially charged rant, during which she — in her own words — “articulated the ‘n’ word all the way out — more than one time.” Among other things, Schlessinger told an African-American caller that she had a “chip on [her] shoulder” and later stated: “If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race.” The next day, Schlessinger apologized.

During an August 17 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, Schlessinger announced that when her radio contract expires at the end of the year, she will not renew it. She said that, following her racial rant, “my First Amendment rights have been usurped by angry, hateful groups.”

I can’t help but wonder how one can cry censorship when one is not being forced to resign as a result of engaging in the spewing of hateful speech, when in point of fact one has had an entire career of many years and has earned big bucks getting paid to spew misogyny, homophobia and other right wing garbage that has contributed to a hate movement that has denied LGBT/TQ people their equal rights.  How is voluntarily not renewing one’s contract, censorship?

Would anyone care to bet that Dr. Laura has another even more highly paying platform  to preach hate from lined up and awaiting her signature on a new contract?  Contrast that with the victims of the right wing black list of the Hoover and McCarty eras.  Those people had their careers destroyed not for preaching hatred and bigotry but for taking stands that supported among other things, opposition to Franco, support for labor unions and support for racial equality.

No…  Dr. Laura’s use of the N-word was not some sort of courageous stance taken in the defense of free speech. It was simply a public airing of what is all to often voiced among those claiming to support “traditional values’ those who wrap themselves in the flag in order to hide their swastikas and Klan robe.

Dr. Laura let her sanctimony slip and revealed her true face.  One that is as ugly as Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism  or the racism of Aryan Nation.

Were it only true that Dr. Laura would be reduced to Blogging without sponsors and supporting that blogging working in a Big Box Store.

Posted in Censorship, Equal Treatment, Free Speech, Hate Speech, History, Human Rights, Police Abuse, Politics, Right Wing Bigotry, Right Wing Bug F*** Insanity, Social Justice. 2 Comments »

Historical Clipping: Where Some of the Mythology Arises

August 16, 2010 — Suzan

Change-of-Sex Surgeries at Johns Hopkins: About 20 Done So Far

By Tony Ortega, Mon., Aug. 16 2010 @ 6:00AM
Categories: Clip Job

November 6, 1969, Vol. XIV, No. 56

Life’s Such a Drag, They’d Rather Switch
by Charles W. Slack

For the past five years or so, the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore has been offering a change-of-sex service to certain carefully screened patients. This service has its psychotherapeutic and hormone-therapy aspects as well as its surgical procedures and thus demands the participation of a team of specialists representing plastic and reconstructive surgery, gynecological surgery, urology, endocrinology, and neurology, in addition to psychiatry and the press. It is the psychiatrist who, together with the patient, makes the final decision as to whether the rest of the team goes to work or not.

Just how well their work was going became the topic of a symposium last Wednesday evening as the Gender Identity Clinic (this is what the Baltimore physicians and surgeons call themselves) gathered to review progress before colleagues at the New York Academy of Medicine. “Trans-sexuality in the Human Male and the Sex Reassignment Operation” was the title of the meeting and it brought out the biggest crowd the halls had seen since sexual responsters Masters and Johnson did their thing at the Academy a few years back.

Most people who undergo the sex reassignment operation come to the Hopkins clinic with more or less normal male genitalia and leave it with genitals looking and functioning more or less like a normal female, although there are a few who qualify for (and hence get) the approximate female-to-male treatment.

The demand, at least in the U.S. and Sweden, is about 2.7 to one in favor of urogenital men asking to become women. In the Union of South Africa, for some reason, it is reported that there are more urogenital women who want to become men. Data from the remainder of this globe are not yet available.

Wide publicity attended the Identity Clinic’s first sex-changing success in 1965 and, since then, more than 1000 people have written Hopkins requesting the operation (or at least more information about it). The head psychiatrist on the U.S. team, Dr. Jonathan Meyer, mailed a fairly detailed questionnaire to everybody who wrote in and well over half the people filled it out and sent it back. The questionnaire provides good information about U.S. citizens who wish to change sex.

The typical applicant is 25 to 30 years old, in the lower-middle-class income bracket, and is apparently law-abiding in every respect not related to trans-sexualism. More than half have tried psychotherapy but most complain, usually bitterly, that psychological treatment is no help at all with the problem (one or two report that psychotherapy is okay for the side issues although definitely not good for the main trans-sexual hangups).

Hormone treatment is a different matter. Almost all trans-sexuals take hormones before trying to go for surgery. Female hormones taken by males produce female secondary sex characteristics such as breast development. Male hormones taken by females produce an enlarged clitoris. Opposite-sex hormones also produce (or reinforce an already existing) low sex drive. In fact, weak sex drive is one of the surprising characteristics of trans-sexuals as a group. Since so many people who want to change their sex take hormones, it has not been possible, until now, to find out whether they would be different from the rest of us if they didn’t. The Hopkins clinic was able to assemble, from its large volume of applicants, a small group of males who had never had female hormones. Endocrinologically speaking, they turned out to be no different from normal males. Thus, in all probability, the desire to change one’s sex does not ordinarily stem from physiological causes. (There is some hint that damage in the temporal lobes of the brain may be involved but the evidence is not overwhelming.)

Of those who apply for the operations at Hopkins, only a small per cent qualify. The rest, presumably, if they are persistent, must go elsewhere — which, at the moment, means out of the country. To get one’s sex reassigned in Baltimore, one must not be diagnosed paranoid-schizophrenic or otherwise psychotic. One must be living continually (preferably continuously) as a member of the opposite sex. This means more than cross-dressing and changing names: people with conjugal or pseudo-marital relationships are preferred. According to the doctors experienced in interviewing trans-sexuals, those who are really committed to the trans-sexual life represent only about five per cent of those who apply. Really committed trans-sexuals are often well adjusted to their altered role. The very adjustment makes them genuinely frightened of discovery and with some good reason. As trans-sexuals, they pass as the opposite sex. Thus exposure could mean legal, social, and occupational disaster.

The gender-clinic physicians are strong in their agreement that the genuine trans-sexual is not a homosexual. Often enough homosexuals will inquire about or even apply for the operation in the mistaken belief that it might relieve some of the social and sexual pressures now upon them, but during the extensive interviewing given all applicants the homosexuals are disqualified or, more likely, disqualify themselves when they find out what it’s all about.

In the first place, sexual reassignment is not really an operation but a series of procedures. While under observation by the team, and while using hormones, one must first live for a period as a full-time member of the opposite sex. Then those parts of the process which are reversible (breast removal in the female-to-male, breast development in the male-to-female) are undertaken before such irreversible as removal of penises. Before any surgery is undertaken, the team spends a good bit of time talking to the prospect and explaining just what to expect and not to expect. One can understand why this would be necessary. The aim of the operative procedure is basically to satisfy the patient by (1) removing the external genitalia associate with the undesired sex, (2) replacing them with the external appearance of genitalia associate with the desired sex (penises are made from skin grafts from other parts of the body), (3) for male-to-females, providing a functioning simulated vagina. The whole team participates in one way or another during the operations. Reoperations are far from rare and, unfortunately, the whole process is tinged with trial and error. Only about 20 people have been switched so far here in the States, but the clinic is presently going at the rate of one a month. The big-volume sex-changers have so far been the Japanese, Turks, Danes, and Swedes. While admitting that the foreigners might be a bit advanced on the aesthetics of reconstruction (practice makes perfect and they’ve had more change), the U.S. doctors express uniform dismay at foreign lack of attention to urological complications. One gets the impression that as long as the job looks good, the Turks are happy — never mind what develops urogenitally after the patient gets back home.

There can be no doubt that people should have the right to be free of such fears and to pursue such happiness — through hormones or trans-sexual surgery or through any other means medical science can come up with. The pursuit of happiness down one-way streets must not be denied. God Almighty, however, help those psychiatrists to direct this traffic wisely.

Posted in History. Comments Off on Historical Clipping: Where Some of the Mythology Arises

Gender… Schmender #$%@&^*

August 4, 2010 — Suzan

The whole ideology of gender is purely sexist bullshit.

Gender is a pure social construct, a fiction that oppresses both men and women but more women than men.

When I hear “gender assigned at birth” I want to slap someone. I wasn’t assigned a gender at birth.  The doctor looked between my legs and said, “It’s a boy.”  I was assigned male by reason of having a penis there later in life I had an operation that reassigned me to female based on that same genital appearance factor.

When I came out in 1969, I came out as a feminist.  Women in the collective gave me clothes. While the guys claimed they respected me but they also started treating me in a way that told me they expected me to adhere to the sex roles both hippie and movement women were expected to adhere to.

When other movement women saw this they introduced me to feminism.  When SDS split into Weatherman and other factions I became Weather, largely because of Bernadine Dohrn.  You see there weren’t very many strong women’s voices in SDS and the Anti-War Movement.

Bernadine Dohrn gave great rants…  Maybe months later on reflection you went WTF but at the time…  Oh how I admired her audacity and how she inspired me to act courageously.

I also learned from other radical women. Putting women and the interests of women first yet never forgetting that sexism was only one axis of oppression. Consciousness raising and analysis gave me/us an understanding of what the world expects of women.

Many of us who were dealing with having been born with transsexualism owe far more to feminism and the feminist movement than we ever did to Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Movement. We weren’t gay men even if we had male lovers.  Especially if we had male lovers… being transsexual and having a male lover meant we were straight or more accurately heterosexual since straight also had other connotations.

We weren’t some “T” so recently grafted on to what was first a Gay Liberation Movement.  We were women in transition to female having to deal with the same sexism as natal female women had to deal with.  It didn’t much matter if we were radical feminist Weather Nation women or Cosmo “Sex and the Single Girl” women.  We had to deal with sexism and pay discrimination as well as sexist assumptions based on what are now called “gender” stereotypes.

Gender was something used to keep women oppressed.  It was the idea that women are weak and stupid; fit only to be sex objects or mothers. Daddy’s little princess until given to a man only to lose her last name and become his property.* Gender became a way of telling feminists that they were not real women since they questioned the marketing of very high profit items based on pandering to a sense of insecurity in one’s own womanhood or attractiveness.

When feminism challenged those who were dealing with transsexualism part of the challenge was due to the tendency of so many of us to embrace all the marketing of gender without insight or even a sense of irony.

But gender as it is so often used today is if anything a far more sneaky and loaded with subtextual readings semiotic. Gender has now replaced sex in so much of the common discourse that we look at the construct as reality and skip over the subtextual readings of the semiotic.

Whereas once upon a time the Cockettes Troupe in San Francisco deconstructed gender and showed it as performative through the usage of exaggerated costumes and the performing of equally over the top stereotypes taken from films of the 1930s and 40s I now have some people ask if these performers were transsexual or transgender. The answer is maybe some were.  One was in the Stanford program at the same time I was, others were gay men and some were natal females.

By breaking the rules of gender through Absurdist Theater they created both campy comedy and a critique of sex roles. One of the crucial mistakes in feminist criticism of more traditional drag is the assumption that women are the target when it often seems the aim is more a matter of ridiculing roles portrayed in movies.

But Second Wave Feminism went even further in delivering a devastating critique of sex roles as defining what the proper role of women was.  When women dared step beyond the stereotypes and enter male dominated career field they were told that doing so would un-sex both women and men.  Fashion magazines and all sorts of corporate interests dished up massive loads of propaganda aimed at undermining the confidence of women seeking equality of opportunity.

One of the critiques of transsexual to female people is that we have not been socialized as women. This is an assumption that is often times contradictorily both true and false. Transsexual to female people grow up as transkids and are influenced by the same sales pitches and indoctrination as natal women yet they are told it is something they must adhere to and we are told it is something to be ashamed of.

This makes it hard for us to have a critical eye regarding this propaganda when we first come out. We may acquire it with experience but it is equally possible for us to join the masses of women who march to the beat of Sex in the City rather than to NOW and more radical feminisms.

At some point sex became gender and roles acted replaced that which was written upon the body. The ironic labeling of sex as a definer of maleness or femaleness as essentialism has resulted in many people with a poor understanding of feminist theory using it as a careless accusation.

Dividing people into classes of male and female based on the appearances of genitalia would mean that heterosexual post-SRS women and men would be able to legally marry partners of the other sex.  No more Christie Lee Littletons, no more Nikki Araguzs.

But when the misogynistic reactionary forces of both religious fundamentalism and ultra right wing politics united to defeat feminism as well as LGBT/TQ liberation and the progressive movements of the 60s and 70s they seemed to unite with corporate interests in reasserting misogyny.  Trying to sell sex roles and their importance after 15 years of serious feminist critique was more of a struggle than repackaging sex roles as gender.

The Total Woman by Marabel Morgan was supposedly a self help book for women.  In reality this 1974 publication was grounded in the rising right wing Christo-Fascist backlash that also spawned the rise of the homophobic bigotry of Anita Bryant and crew.

Along with Phyllis Schlafly these genderists put forth an ideology that could have been penned by the late transvestite activist pioneer, Virginia Prince.  The ideology was one that kept women in their places by telling them that they weren’t real women unless they filled this total woman gender role.  The same gender role feminists had critiqued under the name of “sex roles.”

Now I view “gender” as a culturally defined social construct that varies a great deal according to culture and time (see Margaret Mead’s work.  BTW her “debunker” were right wing McCarthyites).

With western modernism the naturally occurring over lapping of sex traits and abilities lead to a lessening of rigid gender roles that are more often found these days in non-western cultures.

Defining people as real men or real women based on gender is a characteristic of conservative values often based in religiously fanatical cultures which is why I find the embrace of “gender” as definer by Transgender Inc. to be more reactionary than progressive.

I read a story on Bilrico about some creep beating an infant boy to death to make him act like a man. http://www.bilerico.com/2010/08/man_kills_17-month-old_boy_for_acting_like_a_girl.php This is the problem with putting so much emphasis on gender.

In the real world an Emo boy even with nail polish and a magenta streak in his long black hair is still a boy.  The rocker girl with facial piercings, tats and black leather motor cycle boots is still a girl.

Of course without the ideology of transgender Thomas Beatie is a masculine woman who dresses and acts like a man when she isn’t having children.  But c`est la vie.  And no I wouldn’t mis-gender him like that even though I am supremely irritated by the neo-quiver full thingie.

Gender is masculinity or femininity not maleness or femaleness.  We got suckered into discussing that core identity of male or female as being gender based on Stoller’s book (Sex and Gender) way back in the 1960s.  We didn’t have a whole lot of information to operate on and lacked a vocabulary to describe what we were feeling.  We should have used “core sex identity” for that sense of being female trapped in a male body.
Little did we realize that even then introducing “gender” in to the discourse was using poisoned seeds from the fruit of a poisonous tree.  The misogynistic world according to Virginia Prince became the bullshit crop of the transgender social construct of gender.

The way Transgender Inc. uses gender is not the least bit liberating.  It can’t be as it is based on a construct that defines membership in the sex class of female or the sex class of male not based on what one commonly uses.  Male and female are generally based on whether one has a penis or vagina.

Yet the simple reality of hole or pole unites both Transgender Inc and the religious fanatic/right wingers in finding ways to tell women born transsexual that their pussies do not really make them women.

Posted in Gender, Gendering, History, Homophobia, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Politics, Questioning Authority, Sexism, Transgender, Transphobia, Transsexualism. 14 Comments »

FBI admits probing ‘radical’ historian Zinn for criticizing bureau

July 30, 2010 — Suzan

While many babble on about how free people are in America I have tended to question the reality of that freedom. Too often that freedom seems to mean one is free to work wages so mean and parsimonious as to give meaning to the term “wage slavery”.  Oddly that freedom doesn’t seem to extend to the rights of labor to organize, form unions and strike for better conditions, otherwise why would workers who try to exercise that freedom be fired, subjected to beatings and arrest or sometimes even murdered by those who are authorized to enforce the nations laws.

Why are people of color, women, LGBT/TQ people considered subversive and anti-American when they ask that the nation that claims to stand foursquare for freedom, justice and equality honor those claims by giving people of color, women and LGBT/TQ people those things the nation says it is most proud of.

Why are those who peacefully dissent and point out the short-comings, the bait and switch nature of these claims spied upon by secret police when our government tells us that only totalitarian governments use secret police to spy upon citizens who peacefully dissent.  Why is it okay for a nation that claims to stand for freedom of speech turns around and black lists those who have the audacity to speak out against the injustices of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia?  Are terminations and black listing the marks of freedom or of an authoritarian police state?

Is it more radical to petition an authoritarian state to be allowed to become part of that authoritarian state than it is to work to end the authoritarian state that oppresses so many?

The late Howard Zinn exposed the reality behind America’s image and showed us how it was so often a bright and shining lie.

For this he was investigated by the FBI and I am sure by secret police squads all over the country.  His crime being a truth teller with the courage to speak that truth to power.  I am not surprised at their attempts to have him fired and blacklisted as that is the nature of those involved in the maintaining of the authoritarian aspects of corporate freedom and the government by and for the rich.

From Raw Story:  http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0730/fbi-admits-probing-zinn-criticizing-bureau/

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, July 30th, 2010 — 3:22 pm

FBI files show bureau may have tried to get Zinn fired from Boston University for his political opinions

Those who knew of the dissident historian Howard Zinn would not be surprised that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept tabs on him for decades during the Cold War.

But in a release of documents pertaining to Zinn, the bureau admitted that one of its investigations into the left-wing academic was prompted not by suspicion of criminal activity, but by Zinn’s criticism of the FBI’s record on civil rights investigations.

“In 1949, the FBI opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn,” the bureau states. “The Bureau noted Zinn’s activities in what were called Communist Front Groups and received informant reports that Zinn was an active member of the CPUSA; Zinn denied ever being a member when he was questioned by agents in the 1950s.

“In the 1960s, the Bureau took another look at Zinn on account of his criticism of the FBI’s civil rights investigations.”

Continue reading at: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0730/fbi-admits-probing-zinn-criticizing-bureau/

Posted in Abuse, History, Police Abuse, Questioning Authority, Social Justice. Comments Off on FBI admits probing ‘radical’ historian Zinn for criticizing bureau

Allegories Gone Wild: Comstockery Was No Laughing Stock…

June 9, 2010 — Suzan

From God is for Suckers

6 June 2010 by KA

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it” –  Macbeth, Act I, Scene IV

In a recent post, Mr. Garton expounded upon the sexual horrors that some would perpetrate upon us. Sadly, American history is rife with those who would gird our loins for war against our wills. Anita Bryant, for instance, led a vicious movement against gay rights that was religiously motivated. The AFA (American Family Association – what a gentle name that hides the insanity of its members) to this day is virulently anti-gay and labors mightily to foist other violations that run contrary to the (many) principles upon which this country was founded.

As outrageous and horrid as these recent efforts to deprive the few of the liberties granted to all, a brief history lesson will chill the blood and clench the knuckles white with rage. We can breathe a sigh of relief that these days are past us, but we must always be on guard lest the past come back with foaming jaws to bite us in the ass.

Anthony Comstock was a sexually repressed control freak, who left vivid scars on the sexual psyche of America:

Continue reading at: http://gods4suckers.net/archives/2010/06/06/allegories-gone-wild-comstockery-was-no-laughing-stock/

Posted in Censorship, History, Homophobia, Human Rights. 3 Comments »

The Banality of Evil

May 7, 2010 — Suzan

Hannah Arendt used that phrase to describe Adolf Eichmann.

Over the course of my life time I have met a few very evil people. People who though seemingly very nice I have later learned were members of the KKK, John Birch Society or other viciously racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or misogynistic organizations.

What is being exposed regarding the criminal conspiracy of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergy is a perfect example of how monstrously evil people can at once nice cultured people and at the same time do things like child rape, lynchings and the commission of genocide.

Willow has stated that she has corresponded with some of these people and they have exchanged pleasant conversations. She then extrapolates from those exchanges that other sisters view of these people as monsters is inaccurate. She cites the very confused Dr. Lawrence’s friendship with these people as an example of how they couldn’t possibly hate transsexual people without noting how the Nazis used Jewish collaborators to aid them in their commission of genocide against all Jewish people. The Nazis even had a name for these collaborators, who they called Sonder Kommandos.

The cowardice of people like Rekers and Bailey which compels them to keep their own homosexuality/transgenderism/transsexuality hidden while attacking other who are out and proud is identical to those one occasionally learns about. Like the leader of the American Nazi party who was Jewish, or the leader of Aryan Nation who was half black.

It is easy to say, “But these people were nice to me.” It is rare for people who actually have the position of power that garners respect within Academe to display the snarling vicious mind that is the mien of Fred Phelps and his cult of evil minions.

More often one finds a Martin Heidegger, someone insightful, cultured, even charming as well as vicious bigot and a Nazi.

One thing I have discovered about Janice Raymond is that her anti-transsexual ideology is motivated not by feminism but by Catholicism. The same motivator that drives Maggie Gallagher in her vicious campaign to deprive LGBT/T people the right to marry their partners.

I was raised Catholic and at an early age saw that it used religion as justification for a wide range of bigotry including vicious Antisemitism, homophobia and some of the vilest misogyny one find anywhere outside of fundamentalist Islam. At the same time the church introduced me to art and music such as Bach and Handel.

Which is the true face and is it not just possible that the smiling face of the culture is not just a mask that hides the banality of their evil?

Posted in Hate Crimes, History, Human Rights, Unequal Treatment. 10 Comments »

Christine Jorgensen and Roberta Cowell

April 4, 2010 — Suzan

It has been some 40 years since I read Christine Jorgensen’s carefully redacted ghost written “autobiography that came out about the same time I came out.

A year or so latter I saw that horribly done film version of her life story starring some no name boy who looked like the foot ball player in drag that he was.

I met Christine at the San Francisco premiere of the film.  I was young and terribly sexy wearing one of my sleazy dresses from a Telegraph Avenue boutique that I loved, she reminded me of one of my chain smoking never married aunts who lived in LA and went to Las Vegas for her kicks.

But Christine’s story had never been the transsexual life story that captured my imagination.  I was too young or perhaps too scared of my own problems with being a transkid to express any interest in it when she was a news item.  Possibly I was too sheltered by my environment.

The transsexual stories that did get my attention started filtering into my active awareness about 1960 or so and centered around the stars of Le Carousel in Paris.  Coccinelle, Capucine, Bambi and April Ashley were the sisters I found ready identification with.  Coccinelle was as they said of buxom sexy women in those days, “a Bombshell”, a transsexual Bridget Bardot or Jayne Mansfield.

April Ashley’s story hit the tabloids the summer of 1962 and gave me a name for what had been euphemistically referred to by my parents as “my problem”.  My problem being that I was an obvious transkid blossoming into a teen queen.  One who got busted regularly for dressing in mommy’s clothes and for showing signs of wanting to be noticed by the sort of boys who would take me riding in their cars.

As a historian I have actually worked on recollecting books I once had and either sold or lent and never saw again.

Over the last year this blog has attacked  the all too frequent claims of often contradictory and generally sketchy forms of intersex on the part of people who are garden variety women born with transsexualism.

Everyone of them seems to think they are original in making these claims.  Yet nearly 60 years ago Roberta Cowell was making similar claims of spontaneous changing of secondary sex characteristic and trashing Christine Jorgensen as a homosexual transvestite because Christine’s body didn’t respond as well to her hormone regime.  At the same time according to the biography written by Richard Docter, Christine was also making unsubstantiated claims to being physically intersex.

Both were making these claims at a time prior to Dr. Georges Burou development of the pioneering surgical techniques that gave those who graduated from Le Carousel their vaginas.

But more importantly these two were the pioneers of what has now become the infamous, “I’m real and you are not” trash talking among women born with transsexualism who had similar if not identical sex change operations.

And this claim is documented not speculative thanks to biographies and ghost written “autobiographies”.

Posted in History, Intersex, Sex Change Surgery, Transsexualism, Uncategorized. 11 Comments »

Pope apologizes for priests’ child sex abuse

March 21, 2010 — Suzan
Pleads to keep the jewelry, satin dresses and red Prada pumps.
Time to disestablish Catholicism.  The con game is some 1700 years old and has murdered and enslaved more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.  These crimes are only the latest in a long list of crimes against humanity.
By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, March 20th, 2010 — 6:50 pm

Pope Benedict XVI apologised Saturday for Irish priests’ child sex abuse in a letter with far-reaching implications, but victims said it was not enough to address the growing scandal.The pastoral letter, which came with the sex abuse scandal having spread to several countries, including the pope’s native Germany, also said Irish bishops had “failed” in addressing the problem.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” the pope said in the long-awaited letter to Irish Catholics to be read in all Irish dioceses, in which he also expressed “shame and remorse.”

Continue reading at: http://rawstory.com/2010/03/pope-apologises-priests-child-sex-abuse/

Posted in Catholic Church, Christo-Fascism, Hate Crimes, History, Male Privilege, Religion, Social Justice. 2 Comments »

What is Christo-fascism?

March 3, 2010 — Suzan

Sharon, a friend of mine as well as one of the editors over at TS-SI suggested that perhaps I should define “Christo-fascism” as people react rather harshly to my using that phrase.

I am an atheist.  That means I think the very idea of their being an invisible patriarch in the sky or for that matter an invisible matriarch in the sky is pretty absurd.  I don’t take the cop out of declaring myself spiritual rather than religious because I find all the New Age stuff equally absurd.

Christo-fascists behave in a manner that makes them virtually if not literally identical to Islamo-fascists.  Both demand that the state impose harsh religion based laws that impinge upon the human rights of minority groups within their cultures as well as misogynistically denying women both equality and the right to control their own bodies.

One element of Christo-fascism is the giving of primacy to the fetus over the mother in matters of health and well being, denying abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman carrying the fetus. Thus reducing the value of women’s lives to their bearing of children and justifies all sorts of discrimination based upon the expectation of that being their primary role in life.

At the store where I work I see women and girls clad in the Christian version of the burqa, similar cult like costumes including anachronistic skirts down to the ankles and identical hair styles trailing their home schooled or religious schooled quiver full behind them.

While this can be dismissed as simple cultist behavior, rabid right wing Christianity is impacting our ability to learn actual science in public schools due to their demands that creation mythology be given equal weight to birth of the universe physics and evolution.  Christo-fascism is present in the attempts to rewrite history and present a revisionist version with the founding fathers as Christians when many were Deists at most and were quite likely agnostic free thinkers or even atheist the way Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine were.

Fascism is characterized as a totalitarian form of government with a close partnership between the state and corporations.  Religious fascism be it Christo-fascism or Islamo-fascism can be characterized by the destruction of any wall of separation between church and state.  Religious law is seen to define civil law.

In the past the anti-sodomy laws were an example of such interaction between church and state as are censorship laws.

The anti-abortion, anti-sex education and anti contraception movements led by the rabid right wing Christianist factions are some examples of Christo-fascism.

Christo-fascists are leading the fight against marriage equality.  They are the ones who libel marriage equality with lies, fiction and hyperbole.

They use and abuse their tax exempt status to campaign and raise money to pass laws that deny LGBT/T folks their Constitutionally guaranteed rights.  Their representatives in congress further their goal of the establishment of a theocratic state governed by Biblical Law rather than the Constitution as set forth by our founding fathers.

LGBT/T folks are used as scapegoats utilizing the same playbook and much the same rhetoric found in anti-Semitism and racism with the additional language of perversion and pathology.

The alliance with the rabid right wing politics espoused by the Republican Party is as overt as it is repellent.  Since the years of FDR the conservative movement has aligned itself with policies that closely resemble those of the Axis Powers of WW II.  Open racism, homophobia and misogyny are used as tools to stir near lynch mob violence as a campaign tool.

One sees it in the rhetoric directed towards President Obama by Tea Baggers and Birthers alike. It is as though the Catholics, the Fundamentalists, the John Birchers and KKK have formed a party based on hate.

The Christo-fascists are the storm troopers.

When they oppose same sex marriage they are acting in a manner that is un-American in that they are denying their fellow citizens equal rights as guaranteed in the 14th amendment to the Constitution.  Their lies are of the same nature as the lies propagated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Now many think I am over reacting.  Yet every day I hear or read a fresh hate spiel.

One of the big stories this year has been regarding “The Family”, a secretive Christo-fascist cabal of ultra right wing Republicans documented by Jeff Sharlet in his book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”.

Members of this cabal have been caught supporting the proposed law in Uganda that would make homosexuality a capital offense.  Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, there are American Christian ministers calling for the same thing.  I am not speaking of the self anointed Fred Phelps and his Klan of inbred neo-Nazis for Jesus.  No, I am speaking of ministers with huge McMega Churches like the ones found in the suburbs of metroplexes across America.

They call for Biblical law and death for homosexuals.  Although that call is remarkably silent when it comes to calling for a death penalty for pedophile priests/ministers.

These calls for Biblical Law are also rather selectively chosen from books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus.  They tend to ignore other equally emphatic prohibitions found in verses surrounding the few minor references one finds to homosexuality.

Fighting the homosexual agenda has become a major fund raiser for these churches in the same manner as fighting women’s access to safe and legal abortion has been. I believe we ignore at our own peril the precedent that has been set by the words of support and lack of condemnation regarding the misogynistic pro-life movement people who have actually gone out and murdered Doctors who provide legal and safe abortions.

Any Christian organization with “Family” in its name is probably a proponent of Manson Family Values and not any sort of valuing of the rights of people. The only people whose rights and families they value are those they consider the chosen, the elect, the saved.

“Born again” bears a startling resemblance to the old battle cry, “The south will rise again!”  While the text features misogyny, homophobia and trans phobia writ large and filled with blood libels the subtext contains the racism and hatred of the poor that so characterize right wing totalitarian ideology.

Pam’s House Blend often gives me all the illustrations I need to make my point regarding Christo-fascism.  Here are a couple of examples I recently gleaned from her blog:

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/15382/know-your-smear-campaign-how-the-catholic-hierarachy-lies-claims-gays-attack-religious-freedom

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/15380/catholic-charities-of-washington-cuts-off-its-nose-to-spite-its-face

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/15374/gary-randall-opposing-death-sentence-for-gays-is-perverted-tolerance

I could go on and go to other references. But here are some names to watch for, people who are clearly Christo-fascists and are very powerful:

Pope Benedict, William Donohue, Tony Perkins, Donald Wildmon, James Dobson.  The list could go on and on, filling this blog for days.

I could back my claims with You Tube videos of their calls for atrocities.

You can live in denial just as people in the 1930s did when Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” or one can be forewarned and forearmed.  I exercise my rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and legally own a firearm for self defense.  Perhaps others who can legally do so should also consider that as an act of prudence.

Posted in Atheism, Christo-Fascism, Classism, Discrimination, Economic Issues, Feminist, Hate Crimes, History, Human Rights, Misogyny. 1 Comment »

Just Kids and an Exhibit of Later Works by Andy Warhol

February 15, 2010 — Suzan

Last night I finished reading Patti Smith’s recent memoir of her friendship with Robert Maplethorpe in the late 1960s, early 1970s, titled Just Kids.

Perhaps it is nostalgia what with looking at photographs of that era and remembering friends who died.  But there was a time when we were less obsessed with why we were transsexual and spent more personal conversations about art and artists.

There is a retrospective of the later works of Andy Warhol showing at the Fort Worth Modern through May.  Tina and I are going tomorrow as our Valentine’s day celebration.

One of the movies I saw in 1967 that really influenced me was Chelsea Girls.  That year the Velvet Underground’s first album provided a darker counterpoint to Sgt. Pepper.  I was working at a shit job in a piss factory and like Patti Smith, I too had something inside of me called desire.

I was political and part of a movement that helped end the war in Vietnam and we were all “just kids”.

When I got to San Francisco and started the process of changing sex I was helped by an office that offered support for those changing sex.  It was started by people who had their “Stonewall” three years before New York City’s.  And they too were just kids.

I was best friends with a sister named Leslie.  We went to old movies together and dug the crowd that hung out at Andy Warhol’s Factory, perhaps because he actually used queens in films directed by Paul Morrissey. Candy Darling tragically dying young of cancer.

We spoke of the creating our lives as art projects, “I am an artist and my life is my art.”  Mostly we were escaping, running from as much as running towards.

Rock and roll with words that mattered from Dylan to Patti Smith, whose opening lines to her first recording “Hey Joe”, the A-side of “Piss Factory” were, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

We lost so many people along the way.  Too many to drugs and way too many to AIDS.  Andy Warhol died in 1987, over 20 years ago.  Robert Maplethorpe died about the same time.

And somewhere along the line we stopped caring so much about art as something that really matters and be came obsessed with why we are this way.

As though the existential answer of, “I am this way because this is the way I am” is insufficient response to bigotry and psychiatric abuse.

Posted in Art, Culture, History, Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

Tom Joad

February 6, 2010 — Suzan

This Blog is nearly one year old.  It has been through some changes.  Lots of people who came here at first are now denouncing me on their own blogs and over on TS-SI.

They are saying I betrayed them because I don’t embrace “classic transsexual” or HBS.  People are upset because while I think transsexualism is a form of intersex I haven’t believed Ayn Randian, individualist claims of special exemption due to “I’m not really like other transsexuals, I’m really intersex”” since Agnes story turned out to be a manufactured tale that got her SRS in the late 1950s.

I have been attacked as a traitor because people expected WBT to expend a lot of energy attacking transgender people and I refuse to. Transsexualism and transgenderism are different but when it come to oppression we are all “trannie queer gender trash”.

A lot of the expectations of my taking some sort of militantly anti-transgender stance and throwing the same shit at transgender folks as the Christo-Fascist right comes from where I was at for a short while about 9-10 years back when I was getting sober and in the aftermath of 9/11 and not reflective of a lifetime of left wing activism on my part.

I moved back to the left thanks to reading people like the late Howard Zinn and from revulsion towards the hate that was being spewed by the “classic transsexual” faction. Tina also played a major role in telling me how unbecoming my involvement in the near Fascism of the conservatives was and in reminding me of my basic working class New Deal Democratic roots.

When I am asked why I believe certain things and why I am a militant lefty, an anarchist, I joke and say, “It’s all Pete Seeger’s fault.” But I could as easily blame it on Joe Hill or Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.

A couple of years ago Tina and I watched the move Grapes of Wrath, and I recalled Tom Joad’s soliloquy.

Now Woody Guthrie saw the movie and wrote the following song.  After hearing it Steinbeck said, “Woody managed to tell the story that took me some 400 pages in about 6 minutes.

Some times on a lot of matters I think this might be a better world if  instead of asking “What would John Galt do?” we asked “What would Tom Joad do?”

Posted in Classism, Culture, Economic Issues, History, Human Rights, Questioning Authority, Social Justice, Unequal Treatment. 27 Comments »

Male Dominance and its origins in our present society

February 4, 2010 — Suzan

by
Andrea Brown

In our present society which is dominated by a set of financial cults masquerading as spiritual cults which worship a social construct known as man, transsexualism has no place for the following reasons. We do not pay large amounts of wealth to these cults or give them large amounts of influence therefore we are attacked for the following reasons.

Women born transsexual people are getting rid of penises, which the religiously dogmatic, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, fanatics and transgender all worship as the supreme organ. In the eyes of the religious cults, psychiatrists and other deranged sociopath’s, which is seen as a grave sin. They worship the penis as the giver of live. They have not figured out it is just an organ that the body can live without and in fact is the same tissue as the vagina, just differently arranged in the womb.

Sex reassignment surgery just rearranges the penis tissue into vagina for transsexual people, although not as well as what would occur in the womb. The organs that life comes from are the womb, ovaries, vagina and testes with some minor assistance from the penis. The womb is the safe place for life and the vagina is the releaser of life into the greater world, from the safety of the womb. The womb is the protector of life.

Present day male dominance comes from pre-christian Roman male supremacy. They would never allow a female emperor or a woman to hold any position of power. When a roman emperor Elagabalus who reigned from 218AD to 222AD ordered his surgeons to change him from male to female, the Praetorian Guard murdered him as an affront to Rome. Roman emperors were notorious for there excess’s, but wanting a vagina was to much for the Roman’s, due to there hatred of women, but everything else, such as Trajans genocide in Dacia (Romania) was completely acceptable and celebrated as a great event.

Trajan’s column is seen as a cultural exhibit. It celebrates the deaths and enslavement of millions as well as the destruction of an entire language and culture, previously known as Dacia, which was a comparable civilization with the Hellenistic Greeks.

The coliseum may have had as many people die in the arena as in Auschwitz. How can such a place of evil were people died for the amusement of mobs be seen as a cultural icon?

The Roman’s had a very anti-female attitude to the point that if a woman was raped, the rapist was only charged with an affront to her husband. A woman was the property of her father until marriage, upon which she became the property of her husband. If her husband died her oldest son or male relative became in effect her owner. Basically in plain language a woman was subhuman and merely property in Roman eyes at the same level as a horse or cart.

Strangely today a lot of people keep trying to promote Rome as some sort of basis of civilization. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini both tried to emulate the Roman Empire, although Hitler was closest due to his genocide of entire groups in society, just like the Roman’s. They exterminated the Dacians (Romanians). They also killed one third of the French, wiping out their language and culture, then replacing it at the point of the sword with Latin, which evolved into modern French over the last 2000 years. The ancient Gaul’s, spoke a mixture of Basque in the south-west, Celtic in the central part east and west, Hellenistic at the mouth of the Rhone and Germanic languages in the north of France as did the Belgae. The roman’s in their genocidal rampage, which stripped every piece of gold, destroyed all of this European cultural heritage and cultural richness, and silver it could from every country.

It is good to see the modern day European Union funding so many language and cultural issues, groups and events all over Europe, in some cases even leading to strengthening of local culture.

All the Romanesque languages are descended from Latin, which was imposed in those countries at the point of a sword by the Roman army. Countries such as Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, north Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, all of who had their language and cultures wiped out and replaced by Latin and roman woman hating. Those countries lost their languages and their cultures. The loss to society is incalculable.

The southern Germans got it from the Romans from 15BC to 13BC, although they got even in the battle of Teutoburg in 9AD, the 2000th anniversary of which was this year. That battle checked the Roman Empire, slowing the spread of roman woman hating, which in turn slowed down the spread of Christianity to Northern Europe until 1000 to 1300. Without that, the reformation may not have taken place, as older ideas still existed in some places in common memory and story telling in parts. Arminius (Herman the German) may have given all of us our present freedom, without even realizing it. If Arminius had not checked the Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Scotland and Eastern Europe would have fallen soon afterwards, leaving the Romans to only face the Partheons/Persians on there eastern side, instead of always defending there northern borders. That would have condemned the European world to permanent decay, eventually leading to a religious take over, that would have been permanent inquisition.

A lot of Christian historians still do not even mention the battle of Teutoburg, yet it was one of the most, if not the most decisive battle’s in history. The site of the battle has been found and it appears that the roman tale of ambush may have been exaggerated. The latest research indicates it may have been a straight out battle. Military tacticians study that battle, due to its sheer decisiveness and the fact that the Germans literally had been in the Stone Age 20 years before, yet completely and utterly annihilated the most modern roman army of the time. No commander of an army, before or since has achieved such a victory.

The worst act by the Roman’s may have been the destruction of the Hellenistic civilization. Leaving aside the horrific toll in human lives, the Antikythera mechanism gives a good idea of what the roman’s really did. They destroyed technological advances, setting us back farther than anyone realized, until the Antikythera Mechanism was studied. Now a horrible truth is starting to dawn on people studying the Hellenistic society and Rhodes in particular. The roman’s were the destroyers of technological development and scientific thought, all of which the roman’s considered unmanly, therefore beneath them and to destroyed.

I was once tried to build a replica of the Antikythera mechanism as I have a casual interest in older technology. It is the only ancient creation I had to give up on in the early stages. When 3D printers become available in the next few years, I will print one from the lithographs that have been taken, as it is almost or possibly as complicated as Charles Babbage’s machines. I asked an engineer for advice on building it. He initially laughed, making jokes about building it in an hour, saw the nature publication on the antikythera mechanism, said it is impossible, he sat dumb struck, when he realized it was a real design from the 2nd century BC. He couldn’t build it either and passed the links to it around his engineer friends, who were all in disbelief. If it had not been published in the scientific journal Nature, neither they or myself would have believed it was real and would have dismissed it as something from a new age nut job.

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/node/35
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/abs/nature05357.html
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/system/files/0608_Nature.pdf
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/system/files/0608_Nature-Supplementary.pdf
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/data/ptm/full-resolution-ptm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfMFhrgOFc

The Catholic Church took over from the roman emperors after Attila the Hun was bought of in 452 when Pope Leo 1 brought the richest man in Rome to meet Attila. The spin the Catholic Church put on it was that the social construct which the Catholic Church uses as a societal control mechanism called God had defeated Attila the Hun. By bringing ex-consul Avienus, the richest man in Rome and Trygetius, a diplomat. Leo had the perfect team to negotiate with Attila the Hun on behalf of Valentinian. Avienus had the gold to bribe Attila and in effect would have meant no gold left in Rome, so pointless destroying from Attila’s point of view. Trygetius was a great diplomat, who would have smoothed over all negotiations. Leo was completely fearless. He had an ego as big as any megalomaniac in history, believing he was directly protected by the protection of the holy trinity. Leo was perfect to bring as he would have been able to play on Attila’s fears, as Attila was superstitious.

In effect that meant Attila had all the gold, so there was no point in invading Rome. Leo in classic Catholic Church spin-doctor mode, used this event to add even more control over the dying remains of the Roman Empire from the Emperor. Leo extracted a letter from Emperor Valentinian formally recognizing Leo as leader of all the catholic Church as he was holder of the keys of St. Peters in 445 AD, the same year that Attila took over control of the Huns from his uncle Rugila. Leo then went on to declare in 452 AD that a miracle occurred upon meeting Attila and that the Catholic Church had driven back the Huns with the help of God, when in fact it was a massive gold bribe.

That event led to a deranged belief taking hold in the Roman Empire, that the Catholic Church could save them from Earthly dangers. A belief, which is ingrained into almost a billion people today, worldwide.

The roman empire was then a white hot crucible in which there was a mindset of slaughter in the Coliseum for amusement, slavery, extermination of perceived enemies, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-women, anti-disabled, male supremacy at all costs, destruction of all other cultures and replacement of other languages with Latin. All this was occurring in an empire in its death throws, at its most dangerous time.

In the all-consuming firestorm, that was the Roman Empire at the time. Catholicism violently defeated other forms of Christianity such as Arianism. The birth of Christianity at the time in the Roman Empire was as violent as the birth of Islam, shortly afterwards.

The attacks on women were particularly violent. A good example of the violence towards women is Hypatia of Alexandria.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a tall, very strong-minded woman, who rode a chariot, who taught the following statements to her students of mathematics, engineering and astronomy.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final”.

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all”.

“To teach superstitions as truth, is a most terrible thing”.

The fact that she was tall, glamorous, would not be subservient to men, outspoken against religious dogma, rode around in a chariot and was a mathematician would have really pissed of the Christians at the time as they were anti-science, enforcers of religious dogma and only saw woman as existing to give birth to more men and to serve men as slaves.

In 412 AD a group of catholic monks known as the “Parabalani” led by Saint Cyril, dragged her from her chariot and into a church. There Cyril and his followers sliced her to pieces with oyster shells and when in her last breath, burnt her. Saint Cyril was made a saint for this act and he declared his followers in the Parabalani to be saints for this Christian act of butchering an innocent woman.

The term Parabalani means student, as does the term Taliban. Now you know where the Taliban get their inspiration.

Cyril is still revered as a saint. For those of you who wonder what it takes to become a saint, the Vatican is in the middle of creating another saint. His name is Cardinal Stepianic or ‘beloved’ as nazi apologists now refer him to. According to the former Yugoslavian government when they tried him in 1946 for war crimes, he and his Dominican monks followers were responsible for the deaths of up to 750,000 Jews, Serbian orthodox, gypsies and others in the area covering modern Croatia and Bosnia. His followers had a thing for slitting the throats of young children. Pope John Paul 2 started the process of making that nazi war criminal a saint. Joe Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict who wears dresses and red patent shoes, formerly of the Hitler Youth, is now finalizing the process of making a nazi war criminal a saint.

The allies choose not to try Stepianic at Nurnberg, as they did not want to embarrass the Vatican, instead having Tito take on the task. Tito had to deal with the Catholic Church setting up martyr committee’s in every country, forming campaigns stating that Stepianic was a prisoner of conscience, when in fact he was a genocidal murderer. He should have been hanged at Nurnberg along with the rest of the nazi’s. He was seen as a good Dominican as was Miroslav Filipović who was hanged in his friar’s robes.
Miroslav Filipović was a true Dominican friar, upholding its highest ethics. He slit the throats of young girls stating he and his followers were doing gods work. In doing so, he has proven there has been no change since Saint Cyril in how the Catholic Church operates.

The Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy, just like the modern day Catholic Church and the earlier Roman Empire, which they inherited. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet “Principles of the Ustaše Movement”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_clergy_involvement_with_the_Usta%C5%A1e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroslav_Filipovi%C4%87
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac

Over the next few centuries the cult of ultra male dominance slowly spread all over Europe. Mostly it was by the sword, not by consensual belief as most think.

The crusades were one example of how it spread. Most think the crusades only happened in the Middle East. There was a crusade to destroy the Saxon religion in Germany and Netherlands. Part of this was forced conversion to christianity and then execution. They then tried to crusade against Denmark but got beaten back. The crusade against the Slavs to christianise them was particularly violent.

When the Normans entered Ireland, most do not realise that the Normans considered all christians there to be heretic. The Pope at the time said that the Irish were heretic, due to some limited freedom of ideas.

After each crusade women had less rights and freedom of movement.

Now Rome is on a new crusade. The present Pope is calling for no rights for gays and transsexuals.

After all the dominance of the penis must be protected at all costs.

Posted in Christo-Fascism, Culture, History, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Religion, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Male Dominance and its origins in our present society

We Wanna Be Excommunicated or What’s a Girl Gotta Do to Get a Drink Around Here

February 4, 2010 — Suzan

My friend Andrea and I hate the Catholic Church in the manner that only some one raised in its oppressive clutches can.

We were involuntarily violated by having a ritual performed upon us in our infancy when we were too young to consent.

Ever since I have reached the age of reason and been confronted the contradiction of having been born transsexual, which is to say in the words of the Papal Bullshit, “intrinsically disordered” and I discovered the Epicurean Dilemma:

If god is omnipotent and permits evil, then god is malevolent

If god can not prevent evil then he is not omnipotent

Therefore if god is either malevolent or not omnipotent why consider him god?

Being born an abomination in the eyes of the Church raises serious doubts about the infallibility of this supposed god.  With choices like not even thinking about what you are born with and an eternity in some lake of fire its almost enough to make a girl wish her mother had aborted her.

Ooops… Abortion to is a mortal sin.  In fact it seems almost as though being born female is some what sinful in the eye of the Holy Roman Church of Pedophilia.

But be that as it may my parents sent my sissy transkid ass to catechism and had me kneel before the magic word sayer in order to participate in ritualized cannibalism eating a piece of bread that stuck to the roof of my mouth and because it had been transmogrified into the flesh of Jesus I wasn’t supposed to touch it with my tongue.

What a waste of several weeks of precious summer complete with the daily poundings by the bullies who took it upon themselves to punish me for what I was born.

By the time the final ritual I was forced to participate in rolled around, (confirmation) I was already a stone atheist and a full blown teen age transkid planning on getting a sex change operation.

I was expected to go through the magic ritual any way.

Now I know people get excommunicated and I haven’t believed in a god for over 45 years now.  No gods, No masters and all that but on several occasions when I have found myself in unpleasant proximity to one of these scam artists I have asked, “How do I get formally excommunicated?  I want to never ever on any level be associated with or claimed by the Catholic church.”

They all give me some sort of wishy washy answer that says they are sort of like the Mormons who baptize every person who dies into their cult.  But not one of them wants to tell me how to formally get a declaration of excommunication that I can proudly display.

So yesterday when my dear friend and frequent contributor to this blog wrote the following I basically laughed my ass off and thought I can’t publish this.  But then I thought.

Why the hell not?  After all what could they do?  Excommunicate us?  A girl can only hope…

By Andrea Brown

[spelling errors are deliberate]

Vedi, Veni, Reni, Recti, Peni, Penetrati-Rectum.

I ze Pope Ben-e-dick-i-rectum, RECTUMFUHRER of ze Holyiest Catholic church hereby issuze zis papal bull(shit).

Vi have consulted vit mein RECTUMFUHRER, Ze Cardinalz Himmler och Bormann at ze Reichstag here in Greater Berlin, now known as Rome.

Az of today, zis will be law for alt in ze United Kingdom.

Ve deal with ze Britisher degenerate pigdogs und undermensch, firsta. Den Vi vill hav ze Operation Barbarossa and deal vith ze Soviet menace und create ze living room for ze pure.

I RECTUMFUHRER Ben-E-Dick-i-Rectum declar zat ze degenerate homosexual and transsexual menace vil hav to report till ze nu Ghetto for de degenerates i Shetland Islands.

Tranzportation vil be provided to all degenerates till ze nu high living standard ghetto. All nu living quarters hav been superiorly designed by ze master race to giv appropiate living conditions til ze degenerates.

Du vill liv in ze Ghetto area. Du vil not be permitted to congregate vit normalt
people as du may cause ze extinction of alt humanity.

Alt ze Parishez vil pray away ze gayz.

Ze Uber Godz, Adolf Hitler vil lizten to ze prayerz av ze pure, praying awyz ze gayz.

Ze youngest and prettiest med ze tightest rectums, vill be selected for special treatment und hav special houzing and treatment. Zey vil be houzed in ze special parochial houses which vill serve as brothels for ze rightous and god fearing officers of ze church of ze master race.

Alt degenerates vil report to ze local priest, vare zu will submit to anal examination i de Anal Strazze examination suite i parochial howze. Zu degenerates vil den report til ze cattle truckz for immediate deportation to your nu life in efter du hav entered ze specialz showerz.

Vit regard to ze tranzzexual und transveztited degenerates, zey vill also be housed within ze ghetto immediately. Those degenerates vad vish till hav der genitalz removed vil report to Cardinal Mengle at his Eunuch research centre. Those who wish to dress as women may only do so in the confines of ze ghetto und vil submit zer rectums fir tightnez examination. Unholyz lack of tightnezz which vil reduce priest enjoyment, wil earn ze degenerate a ticket to jump zee queue til ze nu showerz, leading to ze better ghetto.

Az a church ve cannot allow ze homosexualz, tranzzexualz und transveztited degenerates til hav access to ourz mozt holy church, as ve have far too many as it is. Zer minority is to much i ze priesthood. Ze paedophiles feelz uncomfortable at ze rizing numbers of non-paedophiles, which is ze desgrazeful situation. Vi must increaze ze number of ze paedophiles, so az til maintain normality i ze holyz church.

If ve were to allow any homosexual i ze Catholic seminary, ze church would be in a sorry state. Ve hav rules, prozeedures and years of demented study before you can be accepted into our men’s club. They muzt be completed.

ZE VAGINA IZ EVIL, UND MUST BE DEZTROYED..

Also,the same applies to tranzzexual und transveztited degenerates. Ve cannot allowz just anyone to vear ze dress. It took me over 60 years before i could vear expensive dresses all the time. I prefer white, ze red really didn’t suit mine colouring, although i vas partial to brown shirtz when i vas younger.

If homosexual and tranzzexualz und transveztited people vant to enter ze church and achieve ze high office, well ze vill just have to do as ve all did. Seminary, college, study, vorking in poor parishes, looking after altar boys, raping them, singing Kumbaya vith ze childrens choir, condemning single mothers, ostracising openly homosexualz, etc.

Ze cannot expect just to walk in and take over…ze must follow ze code…no one muzt ever know zu are ein homosexual, transsexual or transveztit.

ZU VIL OBEY UND COMPLY.

Ze Holynezz

Pope Ben-e-dick-i-rectum, Rectumfuhrer Benedict (Jo Ratzinger)

Posted in Christo-Fascism, Existentialism, History, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Satire, Social Justice, Uncategorized. Comments Off on We Wanna Be Excommunicated or What’s a Girl Gotta Do to Get a Drink Around Here

Documents suggest Pope Pius XII more concerned about Soviets than Nazis

February 2, 2010 — Suzan

From the World Jewish Congress

02 February 2010

Two Italian researchers have found previously unknown correspondence about a meeting held in November 1944 between Pope Pius XII and the British ambassador to the Holy See, Francis D’Arcy Osborne. According to the papers, kept in the British National Archives in London, Osborne told the Catholic pontiff that the British government wanted him to issue a public appeal on behalf of the 400,000 Hungarian Jews who were being deported to the Nazi death camps at the time. However, Pius said that he was under pressure to condemn alleged abuses perpetrated by the Soviets against Catholic civilians in Poland and in the Baltic countries. Osborne reportedly told the pope that he had seen no evidence that the Russians had committed any such atrocities, and that even if they had, they could not be compared to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis.

Continue reading at:  http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/main/showNews/id/8862

Posted in Hate Crimes, History, International, Religion, Uncategorized. 1 Comment »

New Federal ‘Hate Crimes’ Law Challenged on Constitutional Grounds

February 2, 2010 — Suzan

[ As I have come to note “Family Values” is Christo-Fascist form of newspeak for Nazi values of hate and bigotry.

People need be aware that religion taken as a whole has never supported human rights or equality and that they constantly lie saying they have.

Never mind the fact that Christianity and Islam have brought some 2000 years of heinous religious wars. Lets take the last 500 years:

They supported the murder of “witches” with some respected historians saying the numbers murdered were in the millions.

They supported European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere that resulted in the genocide of millions of Native Peoples.

They supported the colonization of Africa and Asia.

They supported the slave trade, slavery and opposed the abolition of slavery in the US.

They opposed women’s suffrage, the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism.

Pope Pius XII supported Hitler,  Mussolini and Franco.

The same Christo-Fascists opposed to LGBT/T rights also opposed civil rights for African Americans and women’s rights, including but not limited to reproductive rights.

From CNSNews.com

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/60842

Tuesday, February 02, 2010
By Susan Jones, Senior Editor

(CNSNews.com) – A conservative civil liberties group is challenging the constitutionality of the recently enacted federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

The new law, attached to a defense authorization bill that President Obama signed on October 28, 2009, makes it a federal crime to attack someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center says it elevates people engaged in deviant sexual behaviors to a special, protected class of persons under federal law.

The lawsuit naming U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of three pastors and the president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

All of the plaintiffs “take a strong public stand against the homosexual agenda, which seeks to normalize disordered sexual behavior that is contrary to Biblical teaching,” the Law Center said in a news release.

“There is no legitimate law enforcement need for this federal law,’ said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center.

“This is part of the list of political payoffs to homosexual advocacy groups for support of Barack Obama in the last presidential election,” Thompson continued. “The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.  It elevates those persons who engage in deviant sexual behaviors, including pedophiles, to a special protected class of persons as a matter of federal law and policy.”

According to the Law Center, of the 1.38 million violent crimes in the U.S. reported by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered to be motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation.

The four plaintiffs are Michiagn Pastors Levon Yuille, Rene Ouellette, James Combs, and Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

The lawsuit alleges that the new law violates the plaintiffs’ rights to freedom of speech, expressive association, and free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, and it violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.  The lawsuit also alleges that Congress lacked authority to enact the legislation under the Tenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.

The lawsuit says the Hate Crimes Prevention Act “provides law enforcement with authorization and justification to conduct federal investigative and other federal law enforcement actions against Plaintiffs and others deemed to be opponents of homosexual activism, the homosexual lifestyle, and the homosexual agenda,” thereby expanding the jurisdiction of the FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies.

Robert Muise,  who is handling the case, said the new law promotes two Orwellian concepts: “It creates a special class of persons who are ‘more equal than others’ based on nothing more than deviant, sexual behavior.  And it creates ‘thought crimes’ by criminalizing certain ideas, beliefs, and opinions, and the involvement of such ideas, beliefs, and opinions in a crime will make it deserving of federal prosecution.”

He said it gives government officials the power “to decide which thoughts are criminal under federal law and which are not.”

The Thomas More Law Center describes its mission as defending and promoting “America’s Christian heritage and moral values, including the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life.”

Posted in Christo-Fascism, Hate Crimes, History, Religion, Social Justice, Uncategorized, Unequal Treatment. Comments Off on New Federal ‘Hate Crimes’ Law Challenged on Constitutional Grounds

Howard Zinn is Dead

January 30, 2010 — Suzan

I cried when I heard of Howard Zinn’s dying of a heart attack on Wednesday night.

I was going to write something on Thursday but I was called into work.

For a formal obituary I suggest The New York Times.

How our history is written shapes how we we think of ourselves in the present.  Here in Texas there is a major struggle in the State Board of Education regarding what is stressed and what is to be omitted from the history taught to the children of Texas.  The conservatives want to teach the importance of wealth and religion, the powerful white men while omitting the struggles for the abolition of slavery, racial equality and the rights of women.  Naturally the progressives are more inclined to include more of the history of the un-named people who struggled to make Texas and the nation a better place for people of color, women as well as LGBT/T folks.

In high school during the early 1960s, I was a history punk before I went to college and joined SDS.  I had a teacher who taught the text but who let me add information from works I read outside of school.  She even suggested I read certain books.

As a radical I saw how the new papers under counted those demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and over counted the few counter demonstrators, a practice that continues to this day with the most notorious recent examples being the huge over counting of the numbers of Tea Baggers vs the incredible under counting of the number of anti-war demonstrators at the protest in New York City prior to George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq.

I have seen how corporate media has distorted the views of feminists as well as the demands for equality on the part of LGBT/T people.

Before I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States 1492-Present I read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.   I don’t think I needed a book to tell me that something was rotten and that I was being programmed to forget what actually happened at some events I was  physically a part of.  I knew something was wrong when the official histories and media accounts of those events were so different from the events I was part of that I had to question if I were actually there.

Howard Zinn never gave in to the vast right wing media propaganda machine.  Even when it would have been easier and far more rewarding for him to do so.  Others on the left did and were rewarded handsomely with guaranteed best sellers and large grants from right wing foundations.  Some of these former progressives are almost convincing in their role as Judas Goats others are simply pathetic.

In the 1990s I read a fictional work by Felice Picano titled Like People in History which caused me to start thinking about all the events I had been a part of from the anti-war movement to the early days of DIY transsexual self help/support groups.

Later Jacob Hale introduced me to Susan Stryker, who collected an oral history from me which was in turn referenced by Joanne Meyerowitz in her book, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.

Eventually so many right wingers bad mouthed Zinn and Chomsky so harshly and often I felt I had to read them.

Because of Howard Zinn I came to realize how much real history is left out of the history they teach in schools, the history they want us to know because if we knew the real history of the common people then we might know that our present struggles are part of a long history of struggles against a wide assortment of oppressions.

What started for me with Susan Stryker collecting my oral history was magnified by Zinn into a recognition that so much of real history is found in memoirs rather than over arching historical texts emphasizing the actions of kings, presidents and generals.

My most recent memory of that importance was a staged reading of Voices of A People’s History on the History Channel.

History belongs to each and every one of us.  It becomes ours when we take a stand against oppression and speak truth to power.  I do not automatically dismiss our personal stories with a sneer of contempt as, “just another trannie biography” when as a whole they tell about who we are as a people far better than any work by any Ph.D. who studies us including Dr Benjamin, who some think we should rename transsexualism for.

But Dr. Benjamin had nothing to do with making us who we are or for that matter with the condition we were born with.  The power lies in the narrative we tell of our lives, the reclaiming of our own personal histories.

Howard Zinn and others have taught us that the stories of our lives count.

Posted in History, Social Justice, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Howard Zinn is Dead

Some recent history, and its mythical transformation

December 18, 2009 — Suzan
By Wayne Dyne

Reposted with permission.  Original post at:

http://dyneslines.blogspot.com/2009/12/some-recent-history-and-its-mythical.html

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

I am a survivor, and my involvement in the gay movement goes back a long ways. In fact it started at a time when the current obligatory designation of “GLBTQ” could scarcely be imagined. We called ourselves homophiles in those days.

I was living in Los Angeles in the 1950s when Mattachine, the first significant homophile advocacy group was formed. I had other concerns in those days; getting through college and laying the foundations for my academic career. After having attended a few meetings, I finally joined the New York branch of Mattachine in 1968. Like many of my contemporaries I was energized by the events at the Stonewall Inn a year later. Not long after, I was became active in the gay committee of the American Library Assocation, and then became a founding member of the Gay Academic Union.

After I shifted from activism to gay scholarship, I realized that the history of the American gay movement needed to be written. I knew that the belief (still common to this day) that everything started with Stonewall in 1969 was mistaken. Accordingly, I journeyed to Los Angeles, where a number of the leaders of the original movement, which started in 1950, were still active. I was lucky enough to speak at length with such key figures as Harry Hay, Jim Kepner, Dorr Legg, and Don Slater. Over the years I have maintained a friendship with Billy Glover, a key figure in the early years who is still going strong in his late seventies in Louisiana. Billy is a kind of living record of those brave years.

I then gathered some biographical pieces on the early leaders, turning them over to the late Vern Bullough, who shaped them into an essay collection, entitled Before Stonewall (2002). This book is now the standard reference for the period.

I won’t rehearse any further my credentials in this area. I mention them because they are relevant to what I am now going to relate.

A strange new myth has arisen about the origins of the gay movement. This myth, fervently endorsed by some trans activists, holds that the gay and lesbian movement was, essentially and pivotally, the work of their group, the transgender people. The transgender folk were in the vanguard, gay men and lesbians followed meekly after. This bizarre claim in the opposite of the truth.

First of all, the term “transgender” is an anachronism, and as such revealing of the present-minded agenda of those who brandish it. To be sure, Christine Jorgensen had made headlines with her Danish surgery in 1953. Jorgensen, and the very few individuals who followed her example at the time, had little interest in gay matters, because they believed that they had truly become women. Jorgensen dated men and regarded herself as heterosexual. The same was true of Reed (formerly Rita) Erickson, a wealthy oil tycoon who helped fund several social-change organizations.

Let us then be honest. If we are to speak of a “transgender” contribution we must restrict ourselves to drag queens. They were the only transgender folks around in those days. None of them in fact made a major contribution to the movement.

It is true that Harry Hay sometimes donned a string of pearls, but that was as far as it went in those days. Among the lesbian stalwarts in Daughters of Bilitis, my friend Barbara Gittings was known occasionally to pull out her corncob pipe. Most of the time, though, Barbara wore a dress (gasp!). The demonstrations she and Frank Kameny organized annually in Philadelphia were known for their sartorial conservatism: dresses and skirts for women, and coats and ties for men.

The female impersonator Jose Sarria of San Francisco, who came along a little later, was the only exception in those early days. Quite a few years later Beth Elliott, a Bay Area male-to-female post-op, made a splash. Unfortunately and tragically, Beth was soon run out of the lesbian movement, for not being born a woman. Transsexuals remain controversial in the lesbian movement.

In reality, the “transgender” contribution was negligible in the early gay and lesbian movement. We started the French Revolution, so to speak, without these individuals. The claim of current trans activists rests, as far as I can see, on the slight foundation of two events, the Compton Cafeteria episode in San Francisco and the much more famous Stonwall Inn riots in New York City. (I will return to Compton’s in a moment.)

As various accounts show, drag queens played a role in the Stonewall events–but only in the raucous aftermath OUTSIDE the bar. The actual patrons of the Stonewall Inn were for the most part gay men of middle-class origins (note Rivera’s testimony below). For the real facts, see the definitive account in David Carter’s 2004 monograph, Stonewall. Anyone who has not consulted this book does not know much about Stonewall. Some things just can’t be “winged.”

From the Greenwich Village event emerged a whole new cadre of leaders, who joined together to form the Gay Liberation Front. Not long after some of them seceded to create the Gay Activists Alliance. None of these leaders were in any way classifiable as transpeople.

There were, to be sure, two fringe individuals, the drag queens Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. While these two persons now enjoy iconic status among trans advocates, neither of them made a significant and lasting contribution to building the overall gay movement. They were pretty much doing their own thing. I knew both of them.

What then of the Compton Cafeteria event? One must step back a moment and realize that during the pre-Stonewall years confrontations with the police were routine. These stemmed from the vicious bar raids conducted by the men in blue. As a rule, one of two precipitating factors came into play: “cleanups” when an election was in the offing, and dissatisfaction on the part of the police that their payoffs (routine in those days) were insufficiently lucrative.

For the most part, the gay victims went quietly during these raids, resulting in a misdemeanor charge. These arrests could be career-ending, though. Doubtless this was one of the main reasons why the raids kept happening–to “keep the queers in line.”

In a few cases gays fought back. This was true, for example, of the Dewey’s restaurant raid in Philadelphia (1965), the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco (1966), the Black Cat raid in Los Angeles (1967), and the Donut shop event in Los Angeles (May 1969). Thus the Compton occurrence, now lauded to the skies by trans activists, was but one of a series. Compared to Stonewall, all these episodes were of merely local importance.

What happened at Compton’s Cafeteria so long ago? The riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. On the first night of the disturbance, the cafeteria management summoned the police when some drag-queen customers became obstreperous. When a police officer attempted to arrest one of the cross-dressers, the individual threw her coffee in his face. At that point the riot began, dishes and furniture flew in the air, and the restaurant’s plate-glass windows were smashed. Accounts of the event indicate that the rioting and subsequent picketing of the cafeteria were a joint effort of drag queens, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and lesbians. This occurrence was by no means a “transgender exclusive,” as it is often portrayed nowadays.

On this slender foundation–a San Francisco episode of purely local importance and the flare up of drag queens at Stonewall–today’s trans activists have built a whole elaborate myth. We are asked to revere a gaggle of crazy queens as heroic pioneers who were responsible for the foundation and progress of the gay movement. As I have shown, this contention is simply nonsense.

FOOTNOTE. Here is what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History: “The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time.” In fact, the night when the Stonewall riots began was the first time Rivera had ever even been to the bar, and then she only appeared outside the premises.

Posted in Gay Liberation, History, LGBT/T, Questioning Authority. Comments Off on Some recent history, and its mythical transformation

The Myth That Others Counseled Us To Be Totally Stealth

December 14, 2009 — Suzan

I was there in the early days, aware regarding transsexualism even as it was being discovered by the tabloids.

I was in the system when University research and Medical School training were part of being in “the program”

I saw Dr Benjamin as a patient and he wrote one of my surgery recommendations.

I went to the monthly rap groups at Stanford for a couple of years and co-ran the NTCU.

The doctors and counselors weren’t the ones telling us we should live absolutely stealth and they were not the ones recommending we make up an appropriate childhood.

They didn’t have to.

We weren’t stupid.  While we had gained knowledge of self because of the news and scandal created by people like Christine Jorgensen and April Ashley we could see the impact on both our ability to function in the world. How the notoriety meant that to be out would mean always being a freak.  It meant that “Transsexual” would become our new first name.

We weren’t aware of how many of us there were in those days.  Each of us had grown up thinking we were the only one.  When we discovered there were others like ourselves we found them in the underclass demimonde of the trannie/queen ghettos where the only way of life was that of being a sexual outlaw.

When some of us started living as women our very existence was illegal. As I have said we ironically describe our career choices as performer, hairdresser or sex worker.

All one had to do was look at the tabloid headlines.  Some things never change even today the news digests of Brenda Lana Smith and Stephanie Stevens all too often have the same bigoted nasty language, the pronoun abuse that the head lines have always had.

We weren’t stupid back then, indeed if someone who delayed coming out until middle age were to say to me, “I didn’t want a lifetime of being treated the way the women born transsexual I read about in the tabloids were treated…”  I would see that as a completely valid reason for not transitioning as a young person.

We didn’t need doctors or counselors to tell us that if we wanted a chance at escaping all the bullshit we had been put through as transkids, all the discrimination we had faced as pre-ops,  that stealth was a better option than wearing the label transsexual like a t-shirt slogan.

Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame.”  When there were a few hundred post-ops just the willingness to be out could get one a book contract for putting your face on a ghost written pulp.  By the 1970s when there were a few thousand of us or 15 minutes of fame had been devalued to the point of having a good story might  be worth a writer taking you to dinner.  If you were hot looking and fuckable.

So those of us who wanted to be just women, straight or lesbian looked at the situation and how little outness was worth and said “screw that shit”.  I want something more than working the sex ads.  Even if my dreams are only having a lover, an Ikea furnished place to live and a decent used car.  I want the life I can have if I keep my mouth shut.

Stealth equaled survival.

For many of us stealth was never absolute.  We kept our sister friends,  signed petitions.  Wrote and spoke and realized that those who really made the headlines tended to be the glamorous and the notorious.  Mostly though there were more and more of us and we sort of hit a critical mass where we were no longer one in ten thousand.  We might not be as common as gays and lesbians but it sometimes seems as though we are close.

And yeah we owe a debt of gratitude to those who were in the headlines.  Yet if we chose stealth (and that always tended to be more about controlling information than keeping an absolute secret) we were nonetheless brave enough to live our lives as post-SRS women and by simply doing that help make it easier for those who came after us.

Those who believe the myths without questioning them do us a disservice and dis-empower us by making the assumption that stealth was pushed upon us from above and wasn’t a way of survival we developed on our own.

In fact I sometimes think it is a bit insulting of those of us who were smart enough and crazy brave enough to be the first for people to think we had much of anything pushed on us from above.

Some of us started living as women in preparation for our operations at a time when it was illegal for us to dress in women’s clothes, when we had to teach the doctors about the right dosage of hormones to prescribe, when we couldn’t change our ID until after SRS.

We questioned authority, we gave authority the finger, we didn’t just submit to it.

Posted in History, Questioning Authority. 4 Comments »
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