I rarely discuss my personal history other than to put my ideas in context but this time I must somewhat break that rule. I grew up understanding myself to having a “female mind in a male body”, a conclusion I came to at the tender age I was able to formulate those concepts. As a result, I had my own personal feminist “awakening” around age nine, in 1958 at the dawn of second wave feminism. It came about watching my father’s attitude towards my mother’s attempt to leave him and what he said to me assuming I’d buy the patriarchal way of thinking since I was an apparent heir to it. It horrified me instead.

As it turned out, I discovered after I had transitioned that I had been born a true hermaphrodite and surgically assigned male at birth. The long and short of it all is I have been a lifelong feminist, one who understood herself most of my life as a transsexual woman. I grew up during the period of modern history that saw the most rigid enforcement of gender roles by design in American history, the fifties and early sixties.

So, while some feminists would question my own feminist credentials, in many ways they more solid than many modern feminists because I witnessed the entire birth and growth of second wave feminism, cheered on my own mother’s feminist awakening and empowerment and witnessed first hand feminism being turned into a “dirty word” with the rise of radical separatism that in essence, locked me out of a movement dear to my heart and has remained so.

My somewhat unique history, my very unusual childhood and a lifetime of trying to understand the concepts of gender and sex in relationship to my own life led me to a form of feminism akin to the European second wave variety as opposed to what became American second wave. In the model of second wave feminism most understand, gender is all social construct or at least mostly so. Something imposed by the patriarchy and opposed by “deconstructing” those “artificial” differences. The problem with this is my very life and being and those of women like myself give lie to this by our merely being. Gender roles are often socially imposed, gender itself is not or I would have never spent the better part of a lifetime trying to come to peace with it. I have often seen feminists speculate that in a “genderless society” if transsexual people would even exist. Now this might seem an interesting thought experiment if you are opposing patriarchal imposed gender roles and don’t understand or give much thought to what it means to have body and mind in conflict your entire life, but from my own point of view this is a meaningless question. It arises from religious based points of view that place humans apart from other mammals. One that insists, all the evidence to the contrary, that very real neurological as well as biological differences do not exist between the sexes. It is born also from knowing that those differences are misused by the patriarchy to oppress women. To many feminists these inborn neurological differences are something that absolutely must be denied and many had a knee jerk response to women of trans history (and often their own more traditional minded sisters and femmes) that by demonstrating these differences is somehow “anti-feminist”. Trans-feminist author, Julia Serano, touches on this in her writings with the idea of “scapegoating the feminine”.

What I am witnessing in various feminist blogs all around the internet bothers me considerably. There has been a rise in radical separatism I thought had mostly died out and it arose in response to the so called “Third Wave” feminism that seeks to erase gender by universal erasure of it. It has gone hand in hand with the rise of “transgender” as an umbrella to cover everyone from gay male drag queen, fetishist crossdresser, androgyne gender benders and more in-between gender identities than you can shake a stick at. But it doesn’t stop there, it claims also to cover women such as myself and intersexed people as well. Lately it is taking over feminism and womanhood as well by setting up two new categories: men and not men. Please note, women are not here other than a part of “not men” and this is precisely the sort of argument this new breed of gender deconstructing “transgenders” are using to essentially take over feminism. It is being done in the name of “inclusion” and “creating a big tent” opposition to patriarchy but what it actually does is cut out women identified women in precisely the same manner that the take over of feminism in the seventies by radical lesbian separatists made feminism a dirty word to heteronormal women.

The concept is appealing on it’s face…..everyone oppressed by the patriarchy banding together to oppose it but it comes at the cost of core identity, the inborn strengths of womanhood and the values that go with it and very very real dangers in terms of a rebirth of denial of essential differences that set back women’s medicine once before by serving to oppress research into those differences which have proved critical towards understanding the very real physiological and neurological differences between men and women that effect everything from drug effectiveness to differences in symptomology from everything to heart attacks and strokes to various mental disorders. How do I know this?…….ten years plus experience with the “transgender” community and their doing exactly this to the actual women they claim to represent, women such as myself, fully woman identified, body corrected, neurologically female as opposed to male. We are silenced, insulted in the traditional patriarchal fashions and our identities are co-oped. We are denied an active voice or place at the table. And those who do this have moved on to the third wave feminist blogs and are starting to co-oped the intersexed as well. Alliances are good things, banding together in common cause is a good thing but it comes to bad if individual groups identities are sacrificed in the process.

My own postings on Feministe and Feministing would not be welcome despite a lifetime of feminist and activist credentials because I would dare to speak truth to those who claim to represent “trans women” there but elsewhere are clear they are male identified crossdressers and drag queens.

These people only claim womanhood when they wish to dictate to women. When you define the world in terms of men as in men and not men, women are essentially erased. They erased us, you third wave feminists are next…….fair warning.