Why You Can Count Me Out of the Tranny Nonsense

As I have tried in the past, I’ve refocused this blog towards Feminist issues. I’ve been criticized for that by some HBS advocates and Feminism itself attacked in the process.

Feminism isn’t something new to me. I’ve been a long time member of NOW, most of my historical research relates to the time before the rise of the patriarchy and the ancient role of women in spirituality, politics and daily lives. I live what I write about. I founded the Maetreum of Cybele, a Goddess tradition of the ancient Mystery Schools, as near as I can tell, the original one in fact. I live at the modern Phrygianum, or Goddess oriented “convent” that was started by myself and three others. We have a three + acre site with a 150 year old former Catskill Mountain Inn on the property.

My day to day activities revolve around restoring our property and Goddess Spirituality. When not online, I’m probably cutting grass, planting gardens, restoring 150 year old plaster walls or similar activities. It is a place of sanctuary, safety and renewal for spiritual women. One of our projects is establishing a late 19′th century telegraph office in our home. This is probably one of two fully functioning such offices in the world today for we have learned that even various museum projects haven’t gone as far as we have. This project is called the Women in 19′th Century Technology Project, you might be hearing more about it in the future. Oh, by the way, that other office is ours as well near Erie Penn. This was started because telegraphy was the breakthrough technology for women and dominated by them, a little known fact. Some of the most famous suffragettes were telegraph operators such as the infamous Alice Paul.

When you enter the main hallway of our Phrygianum, you enter the late 19′th, early 20′th century from a woman’s point of view. On the walls are Suffragette posters, a telegraph alarm bell and a crank wall phone.

We do all our work on an absolute shoestring budget.

My primary “activism” these days is centred around minority religious freedom. As a woman centric, Goddess minority religion we have been fighting a three year battle with our county and town for the restoration of our property tax exemption that they continue to illegally deny us. They do this in violation of Federal and State law for we are a 501 C3 religious charitable organization recognized as such by the IRS and the State of New York and incorporated under the Religious Corporation laws of New York. This is the focus of my activism these days, not tranny rights, not repeal of DOMA or DADT. Shots at my religion from a christian point of view are triggers for me these days since minority religious freedom rights of Pagans is also a battle I’ve been part of for many decades and one that is impacting my day to day life right now.

I will never understand the tranny need to confront any random bigot on issues of womanhood. I am a woman, some random rad-fem extremist or religious bigot cannot change that, I’m secure in it the same as any other woman is. Frankly I have my own doubts of the sincerity of belief in personal womanhood of those who feel the need to confront the Lisa Vogels and Germaine Greers constantly. Their opinions of my womanhood have zero effect on it…..because although it might not be a very conventional woman’s life, it is one nonetheless. And in the end I don’t give a flying fig about some TG or HBSers opinion because I’m far too busy living that life.

If you read this and have any interest in our projects, Religion or just helping us out with a donation you can visit  our website and use the donation button at the top of the first page.

In the meantime……I’m out of the tranny nonesense business. I’ve clearly stated over and over how I feel about it here on this blog.  If you want to know a bit more about me personally, I maintain another blog for those personal stories, although almost no one apparently reads it other than my facebook friends.

 

Racism, Classism and Feminism by Maura Hennessey

Feminism in America was from its inception permeated with classism and racism. Sojourner Truth’s entreaty “Ain’t I a Woman” was a plaintive cry out to a movement that had by and large overlooked women of colour, immigrant women and women trapped in sweatshops. The working poor and the unemployed poor, unwed mothers, widows not only had no place at the table in 19th century American feminism but were covertly and frequently overtly excluded from not only the benefits of the “sisterhood” but also from the “sisterhood” itself.

The”sisterhood” of the 19th century, those women of privilege brought into being a style of feminism that narcissistically mirrored the privileged places in American society that they occupied. Often the wives of prominent man, their feminism was aimed at attaining the privileges held by their white Anglo-Saxon Protestant husbands. But, in addition to already possessing many of the social privileges of their husbands, they tragically reflected the prejudices of the narrow segment of community that brought them forth.

Successive waves of American feminism were built upon the bedrock`of this classist and racist movement. Overt hostility gave way to arrogant neglect. From its inception, the stratified hierarchy of American feminism, motivated by an arrogant sense of noblesse oblige functioned in loco parentis, that is seemingly with the powers of a parent over the agenda of women, whose issues and lives they were wholly out of touch with and made no effort to understand except in terms of their own culture and experience. The faces remained largely Caucasian; the issues remained largely upper middle class. At a time that women of color, immigrant women and single mothers were struggling for survival, mainstream feminism continued to be preoccupied with breaking the glass ceilings, pay equality for executives and reproductive rights. With HIV sweeping through women of color, American feminism politely ignored growing epidemic.

There have been repeated demands and pleas for change; the shortcomings of the feminist movement had been pointed out not only by the Right, which delights in doing so but also by the left, whose diverse spectrum is barely represented at all in the leadership of the feminist movement.

The structure of the movement is hierarchical and therefore vertical. Its goals have been defined from the time of its inception through the modern era by a leadership that in a very real sense rules sometimes more, and sometimes less benevolently over the image, demands, and agenda that it presents to the world on behalf of a majority of women far different than itself

Spanish feminism, as opposed to this, developed as a popular and populist movement of women living with nearly feudal oppression, dispossession and disadvantage. Closely tied with it were the first women attending universities in the country in many instances. It was philosophically allied with humanism, socialism and even anarchism.

As a horizontal rather than a vertical structure, as a populist rather than an elitist movement and based on a fundamental premise of mutual support and improving the welfare of all women as opposed to attaining privileges associated with empowered white males for a select few, Spanish feminism or horizontal feminism is more egalitarian and inclusive with a heavy emphasis upon nurturing support in assisting and uplifting an entire sisterhood with close attention to the individual needs of daily life as opposed to abstract ideals and privilege.

The issues of race inequality have to be addressed for horizontal feminism to truly function; women have the obligation be cognizant of and lend themselves to the improvement of the condition of their sisters as part of the improvement of the condition of women as a whole. Healthcare, child care, safety from assault, employment equality all become issues for the entire movement. The agenda is generated from the far reaches of the community through the center to the opposite side, permeating the whole with a co-responsibility for human welfare

There is one defining feature of the group, the divine feminine, esprit feminine or woman’s spirit. To truly function, to truly reflect the nature of women as a whole, the group must be inclusive, must be diverse and must reflect both empathy and advocacy for the entire membership.

It is time to finally part with the fatally flawed structure that has been the model of American feminism and embrace a different, inclusive, co-responsible model, horizontal feminism too and the racial and class distinctions that poison the well of women’s rights

 

“The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play”

That was the final line made by the computer in the 1991 cult classic movie, “War Games”. Multiple levels of meaning are expressed in that phrase for myself right now. I’m turning my back and walking away from all things trans anything because I finally learned this lesson. My history is there but I no longer will let it or others use it to define me. And in that process I took a wider view of my own life and what I have devoted the rest of my life towards and realize it applies there as well. This is why horizontal feminism which in my own mind is nothing more or less than furthering the re-awakening in the world of Goddess Consciousness.

Goddess Consciousness has also been expressed in the idea of Gaia Ecology, Mother Nature. It is quite simply a belief in the interconnectivity of all of us and a rejection of the belief that mankind is the ultimate expression of the universe who can rape, pillage and plunder all resources at will and without cost.

Ultimately the failure of American Feminism to appeal to the majority of women has been that it “played the game”…and that only can take you so far when the deck has been stacked against you from the beginning. Despite having gained the vote, women still make 23-25% less than a man for the exact same work. The control of a woman’s own body is still a battleground. Roe v Wade is still in constant danger, contraceptives are still being withheld, the ERA never passed. We’ve played the game and gone as far as we can that way. Time to change the entire way we’ve defined our position and stop asking for “rights” within a hierarchy that in the end is nothing more than jockeying for position within that hierarchy and just toss those hierarchies out the window in our own lives altogether.

I’ll be writing in the future on the history of women from a political viewpoint and the demonization of cooperative efforts by the Patriarchy as expressions of the ultimate evil, socialism and what that implies as an answer to healing the world and ourselves as women. Hopefully I will be pointing the way to a new model of Feminism that simply refuses to play games that actually empower our continued enslavement. I invite others who wish to explore this in blog form to add their voices. These ideas are not new. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde is a title of an essay that speaks to this, not just a quote. Read it……add what you know is true, that vertical organizational models are hierarchies and tools of the patriarchy.

I’ve changed the subtitle of this blog to reflect the new direction but actually this is merely my taking the work I do in my daily life to a wider meaning in my writing as well.

If you are now coming here for future discussions on trans anything, I’m afraid you will be disappointed. When I first transitioned I was shunned by the local “transsexual community”, after years of trans activism, considerable effort was made by some to make sure I never was credited or mentioned. Now some of the sisters of transsexual purity wish my name never mentioned again. While all this was done to hurt, it was and is a great gift.

My positions on women and trans remain the same as always: If you are a woman, be one. If you come to women’s space as anything other than a woman, you don’t belong. If you seek women’s space as a form of validation of your womanhood, you are not a woman and should examine why you need that validation for you thus came to take, not share. At any rate, I won’t play in that playground any longer.

 

Guest Post: Greer and Raymond: re-examined in different light by Maura Hennessey

By way of introduction I will reveal that Maura Hennessey, Irish lesbian activist extraordinaire, has visited our home in the Catskills and along with a board member of HRC we shared an evening of spirited and delightful debate on feminism past and present. Her “friend of operative history” is a mutual one.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was an epoch of foolishness; it was an age of wisdom…”

In short, it was the 1970’s. A brash, angry and outspoken woman named Greer was caught up in and in fact one of the public faces of the feminist movement in the British Commonwealth. In Boston, a young graduate student was working upon expanding the ideas of her doctoral supervisor and rumoured lover. Her work on gender and feminism would be perceived as largely theoretically sound to a point, making a sudden leap to come to a conclusion nearly inconsistent with the first few chapters of her work. Her name was Janice Raymond.

“To understand what came after, it is important to know what came before.” In this case, it is important to understand the milieu in which both of these women arrived at the conclusions that are forever associated with their names.

Feminism arrived with not so much a trumpet blare as a cannon blast. Partly it was fueled by the availability of contraception, which meant that “good girls could…and did” and partly it was a reaction to the sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years . The sexual revolution was on and with it a rapid and vertigo-inducing shift in ideas about women, women’s roles, women’s rights.

Donna Reed and June Cleaver were replaced by Angela Davis and Bernadine Dohrn(or Bernadette Devlin, if you were overseas). The stereotyped conservative, deferential housewife was exposed as a mockery of women, contrived to encourage a TV-opiated television audience to accept and to accomodate the dominance of men

Roles and stereotypes were ripped away, derided and condemned as what they were, sociological chains wrapped around women to keep them in their places serving comfortable a patriarchy deluding itself that it was exercising noblesse oblige in caring for their servant-wives and servant-daughters.

Into this age, this milieu and this sociological revolution came the higher awareness of transsexuality. The public began to hear of cases more frequently. These women now in the public eye were conventional in speech, in behaviour, in belief and in behaviour with perhaps the exception of Dr Richards. They were by and large heterosexual and socially conservative. Much as women of the fifties were shaped by the social constructs of men, the presentation of trans-women of the 1970’s was as well. Donna Reed and June Cleaver had returned, only now they emerged from the operating room. The culprit was the standards used for operative selection, permitting only women attracted to macho men, demure, feminine, attracted to frilly things. Man had become God and created woman in the image of his own fantasies and his own misogynistic desire for dominance. Man wrote the criteria for the surgery, insuring only women from the fifties languishing in the 1970’s could achieve their goal of mind-body agreement.

New women were coming into existence, it seemed, garnering public attention, and these new women were caracitures of the goals of women radicals, the antithesis of the feminist desire to shatter glass ceilings and glass walls, to end the control of men over their reproduction and thier bodies. The new women would in the end use conservative ideals, conservative life choices, and conventionalism to survive “in a man’s world.” By and large they are not to be blamed, this was the price of surgery and men had written the rules.

To women like Raymond and Greer, it seemed as if the Stepford Wives had arrived upon the scene. Worse, they seemed to have equal media access to send a decidedly anti-feminist image in nations where women were struggling for independence of men and equality to men. The anger and rage towards the men who had created post surgical Mrs. Cleavers spilled out in poisonous draughts upon their creations, whether or not they were truly ‘caricatures.’ An entire class of women was condemned in a fashion just as separatist, just as elitist and just as noxious as that of the men who Greer and Raymond were declaring their separate identity from.

Raymond and Greer condemned an entire group when their anger was at the man made social image of women carefully selected and crafted by male medical professionals. Over time, women freed themselves of the expectations of men and trans-women found medical professionals who would do likewise…

But ….the Stepford Wives, the ‘Desparate Corrected Housewives,’ these are still with us. Anti-feminist, conservative, demanding purity in their ranks, we know them by various names. Embracing a conventionality of the 1950’s, defining their group as heterosexual, frequently anti Lesbian their socialisation as women seems to be out of 1950’s and early 1960’s television; one wonders if they would appear in black and white or in colour were you to meet them.

I remark upon the socialisation because for the past 40 years women have had, unless living in a polygamous Mormon compound or a fundamentalist enclave, broader views of roles women can play, women’s sexuality and even women’s spirituality than is to be found amongst the heirs of Greer’s and Raymond’s targets. Worse, they choose, out of some desire for separatism and ‘legitamacy’ the lives, beliefs and roles of the trans-women of decades ago who had no choice but to be what their masters in the medical establishment meant them to be or they would never see the inside of an operating room.

They condemn Lesbians, they condemn radicalism, they condemn women’s spirituality which even Girl Scouts are exposed to and either overtly or covertly participate in. Though overinclusive, there remains a truth to Greer’s condemnation, though she points it in the wrong place.

There are caricatures, but in limited numbers, clinging to conventionality, defining others out of their cohort, roundly condemning women’s radicalism of spirit, spirituality, politics or sexuality. They are not amongst us, for they desire separateness of identity while claiming at the same time the title of women. While a conventionalised and more reactionary Greer points in one direction, the true anti-feminist caricature is to be found in the opposite.

 

Self Image- Self Acceptance- Self Esteem Part I

As often happens these days, something I read inspired me to write. This time it was an autobiographical piece by Calpernia Addams. What caught my attention was the opening:
“Transition is never perfect, never easy and never finished. But it does get better, it does easier and it does recede into the background as time goes by.”

My problem with this is that it makes statements from a position of authority, Calpernia after all has a lot of “creds” with trans people, that I find not only not to be true, but potentially downright counter to the development of something essential to a successful transition, a decent sense of self esteem.

Almost all women struggle with the beauty trap, the tying of worth of womanhood to appearance , the feeling we’ll never quite be attractive enough no matter how attractive we may or may not be. It was a major feminist issue throughout all the various “waves”. We are too fat, too thin, our thighs are too thick, our nose too big, our breasts not perky enough or too small or too big. Our hips too wide…..you get the picture and if you are female, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have a transsexual or intersexed history this is further complicated by feeling you will never be female enough, pre-transitioned, that you will never “pass”, that people are laughing at you behind your back. I can tell you from direct observation, the most flawless feminine have the exact same fears. And it is needless most of the time.

By telling women pre transition that it is never perfect, easy or finished Calpernia is doing a major disservice to them. I know we are supposed to warn those coming after us not to pursue this unless you have to and scare off those who should give it more thought, but really, she contradicts herself as well with the whole do it young advise that follows. And as for never finished? Don’t get me wrong, I think Callie and I would become great friends if we were to meet, but someone who’s life is being transsexual is hardly the one to address a “full” transition to womanhood. And it does finish for many, maybe most of us. And it isn’t always hard even if it looks that way to those outside. As for “perfect”…..what in life is?

So time for me to drag out some personal stories to illustrate. I was never going to be a beauty queen, even if I’d transitioned young. I have broad shoulders, large hands and overweight with a large frame. But I had one thing going for me, I always saw myself as female. I even had a morning ritual pre-transition to allow me to “pass” as male. Each morning I stood in front of a mirror and put on a Greek fishing cap as a symbol of putting on “male” for the world that day. Weird eh? Trust me, there is absolutely nothing approaching normal when you are mostly an act to the rest of the world. I grew a beard to provide an unmistakable “male” trigger for the world to see. When I had to see “me” in the mirror when I had the beard, I’d cover the beard with a cloth and the eyes looking back were a woman’s….always. I was also married and had been forced into a promise to keep my “gender weirdness”, as my ex called it, from out daughter when she was born. That is the one major regret of my life, that I made and kept that promise.

The summer between my daughter’s junior and senior year of high school she attended Band Camp and my ex went along as a helper. And I shaved off my beard… and that changed everything. In retrospect, and I am a very introspective person by nature who tries to understand all my own inner motivations and own them, I had apparently come to rely totally on the beard to provide the maleness, let my actual nature free except for saying it out loud and from the time it was gone I never again reliably passed as male regardless of how I was dressed, how “macho” the activity I was engaged in, no matter how aggressively male I tried to be.

And that scared the living crap out me.

This was my big secret, the one thing I could never ever ever let the world see or know about and perfect strangers were seeing me as female, seeing right to my soul….. And even though I had a strong feminist sensibility, even though I emulated the strong women in our family and admired them, for all that I also internalized all those “women as less than” messages I’d received my entire life mixed with the “man in a dress” is the height of absurd humour. So like almost every woman like me I was terrified to dress as the world was already seeing me, female. In that respect pre-transition was not easy. What changed that was exposure to transwomen but not in the fashion you’d think. I started to attend “support meetings” for a trans group and early on one of the “transsexuals” took me under her wing and gave me a list of 50 things women never do. I read it, thought it was joke and laughed. She was very offended at my reaction. You see there wasn’t a single item on that list I didn’t know some woman who did several of them. Right then and there I decided that if I wasn’t insane and really was a woman, then what I did was what women did. A major shift in perception. From that point on “transition” itself was nothing, nothing at all. Oh, I knew I was likely to lose family, friends, career etc. but that wasn’t transition, that wasn’t the shift. I lost all those things and I suppose that made my transition look very difficult to others. But I gained myself Once I owned my own womanhood all the shame went with it. But I seemed to be unique in that.

So I owned my own womanhood. The self acceptance was something else. As a life long Pagan and someone who cherished Crones I had little trouble accepting myself as past the glamour girl nonsense and only had mild regrets I would never be “beautiful” knowing the majority of women my age had dealt with exactly the same issues. I have been blessed or cursed, depending on your viewpoint, to see the world pretty much as it is. I suppose my own self image as female my entire life kept me from developing blinders as to exactly how much variation there is among women in form, I saw a woman when I looked in the mirror. Maybe not a pretty one, but a woman. And I noticed that others in my situation didn’t. It is hard enough for any woman to throw off the beauty trap so I guess it should be no surprise it’s even harder for someone who saw themselves as a male to do so and I wish I knew how to tell those about to transition how to do what I did because I believe that is at the heart of transition and that it has almost nothing to do with clothes, mannerisms, voice etc. All those things help but the simple truth is, the world takes it cues on how to see us by what we reflect from within ourselves.

If you never socialize with other women, you won’t know how. If you insist on seeing a man in the mirror, that’s what others will see. If you put qualifiers on your womanhood, so will the world.

If you truly see yourself as a woman, accept you are the woman you are and that’s good enough, if you can do that then transition is easy, it’s as close to perfect as anyone gets and it most certainly has a finish.

Calpernia is wrong on this.

I have a lot more to say on all this so eventually there will be a part 2

 

Dear Congress-Critters, Please Drop the Gender from ENDA

Yes, I’m dead serious here. It’s long past time for some serious Congressional re-education efforts.

Just like Faux News, the TG activists seem to pass back and forth coordinated “talking points” when it comes to the objections by post corrected women to their colonization of our lives and identities. The latest one is “your numbers are so tiny you have to join us”. Let’s dissect this one and see what lies underneath it, shall we?

The biggie first. In order to make the claim that post corrected women’s numbers are tiny, one first has to separate us from the class “woman”, which last time I checked was 1/2 of the population of the world. Anyone surprised I have a serious problem with this? Transgendered activists have zero problem with this because they never saw us as women in the first place. If they did, they would be forced to deal with their own, extremely misogynistic treatment of us. You know, things like insults to our corrected body parts using the most graphically insulting terms possible? Telling us we’ll never be real women because of our genetics and our birth genitals  (a real hoot in my case).

What hurts however, is when these arguments are used unthinkingly by those who should be with us. Dr. Jillan Weiss for example. On a current Bilerico thread she replied to me with the following:

“This is not something that can be cured by demanding apartheid between transgender and transsexual people. In addition, the numbers of those who have surgery and are politically active are so small that it would be impossible to get any political leverage by ourselves. I respect your opinion that there is an important difference between transgender and transsexual people. However, I don’t think there are enough people of your opinion to win any political leverage.”

Let’s examine this. First is the underlying assumption of non-womanhood indicated by the references to small numbers and not enough people of “my” opinion to win any political leverage. The not enough people of my opinion is also quite interesting and contrary to all my personal experiences. Outside of genderland, most people have almost no problem at all understanding classic transsexuality. It’s an easily grasped concept that has no conflict with 99% of the worlds idea of gender, just a minor variation on it simple enough even Islamic clerics and religious bigots like Pat Robertson can “get it”, and did. When I lobbyed Congress in the past I could explain the concept to conservative Republicans in rather short order and have them on our side. This is the simple fact transgenders live in absolute terror of because they know it’s true and that’s why they go to the extremes they do to keep us from public sight. The simple fact is, my day to day life gives absolute lie to the idea I’m not considered a woman by the greater world.

The next problem with Dr. Weiss’ statement is the small number politically active part. That’s got a hidden gotcha too. It assumes we are not political active. Bad assumption. Many of us are active in the greater women’s movement and some in the greater lesbian movement. We do not get involved in the transgender movement because they do not see us as women and require us to renounce our womanhood to a third gender. Not to mention forced association with transvestic fetishism, because that is where their “greater numbers” lie. Why on earth would any woman with an ounce of self respect do this?

Most telling to me of all is here we have a lawyer, a trans-activist gathering as many disciples as she can and claims ten years of active research into gender issues……and she is totally clueless about the ERA! She had no idea it is re-introduced every year and has been since 1923. I would not necessarily expect the average woman to be aware of this because the media largely ignores it, but anyone claiming to be a political activist in gender has no excuse here. Pass the ERA and post corrected women, pre-corrected women, all actual women are given full employment rights without the exceptions that riddle ENDA plus full public accommodations, housing, you name it. The whole Magilla. And numbers?, I’m a woman, part of 1/2 of the human race. That’s a hellva lot more “numbers” than the 5% that is the gays.

Now personally, I don’t think anyone should be discriminated against for any non job related issue, but I do draw the line at “civil rights” to play dress up at work for sexual kicks and people with penises demanding the right to invade places of female nudity. I suspect those who share my opinions here number in the millions, not some tiny number with zero political leverage.

So Mr. and Ms. Congress-critters, forget the genda in ENDA and work to pass the ERA if you are serious about civil rights.

 

Just How Stupid is the Average American?

The current “debates” about health care legislation boggle the mind.

The facts are pretty damn clear if you have just a couple of firing neurons left in your skull.

The insurance companies bought most of the legislators. They are the ones right now denying needed health care to sick people. They are the one’s effectively “pulling the plug” on chronically ill people and they absolutely are already dictating to your health care provider what services they are allowed to give you. Ask your doctor, he’ll tell you straight out. It’s the insurance company’s call on what care you get, not his or hers. Right now.

Forcing universal enrollment without a “public option” is basically handing the insurance industry a license to steal. They’ll not only continue to call all the medical shots but also be free to raise the level of costs so damn high 1/2 the country will be forced into bankruptcy for any major illness and it will be enforced by law! If this doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you are brain dead.

If you think the insurance and drug companies are fighting hard now, watch what happens if they get “reform” that excludes a separate government run program as an option (the public option they are fighting tooth and nail) and anyone even suggests regulation on policy prices! HMOs have been killing Americans for profit for almost forty years now thanks largely to Nixon and Kissinger. They changed the entire way medicine is practiced in the US and gradually removed all medical decisions from the doctors and transferred it to non-medical bean counters who put pricetags on human life. Who in their right mind would buy that changing this isn’t an improvement? Who in their right mind would claim that this will happen when it long ago happened already?

This is Karl Rove tactics on steroids.

Write your congress-critters, tell them in no uncertain terms that healthcare reform minus a choice to opt out of the corporate insurance dictators is absolutely unacceptable and you will be watching how they vote on this and remember it.

This is literally life and death stuff. No public option means no actual health care for most. Socialized medicine scares you so much you are willing to buy corporate fascist medicine? If so you are an idiot, there simply is no nice way to put this.

Still don’t believe me? Then consider this, coming from someone who worked in nursing for years. The average nursing assistant, those women who do 90% of direct patient care, are paid poverty level wages and have NO, NADA, ZIP health insurance themselves. And you think these Med Inc. companies give a damn about you? Guess again.

 

Being Oppressed this Morning

Yes, this morning I suffered oppression.

My cat insisted on waking me up when I wanted to sleep in.  Now several years ago I would have attributed this to his just being a cat but now I understand this is cis-specied, sexist, feline privileged, cis-sexual and cis-gendered oppression.  He arrogantly placed his feline privileged desires to force me up so I would fed him ahead of my need to sleep in because I was up half the night.  That’s right, this oppressor actually placed his needs ahead of mine and placed me under the iron paws of feline oppression, literally, to enforce his will!  He yelled in my face!  Not once but several times! He’s a black cat too so some sort of reverse racism mixed with sexism clearly might be involved, my being a white female and all.

Come to think of it, I have been under the iron paws of my oppressor companion animals my entire life!  Not to mention that arrogant SOB squirrel eying me from the front porch while I’m in my nightgown.  Damn! now I have to contend with peeping rodents too!

Oh wait, here he comes with his feline privileged, cis-specied, sexist demands again……..

Awwwwwwww, he just wanted to nuzzle me and get a skritch and my first cup of coffee is changing my perspective a bit. He’s a cat alright and a darn smart one who would be a tool user if he had an opposable dew claw, but he doesn’t and he cannot open the cupboard door easily himself or open the can.

Someone remind me never to read that oppression Olympics stuff in the middle of the night ever again, PLEASE!

 

“Transgender” as Defamation, Speaking Truth to Trannys

In the past couple of days a brand spanking new guy showed up on Bilerico to educate all us poor dumb broads about transness. Naturally this arrogant bastard isn’t trans anything and he even claims to be straight begging the question exactly why is he blogging on a gay male oriented blog in the first place and what possible interest could he have in “saving private parts….er trannys”?

The conversation was interesting to say the least. As part of the conversation I dragged up some of the things that transgender people have done to me personally over the years for daring to speak my truth and came to the realization they are terrorists in the exact meaning of the word. Not misguided, not misunderstood….terrorists that used terrorist tactics on me for more than a decade for the specific purpose of keeping me from speaking those truths and others like me speaking up.

Consider this an extension of Ten Lies About Transsexuality.

Bare ass facts: Classic transsexuality is a medical condition, specifically a neurological natal one that causes an individual to be born with a central nervous system opposite the apparent birth sex. What it is not is an “identity”. Woman is an identity, man is an identity, gay or lesbian is a sub-set identity. Trans anything is an identity. Transgender, specifically is a sex identity, one in opposition to either male or female. It is this that sets apart those born with a birth condition, a medical condition and those who claim a separate sexual identity. Now I suppose it’s entirely possible to be born with classic transsexuality and go for the third gender option, but like so called “normborns” that would be a rather small percentage of the time.

So, think I’m full of it? Language choice often reflects the inner psychological landscape and in the past couple of years the buzz words among transgender identified people are cis-woman, cis-man, cis-gender and cis-sexual. All these words were coined for one specific reason, to other those with transgender identities from those comfortable with sex, gender and being a man or being a woman. Other, third, different. And the trannys lapped up these words, embraced them with a speed I’ve never witnessed in a long lifetime before for new terminology which usually takes years and years to reach this level of usage. And use them they do…as weapons.

All this reveals very clearly the identity nature of “transgender”. The other nature of it as an identity to woman or man because otherwise the words cis-woman and cis-man would not be needed at all, or at least not used to set up an oppression category. This is Butlerianism gone wild (video anyone?)

Perhaps it now becomes clearer that placing people, against their express personal identities, into this transgender identity for whatever reason is essentially defamation? Call a transgender “woman” a man and they literally go ballistic. Anatomy doesn’t matter, clothing does!…or personal ‘mood’! (if you are new to transworld this must seem insane to you, trust me, it does to me too.)

Ok, try this one then. You are born with a medical condition, you get it fixed. At no time are you unsure if you are male or female, just you have an anatomy problem you finally get settled and wish nothing more than to now get on with your life. Your identity regarding sex (category) and gender identity (sense of yourself as male or female) is a settled issue. Along comes a group that tells you in no uncertain terms you don’t get to be a woman or man..you are what they say you are, this third category “transgender”. Hun? Where the hell do they get off with this is probably going to be your reaction. But wait, it gets worse. They don’t just tell you this, they actively promote this idea in the larger world, try to get it enshrined in law, do get it somewhat enshrined by intimidation into language definitions! Tell people it is defaming to not call you that and get a larger group (GLAAD) to actually back them up on this who exerts social pressure to enforce it!

That, my dear, is defamation. A textbook example of it. Now complain about this, try to tell others it’s wrong and it’s enforced with active terrorist tactics like trying to disrupt your ability to earn a living, communications with others and in extreme cases such as happened to me, credible death threats, turned into Homeland Security as a terrorist, magazine bombed for two years with subscriptions to hundreds of magazines you didn’t want, and finally ending with an open attempt to leave you homeless by driving you from y9ur home with constant, 24/7 verbal and physical abuse! That is terrorism. Doing these things to an individual doesn’t reach the level of terrorism but doing these things to make damn sure a message is sent to others does.

And if you still don’t get why I’m pissed beyond belief about this, consider one last thing. The public at large only has a few images of what “transgender” is. Stu Rassmusen, the “transgendered” mayor who tells everyone he is a man who wears dresses, is transgendered and has obscene sized breast implants. The “pregnant man”, Thomas Beatty. A major freakshow all over the media for months who promotes the idea tranny trumps genitals, “she-males” in tranny porn and Ru Paul the drag queen……and you still think as a corrected and now normal woman comparing you to these people isn’t defamation?

Sign the petition, please!

 

Transsexual Mirror Effect

This is an essay I wrote six years ago that appears on the essay section of my “personal” webpage. Given some of the articles written by transgenders, transhumanists and others, it seems appropriate to re-print it here.

Transsexual women frequently find themselves at odds with a wide spectrum of diverse groups. Why is this? Radical feminists label us “agents of the patriarchy”, the wider transgender movement often labels us “elitist snobs”, society sees us as hell-bent on deconstructing gender norms and the Catholic church recently has officially labelled us sexless and unworthy of marriage or religious office. The religious right sees us as threats to children and the institution of marriage and agents of the “homosexual agenda”, homosexual men frequently see us as gay men in denial and lesbian radicals as defenders of gender role stereotyping. A lot of extremes for a fairly rare group of individuals to be saddled with! The reality is that transsexual women are really acting as the mirror of the insecurities and fears of others.

Let’s begin with what transsexual women really are and move on from there. Transsexuals, both male to female and female to male, are individuals born with a varying degree of intersexuality. The research of the past fifteen years makes it almost as certain as it’s possible to be that transsexual individuals are born, at minimum, neurologically intersexed. What that means is that the entire central nervous system of transsexuals is at odds with the apparent sex of the body at birth. I personally suspect that before long, we will discover that the degree of intersexuality of transsexual individuals will prove to be even more involved. In order to understand why transsexuals threaten so many people on so basic a level we have to dive into ancient history, gender roles, sexual differences and feminism. Hang on, it’s a long, convoluted voyage, so take a deep breath and we’ll dive in.

In ancient times among the various Goddess religions there was a role some women played much misunderstood today……temple prostitutes. The very word prostitute today conjures negative images due to western cultures discomfort with anything having to do with sex. Several very good feminist historians have written on the subject and accurately explain much of the mystery surrounding position and place of the Holy prostitute. It was a position of honour, of healing, a route men could take to understand and participate in the Goddess through the priestess. The part these historians miss or misunderstand, is the role of transsexual priestesses in this office. Being a part of the natural order of things, transsexuals have always existed. Our presence in the ancient world, well documented from the earliest records we have, almost always in a role as spiritual leader, priestess, mystic, seer, healer and teacher. The sacred prostitutes were as likely to be transsexual women (who had undergone the ancient version of reassignment surgery, full removal of male genitals) as they were non-transsexual women, it was only natural. Only the prejudices of our society’s view of sex allow this to be seen as “degrading” or immoral. To understand this, you must understand that in “Pagan” (non-judeao-christian) religions, sex is not only not seen as for procreation only and tainted and dirty, but rather as a spiritual act of joy and celebration in the great gift it truly is. Fertility of the earth was tied to prosperity in the minds of those who feel kinship with the earth rather than sought domination over it, a lesson we’d do well to learn today. Sacred sex was practiced to insure fertility of the earth. Sacred sex with a transsexual woman, not being tied to conception, was often considered a higher form of this type of worship and thus the elevated status of the transsexual priestesses. In addition, our having spanned the sexes was viewed as a magickal gift and so we were valued as seers, mystics, healers and understood to be naturally spiritual.

Ok, we had a place, a sacred place, in the order of things, what changed?

In many respects, modern western thought has its roots in Greek and Roman history. As is true today for the last remnants of transsexual priestesses, the Hijra of India, a male dominated culture was very uneasy with “males” who become women for whatever reason. The greek and roman cultures grew out of a movement away from more earth centred, nurturing focus to a warlike, more dominating one. An uneasy truce between the old ways and the new resulted. At the time Cybele was “welcomed” into Rome during the Punic Wars as the result of a prophecy that She must if Rome was to survive, the average roman citizens were shocked at the colourful, loud and ecstatic transsexual priestesses, the Gallae, who came with Her. While many who write about Cybele and Her Gallae correctly mention the Maetreum (temple) erected for Her in a place of honour on the Palatine hill, they miss the fact that the Phrygianum, home of the Gallae themselves, was put outside Rome, on the Vatican hill. They gloss over or miss completely, that one of the roles the Gallae played, as Her priestesses, was “comforting” and healing returning roman soldiers to ease them back into roman society. They usually leave out that for the bulk of their history in Rome, the Gallae were not allowed within the city except during the festivals honouring Cybele. Already transsexual priestesses were viewed with suspicion tainted with awe and fear.

The worship of Cybele was the last of the direct Goddess religions and references to it ruthlessly suppressed by the Roman Catholics. Even then, no less a figure than St Augustine himself, referred to the Gallae as “castrated perverts.” Translators of Catullus, who wrote the only surviving poetic reference to the Gallae in the verse form they, themselves used, changed Gallae (feminine) to Gallus (masculine), clearly intended as insult since both words are latin and kept in latin in the translations. To this day, almost all accounts of Gallae and other transsexual priestesses of the ancient world not written by transsexuals, refer to them as Gallus or castrated male priests of the Goddess. Gay historians use them as “proof” of the position of gay men in the ancient world, lesbian and feminist historians avoid any mention of them as much as possible. What gay man would cut off his own genitals and then live a female life? Are we seriously supposed to believe that thousands of homosexual men would do this in a culture where gay sex was fairly accepted as normal? Already, our very existence was turned into a mirror of other’s visions of themselves and their place in the world.

Any transsexual woman who reads in depth about the Gallae instantly recognizes who they were and the truth of their lives, they are our sisters. Others cannot see because of the blind spot of christian “morality” that is almost inescapable in western society or their need to prove something about themselves. But our history was not written by us, but rather by those blinded others with their various agendas. Recorded, not by our sisters, but those who feared who and what they were. Even today, when the grave of a Galla was discovered in Great Britian recently, she was reported as an ancient crossdressing male! The scholars were unable to process the idea she was a member of the transsexual priestesses of Cybele despite her burial with the trappings of her life and office.

All this leads us back to more modern times. Throughout the 18′th and 19′th centuries the identities of transsexual women was mixed, by lack of understanding of the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual orientation, with gay men. The “Molly” houses of the British Isles and europe were filled with transsexual women and gay male lovers, castration now the property of the Church and done for the creation of castrati singers or seen as the creation of eunuchs, now literally third sexed individuals rather than women. Occasionally we find references to some poor transsexual who was exposed after their death, often to be then claimed by gay historians as one of their own. Homosexual identity itself wasn’t conceived until the mid 19′th century! Whenever the Church encountered transsexual individuals in other cultures, such as among the Native American people, the response was typically to put them to violent death. Gay behaviour was called inversion, the roots of the words introvert and extrovert coming from a simplistic view of innie and outie sexual equipment. A male showing feminine traits, an invert. The “macho” or sexual “tops” viewed as normal males, a viewpoint still found in Latin cultures today. It wasn’t until the work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a gay male, in 1930’s Germany that the actual gender identity of transsexual individuals was once again noticed as a separate issue. Dr. Hirschfeld’s work via his Institute of Sexual Science was largely lost when the Nazis destroyed the records along with the Institute itself, but the seeds were now planted.

World War II changed the roles of women and men in western society forever. Coming on the heels of the Great Depression, the war effort spurred a technological revolution in which it was necessary to enlist women as vital players since most able bodied males were fighting the war. Prior to the war, families were multi-generational out of necessity as they had been for thousands of years of human history. After the war, America in particular, set forth on an unprecedented experiment in social engineering in order to return women from the factories to the home so that the returning male veterans could replace them and spur economic growth. The very idea of family was redefined as today’s nuclear family rather than the multi-generational model that was humanity’s standard up to this time. The new ideal was the levittown “cape cod” family nest with mom and dad and their kids. Grandma and grandpa were expected to maintain their own, formerly multi-generational homes apart. The new medium of television, fear of the “communist peril” and an endless stream of government films outlining “proper” male and female roles aimed at children who were forced to view them in school literally changed the face of society. Any deviance from these new, imposed, norms could not be and wasn’t tolerated. Ozzie and Harriet and the Nelson clan were the role models of the new face of society. When the religious right invokes the sacredness of the “family”, they are talking about a return to this artificial era, not the model that was the norm throughout most of human history. Christine Jorgensen paid a lifetime price for this when she was exposed as “America’s first sex change”. Her very conditional acceptance depended on her rigid conformity to the new social order as a woman, sexy but sexless, stylish with no trace of maleness………jobless except for the one avenue left to her since motherhood was denied her, show business. She, through no fault of her own, set the pattern of future transsexuals for a generation. In spite of this she still paid the price of being the brunt of endless jokes for decades, mirroring society’s own discomfort with the new, rigid sex roles.

During the early 1960’s the rumbles of discontent with the “new norm” started off slowly. Women, given more and more “free time” by the very technological bribes as labour saving inticement to stay at home, became restless to have some real meaning to their lives. Vast numbers of American women were literally drugged with “mother’s little helpers” or Miltowns in an effort to keep them happy with their lot. The “long” (in reality shorter than Moe of the Three Stooges a generation before) hair of the Beatles became an international scandal followed by their rejection of western values in favour of eastern ones. Mary Tyler Moore had to threaten to quit the Dick Van Dyke show for the right to occasionally wear pants on the show even though more and more women were doing just that. Samantha Stevens on Bewitched openly chaffed at the imposed housewife role of her marriage to mortal Darin Stevens (played by two different gay men), allowed to do so since she wasn’t exactly human. America’s involvement in Vietnam was giving lie to the patriotic promises of the 1950’s. Revolution was in the air.

Out of the sixties grew the civil rights movement, the counter culture movement, the women’s movement (reborn), the gay rights movement (started by gender variants) and a growing awareness that our environment was something we were supposed to protect, not subdue. Dr Harry Benjamin was able to openly treat and write about transsexuals due to this new-found freedom. In spite of all this, the seeds of gender roles sown in the fifties still had its part to play.

Transsexuals were forced to conform as a price of treatment. Any sign of deviance from this meant no treatment and so they were forced into an almost “Steppford wife” model of womanhood. An uneasy truce between transsexual women and society allowed them a place providing they conformed totally to their new gender role and denied their own pasts. The women’s movement, which initially pushed away openly dyke lesbians, was largely co-opted by them. So much so, that the femme lesbians who were their counterparts of the fifties and sixties all but disappeared from view. The new model of the liberated woman was a female-man presentation. The gay liberation movement, touched off by a “queens” revolt at Stonewall, then embraced a macho image by shoving out the effeminate members who were too identifiable as “gay”. Radical feminists, also trying to out macho the men and still stinging from accusations of too much male energy from the earlier feminists, railed against the transsexual women in their midst for conforming to the patriarcially imposed roles for women and calling them agents of the patriarchy. Not content to leave it at that, they also started accusing transsexual women of the same “crime” they, themselves, had been accused of…….too much male energy when ironically the “crime” was acting too femme. From a beginning of “biology is not destiny”, the new feminists came full circle to “once male, always male”. Transsexuals once again became a mirror of the fears of others.

Born from reaction to the rigid role set for women in the fifties and fueled by the radical lesbians like Janice Raymond, the new ideal of feminism became gender deconstruction, but only for “womyn born womyn”. Transsexuals who could not conform to the rigid roles and “marry Mr. Right” were left few options one of which was prostitution in various forms, but the new, degraded version rather than the ancient model. Many men have homoerotic urges even if they don’t identify as gay, something our culture has never been comfortable with. The new visibility of transsexual individuals was seized upon by the pornography industry as a way to cater to these desires in a fashion that was less threatening to men who had these urges but needed to deny them in order to maintain their own vision of themselves as straight. The She-Male industry was born. Young transsexuals have very limited options if they come from poor families or, as is often the case, their families disown them. Until just a few years ago, information about transsexuality was hard to come by other than the occasional, lurid, account in scandal sheets or articles tucked into porn to meet the new standard of “redeeming social value” set by the courts. Many turned to a life on the streets, the luckier ones, the porn industry. Starting in the early seventies, the porn market was flooded with a new type of pornography, she-male porn. Much of it was, and still is, made up from pictures of women with male genitals superimposed on them but a few transsexual women found a way to make a living posing for this type of porn, often to save up the money needed for their own surgery. This image of transsexuals as strange, otherworldly creatures both male and female was dependant on pretty faces, large breasts and pronounced male sex organs. It appeals to both a taste for the bizarre and those men whose homoerotic urges could not be faced directly. For those men, it’s literally became now ok to be attracted to someone with male parts if they look female in all other respects. It is the ultimate in the deconstruction of the sex differences and unfortunately colours the reaction of many to all transsexual women. Yet again, the image of the transsexual herself became a mirror of someone else’s fears from within.

In the eighties and nineties another shift came about. As a result of the radical lesbian feminists preceding them, Women’s Studies became a part of many college campuses. Young lesbians, in particular, became enamoured of the idea of deconstructing gender roles in their own fashion. Several dynamic transsexuals, themselves searching for their place in the scheme of things, became the darlings of deconstruction by positioning themselves as “third genderists”. At a time when public awareness of transsexuals and transgenders were growing due to a flood of television talk shows featuring trans issues, these pretty but not femme transsexuals ran with the idea of deconstruction of gender roles. Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg (a female to male) and Riki Ann Wilkins all wrote and spoke to this position, lost again was the lives of the average transsexual woman who merely wanted to transition and get on with her life. The transgender movement was being born. Crossdressers were more and more gathering in support groups and naturally, transsexuals, without a clue where else to turn, often found themselves grouped with them as well. Some of these groups welcomed the transsexuals, others, such as Tri-Ess, had policies excluding both transsexuals and any homosexual oriented crossdresser to maintain the fiction that most crossdressers have no homoerotic urges. A new breed of activist, the transgenderist, emerged often pushing this idea of a genderless society. Most transsexuals, unlike Riki and Kate, are decidedly gendered, their problems being that the gender is at odds with the role they were told they had to play so it was only natural that conflicts would arise. This new idea of a “gender community” pushed by crossdressers, third genderists and transgenderists, all who felt that transsexuals, as the ultimate gender outlaws, is very much at odds with the wishes of most transsexuals to simply blend in. And again, transsexual identity was lost to the mirror of others. In this case, the mistaken idea that by correcting the hand nature dealt, the transsexual woman is the supreme expression of transgenderism, a sort of super crossdresser rather than a woman born with a correctable birth condition that she is.

Transsexuals do not trans (cross) gender by their very nature, by definition, their gender is rather firmly set at birth and stays so. They correct the body to conform to the gender, however, they are widely perceived in the gender community as somehow being more legitimate for this out of the crossdresser’s and transgenderist’s own discomfort with their own, non-transsexual, identity. Ironically, the grudgingly given concessions of society in the past that allowed transsexual women blend in and get on with their lives have increasingly come under attack due to the attention drawn by the gender deconstructionists. The majority of transsexuals wish only to get on with their lives after transition and so are somewhat invisible by choice, the transsexuals the public sees and is aware of, are mainly the more vocal third gender deconstructionists so the public sees transsexuals, falsely, mainly like them. Deconstruction of gender roles is what society fears most, it was the cause of the negative reaction to the women’s movement, the reason bathroom usage becomes such a hot button issue and the root of much homophobia related to family law by religious conservatives.

Trans-activists, in the name of being inclusive, thus often work against the wishes and needs of the majority of transsexuals. As a result there have been an avalanche of judicial backlash type decisions reversing the quiet steady gains of the prior thirty years made as accomodation for transsexuals who didn’t rock the gender role boat. Long time transitioned transsexuals are finding that their marriages are no longer valid, even years after the fact, if anyone cares to challenge them. Rules about changing names, drivers licenses, social security id and birth certificates, all needed just to conduct one’s basic daily living, have been tightened making finding employment during the mandatory one year crossliving year prior to surgery permission extra difficult thus trapping many transsexuals without the resources (since most reassignment surgery is paid by the individual) to finish surgery. Some courts have gone so far as to ignore the law in their attempts to “punish” these uppity transsexuals. In Ohio, one case had to go all the way to the State Supreme Court for a simple name change, denied repeatedly in violation of state law even by the Appeals Court. Some trans-activists have openly opposed laws that would make changing ID easier on the basis that doing so would make it easier for transsexuals to disappear into the system! This last is particularly important. There is a wide spread article of faith among trans-activists, who tend to be transgenderists and third gender deconstructionists, that transsexuals owe them to be “out” and tell long time closeted transsexuals they are wrong to simply want a fairly normal, quiet life. If a transsexual joins the trans-activist community and has the gall to suggest that transsexual needs are different, they are often subjected to very nasty attacks, known to include attempts to out them and interfere with their jobs! They are called elitist snobs even though the issues they are concerned about can be literally life and death for transsexuals.

So why do formerly closeted transsexuals get involved with these groups? As a result of the recent increased security intrusions into what was formerly considered no one else’s business, even long time transitioned transsexuals find themselves being forced to explain their lives unexpectedly. States no longer respect the legal changes/decisions made in other states, again in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the courts willfully ignore these violations. The other factor is loneliness. Having done something that few could be able to do, transsexuals have been forced to deny attempts to out them or even share their concerns with others like them. The system was designed to keep us apart after we complete our change. With the availability of the internet and its explosion of gender related material, facts about gender variance are now accessible. Naturally some reach out to contact others like themselves only to find they are insulted and demeaned for having “woodworked” or “gone stealth”, both terms meaning the individual simply attempted to have a somewhat normal life. Further, when a formally closeted transsexuals life is blown open due to the changed political climate, they often find themselves recruited as activism “poster-trans” by the trans-activists. If they are involved in litigation, they are insulted if they don’t win for setting the “cause” back with unfavourable results, if they win, they are often castigated because they profited when others suffered.

Like it or not, transsexuals are different than transgenders. Unlike the other members of the so called “gender community”, transsexuals are forced to dance to the tune of medical and psychological gatekeepers just to treat a birth condition and get on with their lives. Having done so, they are still often subjected to embarrassing questions about their genitalia. The efforts by non-transsexual gender variant people to replace “transsexual” with a catchall “transgender” has had a negative impact on our lives. It’s amazing, but true, that total strangers will ask extremely intimate questions about one’s anatomy, questions that would merit a sexual harassment lawsuit done to any other woman, within minutes of learning someone is transsexual. Civil servants feel free to demand intimate, very personal, information as if it was their right and duty to do so with no empathy for the extremely embarrassing position they just put another human being into. If outted, we can be fired without any other cause in most of the U.S. today and the very governmental agencies set up to handle sexual discrimination complaints will refuse to even take a complaint on the grounds that as transsexual women, we have no sex. After all the changes, compromises and prices we pay, we have no sex? We have become pawns in the tug of war between the religious right and trans-activists. We have become the mirror of everyone else’s insecurity about gender roles, homophobia and what it means to be a woman or a man in today’s society. And all we wanted to do was live our lives.