4/28/2010

Hate Is In Every Group

Today I read such bile.

Of course I read bile every day. Most of it from hateful Christian extremists, Tea-Partiers, Republicans, trans-hating redfems, etc. spouting their various hate-which-isn't-REALLY-hate-honest! crap we all know and loathe. THAT bile particularly bothered me. The author of that piece of tripe is a post-op transsexual woman with a very clear high-horse complex and very strong mad-on for and trans status that is not identical to her own. Sadly, this is very common.

There are a lot of post-op trans women who are intensely and vehemently bigoted against trans women who still have their penises. Any trans woman who has not yet gotten the Lopitoffame is in their eyes still not yet a real woman. This belief is held with a complete black hole of obliviousness to the irony of radfems who say the same thing about post-ops.

This hatred of pre-ops is ESPECIALLY vehement in the case of non-ops. non-ops are trans-woman who, either by personal choice or by medical reasoning cannot or will not get the final operation.

Women like "Josephine" revel in misgendering non-ops and belittling them in the same way much of society does to them. To post-ops of "Josephine's" type, and woman with a penis who cannot or will not get SRS is just a transvestite, a crossdresser, a fetishist. Trust me, the is a WORLD of difference between tv/cd's and non-op transsexuals.

Now there are plenty of post-op women who have absolutely no issues whatsoever with non-ops. Kate Bornstein and Gwendolyn Anne-Smith for example, two women I'm proud to call friends of mine, not only do NOT hate on non-ops, they publicly speak out in favor of full equality and acceptance of gender variance. Women like "Josephine" however have this bitter bigotry towards Non-ops, and I honestly believe it's because they're externalizing their own still-existing deep seeded repression that they thought SRS would magically fix.

A lot of transsexuals focus WAY to much on SRS as what it is NOT instead of what it IS. SRS is a STEP on the path of a trans woman's life. For those who need it to feel more comfortable in their bodies, it's an important and invaluable step, but still only a step. It doesn't change your chromasomes or give you a womb so to many people you're no more a woman than you were before it. Life continues past SRS with many more new challenges to overcome, ups and downs, losses and wins, angels and ends, yadda yadda. For those who do need SRS, passing that milestone certainly helps them find the strength to continue down their path in life. Life doesn't end with SRS.

What SRS is NOT is a magic cure all for everything that's wrong with you. If you had clinical depression before SRS, chances are you'll still have it afterwards. If you were sexually repressed before it, you likely won't be much less so after. If you had low self-esteem beforehand, well, you'd be surprised how little SRS actually dents that.

Women like Josephine are the ones who treated SRS as that magic cure all, that holy grail that would magically fix everything wrong in their lives. The ones who thought having a vagina would make everyone accept them as a real woman, and that they'd stop receiving transphobic bigotry. They can't accept that SRS didn't make EVERYTHING perfect, something else must be wrong.

So they turn their own insecure failings they thought SRS would chase away and turn it against those they see as lesser. They forget that when they were pre-op they felt every bit as much a woman as they do post-op, and they basically misgender and invalidate their own life history by insisting anyone who hasn't gotten srs yet is less real than they are. It's a classic feel-good-at-the-expense-of-others tactic.

It also has to do with sex. A LOT of Trans women buy into the rad fem bullshit that if you're trans, you're not allowed to enjoy sex if you're pre-op. Because in their backwards logic, real women don't enjoy sex unless they're sluts, and since sluts are subhuman in the eyes of radfems, any trans woman who likes sex is a slut by default and therefore represents only the "worst degrading stereotypes of what a real woman is". Well I'm sorry but fuck that. My wife is a cis woman who loves sex and is certainly no slut since I'm her only sex partner right now, but really, a slut is a name tight-assed people give to people they're jealous of. A slut is someone who is happier than they are doing something they deny themselves.

My friend Danielle Foxxx is Post-op. She loved sex when she was pre-op and she loves it now. The only thing SRS changed for her was it made her feel more comfortable with her body image and it changed the technical aspects of how she fucks.

Some non-ops like me, (Granted I'm an intersexed femal, with female chromosomes and a uterus, but to most people since I have a penis I may as well be trans), are non-op only because something medical prevents surgey. In my case a blood disorder means invasive surgery will kill me. Women like me then have to learn to make peace with the bodies we have in conjunction with who we are as women, a traumatizing journey made all the more difficult by the shallow post-ops joining the chorus of hate telling us we'll NEVER count.

Others however, CHOOSE to be non-op for various reasons. Some don't have the obsession with genitals that "Josephine" does. They don't link bodyparts to identity with the same narrow paintbrush that others do, where what's in your panties is the sole condition to determining what you ARE. These non-ops Are comfortable enough in their identity that they don't need SRS to "prove" anything. They look at it clinically and weigh what SRS gains them compared to what it takes away and they make the difficult choice to live as women with a penis. others simply don't accept gender as a rigid two-sided construct that must never stray from either/or.

The main problem for post-ops like "Josephine" is that they want to hide, to blend in, to just be a woman and forget/bury/ignore all the hardships they survived to get where they are. They hate that all these lesser people who DARE to be *gasp* HAPPY with what they are and comfortable with themselves physically, emotionally and sexually, keeping drawing uncomfortable attention to trans issues by being uppity little bitches telling people about trans issues! How dare they???

So any grief they get for being trans as post-op women is the fault of all these lippy mouth men in dresses, because they're really real women now, why would anyone have a problem with them?

I dearly wish all post-ops could be like Kate or Gwen or Danielle. Sadly I've met WAY too many Josephines. If you actually know Gwen, ask her about Dianne some day. OHHHH has Gwen got stories for you!

Post-op does not make you any more or less a woman than any cis woman or pre-op trans-women. Nor do the clothes you wear. The ONLY thing that makes you a woman is your mind and heart and soul. Some people need surgeries to be more at peace with the BODY, but womanhood is in the soul. Don't step on those who found peace on a different path than yours.

If we all found peace on the exact same path it'd be a goddamned crowded picnic, and I can't afford to bring enough beer to get you drunk enough to stop hating yourself so much you need to shit on me.

4/26/2010

Internet Means Never Having To Say "I'm Classy"

I'm sure we all agree one of the worst things about t3h interwebs is that for many people it's an excuse to cross boundaries they (hopefully) would not in real life. People who would never crack jokes about Rape or Abortion in real life happily create entire message board threads, photoshop pictures and memes dedicated to such topics. If you've even so much as HEARD about 4chan, /b/tards, or Encyclopedia Dramatica, you know all too well that the very worst in human nature is frequently traded online for the lulz, in ways only the most socially reviled people would ever utter aloud in person.

A lesser example of this phenomenon is personal boundaries. On the internet, people will ask you the most tactless questions you would rarely hear so bluntly in person. I got one such question today. While it certainly wasn't near the crude crap level of 4chan, it was still pretty crass and tactless, and lacking any sense of "Is this an okay question to ask of a complete stranger?"

Some of you who read me regularly online know that I have somehow for reasons I will never comprehend become close friends online with some women who work in Adult films. A few of them even think of me like a sister and have publicly said as much on Twitter.

I know why I love them. My working theory is they love me for pretty much the same reason. They treat me with respect. They treat me like a human being. They accept me fully as a woman and they never question it or give me grief about my bits not matching my soul. And I have always treated them the same. They're people, what they do for a living has no bearing on who they are or their worth as a person.

Today, on my Formspring account, an anonymous user asked me this about the closest of my sisters-in-porn.

- "Since **** ****** still escorts and is doing work for dogfart dot com [GH, WMMGB and BonC]. If you had the opportunity would you have sex with **** ******? Any other Pornstars that you would like to do?"

I don't follow what the woman he asked about does for work. I know she still does porn, I don't much care. She's happy and healthy and enjoys her life. But she's like a sister to me. I don't talk about porn when I'm on the phone with her. We talk about life, kids, family, etc. We talk sex sometimes but not in any way pornified, we talk about it like best friends or sisters would. But we don't talk about who she's working for, or what kind of scene she's got scheduled, or who she most or least likes working with. And we sure as hell don't talk about the idea of her and I someday fucking. I don't imagine the thought ever crossed her mind, and it hasn't crossed mine since LONG before I knew her.

I don't think of my friends in Porn in terms of fucking, I think of them as people I'm friends with who HAPPEN to do sex work. There are a few if they hit on me I'd certainly not say no, but I don't think about it happening. I respect them enough to be honest, the ones I wouldn't refuse know who they are, and they respect me for admitting to that thought process while not ever actively persuing it. The only reason it's ever come up in conversation is when they were asking me questions about my short erotica stories, and what inspires me.

Usually it was brought up as a joke and being my way I'd answer honestly, either 'Well, yes if you really wanted to and you made the first move', or, for the ones I proudly call sister, "No, I don't think of you that way, you're like family". And they respect my honesty, but these are not every day conversations.

Of the 15 porn actresses that I actually call friend, who publicly call me friuend also, the subject has only ever come up with 5 of them, usually as a joke, and never awkwardly, and pretty much forgotten afterwards. It has never been a regular line of conversation, nor would i wish it to be. When we do discuss sex stuff, it's usually in a galpal way, and never has any undertones of it involving them and I. To my knowledge only ONE of them actually would fuck me if the opportunity ever presented itself, but even then we don't much dwell on it because the opportunity isn't terribly likely to ever occur.

But because they happen to be porn stars, and have publicly acknowledged me as someone they love to bits, I get questions from their fans asking me if I want to or even ever have fucked them.

Now maybe I'm naive but I'd really like to think that very few men would walk up to me in real life and ask me if I have or would want to fuck (Insert name here). That's a question I'd humor only from a good friend who asked out of curiousity. If a guy asked me that in real life I'd possibly slap him.

But here on the internet there are no such risks involved with stupid tactless invasive questions. Guys feel like not only is it perfectly okay to ask a woman they've never spoken to before about her sexual proclivities with famous pornstars, but seem genuinely pissed off when I decline to answer as if I'M the one being rude and trashy by declining to humour them.

Only on the internet.

PS - No I will not name names. If you really care which pornstars a chubby girl is friends with check my Twitter. I will not pass along fan messages when I'm on the phone with any of them. I will not give shout-outs. And I will not ask them prying sex questions on your behalf. They are my FRIENDS and I am not going to mistreat them for you because you can't seperate their job from their hearts. You know who you are.

Yeah I know, someone with class on the internet. Told you I was a freak.