(Blogger is fucking up and refuses to publish this as a comment, on my own blog no less, and so I'm posting it as a new entry altogether)
Funny how the comment calling me a spoiled child for speaking the TRUTH was left Anonymously. I think that answers itself. Someone who lacks the courage to back up such a childish statement obviously has no valid rebuttal to my stance. For the record, the only way to get that comment posted would have been to remove the painfully accurate comparison of Evangelina and Josephine's garbage to what LaBarbera spouts on his website. If you change a few names and pronouns here and there, they are INTERCHANGABLE. The message here was "Stop pointing out things that prove our bigotry that we can't out-debate and we'll let your neutered post through so we can retain our delusions of superiority". You'll notice that the anonymous comment is utter crap directly attacking me without arguing any validity or logic, just being snide for snide's sake and I have left it completely intact. TS-Si lacked that conviction and in so doing proved their real stance. They are in fact, an elitist hate site.
As for Leigh, well, you've completely missed the point dear. I am NOT defending Transvestites/crossdressers claiming to be transsexual. I am drawing a line between tv/cd's and NON-OP Transsexuals LIKE Autumn. I do not personally hate TV/CD's, and I DO in fact dislike those among them who try to blur the line, as my blog entry from October titled "Transformations" clearly shows. My problem is with elitist post-ops basically lumping all who still have a penis together. Autumn Sandeen is NOT a transvestite or a crossdresser. She does NOT identify as a man. Crossdressers and Transvestites dress for sexual fetishism and do not do so 24/7, and except for those who are actuall transsexuals taking their first steps TOWARD being full-time, do not identify AS women. Autumn Sandeen DOES Identify as a woman. Full Time. Unlike most crossdressers (except for parties) Autumn goes out every day in public looking feminine, risking violence. A crossdresser can take off all his clothes and go back to blending in just fine as a man, a trans woman is never comfortable in masculinity.
The desire and will towards SRS is NOT the one lone and sole marker of being a transsexual. It is as I have stated, a TREATMENT. Getting SRS does not cure you, you will STILL be XY afterwards. You will be every bit as much a woman in your heart, mind and soul as you were before SRS, but you will always be physically male. The ONLY reason for one to believe in SRS as the end-all be-all cure is insecurity in your own identity. SRS is a viuable treatment. If it wasn't for the fact it'll kill me I'd happily get my genitals fixed, but NOT because I think it will somehow magically make me more real as a woman. I'm ALREADY a "real" woman. I just happen to not like having a penis. To meet it feels wrong, to ME, Personally. This does NOT automatically mean I think someone who can shrug it off is less a woman than me. It is JUST A LUMP OF FLESH. It does NOT define me nor anyone else. And for the record Leigh, you don't have to be Trans in ANY way to appreciate hurtful misgendering. I know lots of effeminate but heterosexual men who flip out when called She, and lots of androgynous women who are deeply hurt when called sir. Gender is very much NOT as black & white as the staff of TS-Si wish to believe. They ARE infact saying Non-ops don't count by immediately dismissing ANY Trans woman with no need or desire for SRS as a transvestive/Crossdresser. As a MAN IN A DRESS. An insult I know they have heard personally and been hurt by. That they can do thisd and insist there is no bigotry involved, and while forgetting everything they endured to reach where they are now, is appalling. I'm happy you got your SRS 25 years ago Leigh, but it did not MAKE you a woman, you have always BEEN a woman, and still would be now even if SRS had never been pheasible for you. And I'm glad Autumn will stand up for our issues even if I disagree with her methods sometimes, because women like you and the staff of TS-Si certainly aren't lifting a finger to fight for our rights. You seem to think SRS cured you and now you're just ordinary women and could care less about those of us still struggling for acceptance. So if YOU won't stand up for Trans rights, SOMEONE has to. It may as well be Autumn, she certainly has a lot more character than women like "Josephine". Josephine spouts clearly hateful bile behind a childish and mildly homophobic nom de plume. Autumn gracefully and with class rebuked that bile without lowering herself to it using the name on her ID.
I'm sorry but those are the facts, and TS-Si remains in the wrong. Attacking me like spoiled children for saying so bluntly will not make them any less wrong Anonymous. And Leigh, thank you for a mature reply even though we disagree, I hope you think seriously on what I've said.
Penny
ReplyDeleteAll this "identify as" is pure nonsense. Nobody really cares what anyone identifies as, and it is pure nonsense to say that someone else is in any way bound to respect someone else's notion of themself. Now we can go around being nice and polite and politicly correct as most of us do in 3d life, and we can use all the correct pronouns to each others face, and we can apologise profusely when we slip, but the truth of the matter is none of us get to define in someone else's mind what we are.
So let's cut the PC ok ?
I tend to gender someone online as they present to me. I do so even with people I don't like or care for. The reason I do this is purely because if I don't, I am usually asked to leave, or thrown out. This intimidation online goes way back to the early chats. We were all forced to be nice, or shown the door. As I said in an article I wrote somewhere, "Even if I knew the person that called themself Sabrina online was in fact a middle aged, overweight and balding truck driver from Iowa, with 3 kids and wife in tow by the name of Bill, it was simply not going to fly to refer to sabrina as him"
This was rigidly enforced and did more to bring out the crossdressers and transvestites than anyone can imagine. At the time I can remember having the opinion of "what harm can it do"!
Well, 20 years on we have found ot what harm it can do. Many of those crossdressers are now full time and calling themselves transgender or transsexuals, lobbying at the gates congress for rights and speaking for all of us as if they invented the term transsexual.
Yet still we have this simplistic notion that we are somehow forced to be polite and allow everyone to express their gender as they see fit, and that we are all supposed to buy into it and be quiet. Well Penny, if you want to do that, that is your right to do, but please quit with the bigot and racist and transphobic comments when some of us, that have had enough of being polite, call a spade a spade.
I have been in discussion with Autumn Sandeen all day today at PHB. Not once in that entire thread did I misgender her. However that is not because I personaly believe that autumn is a woman, no, nor do I believe she is transsexual. Furthermore I dont belive that the vast majority of autumns following are transsexual, not in the way I understand the term.
As I said in my last reply to her, and only after she tried to wiggle and squiggle her way out from what was an intense and very blunt attack on where she stands in regards to this Umbrella, I believe that she has no other choice than to fight this fight, for without this cause, she is nothing, and would have a seriously hard time being taken seriously in the world.
So, thats where I stand on this. I have no love for sandeen, in fact I can bearly stand the person, but to me she is nothing different to those trained cross dressers from years back, gone full time, and now with a cause. And thats ok, but she claims to be something I cannot believe she is, a transsexual, and as I said at PHB, we can claim to be anything we want to, we can talk the talk and walk the walk and wear the uniform and get people to believe all sorts of things, until we meet the real deal.
Thanks for allowing my post.
If a "crossdresser" is full time and asking to be called female they are NO LONGER A CROSSDRESSER, they ARE in fact TRANS. Why is that dso terrifying a concept to you? Idenitity IS important and it is EXTREMELY shallow and harmful for you to dismiss it. Why? Because IDENTITY is the only thing that really makes YOU a woman. The pure cold scientific fact is that you are an XY bio male with an inverted penis. To many people you are no more a woman than Autumn. Yert because Autumn is clearly more comfortable with her Identity than you are, and willing to risk ridicule and physical harm to stand up and fight for uniform equality, you dismiss her identity and focus solely on her genitals because it makes you uncomfortable to be reminded that you are and will always be different. That doesn't make her any less of a woman than you are, it just makes her less of a coward. If you want to hide then hide, the only person bringing attention to YOU is YOU. If, as you claim, you have successfully passed as female for 20 some odd years and no one has ever given you any gender based grief, then the only way you're going to get fall-out from trans activism is by mouthing of about it and making the tell-tale meow that alerts the wolves to your presence.
ReplyDeleteIdentity matters. A transsexual is, purely and simply, body of one sex, brain of the other. Plain and simple. SRS does not change that, you're still male. You were a WOMAN before SRS and are one now. YOU PERSONALLY needed SRS to feel at ease in your body and I am honestly happy you acheived that. But the bottom line is that Non-Ops are NOT crossdressers. Crossdressers do not dress full-time nor do they identify as women. Crossdressers still feel and identify as male. Autumn does not. Autumnn presents full-time and is female of mind.
I have a uterus. I could easily say I'm more of a real woman than you Leigh. And we both know it would hurt you if I did. And you would fight me on it. You would vehemently defend your womanhood. But the only way to defend that womanhood is to tell me you FEEL like a woman, which is IDENTITY. Your BRAIN wiring, your heart and soul, NOT your body, makes you a woman. And that is why you ARE in fact being hateful and hurtful in your insistance on lumping Crossdressers and Non-ops together. You complained on PHB about being shoved under an umbrella while doing the same damned thing yourself.
Non-ops are NOT crossdfressers. They are transsexuals who simp[ly found their peace on a different path than yours. And judging by your discomfort being labelled as trans, clearly found more peace than you did.
If you want to hide, hifde. But stop being a coward and demand others hide with you and do exactly as you did if they want to "count as real". You do not get to decide that, ESPECIALLY if you prefer to hide and blend in. Me? I'd rather educate people. My new son is showing clear signs of being trans. If he does in fact turn out to be a she, I don't want him to grow up guilted and shamed in YOUR world, I want him to feel safe and secure exploring his identity and discovering who he or she really is in a safe and supportive environment where he doesn't have to feel pressured into blending into the background to be accepted.
YOUR attitude will cause MY child harm if people like Autumn stop fighting for equality.
Do you fucking get it yet?
PS - Of course I allowed your post. Contrary to the dishonest trolling of Anonymous Coward, I NEVER delete or censor comments here, even the ones that make me want to tear my hair out in frustration.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to express the thought here that any of us who (a) have a gender identity that is different (whether or not opposite) from that expected based on our genital duct development, (b) have a BSTc development that is similar to that of persons whose normal development of genital duct system is oppositely-sexed, or (c) whose genital duct system developed in a combination of wolffian and mullerian systems, regardless of identity, could all be classified as "other" and not/male, not/female.
ReplyDeleteIt is only by virtue of the fact that western society expects a binary classification of persons into two sexes, male and female, that we have the arbitrary binary sex designation classification of infants on the basis of the shape of external genitalia at birth.
This arbitrary assignment continues because it works in most cases. But the tiny minority of people for whom this arbitrary assignment system does not work, the system should provide an easy route to reassignment.
In a more ideal world, more people might be comfortable with the idea of being classified as "other." But many, including myself, don't like the idea - society expects two sexes, even if there is really a multiplicity of natural developmental sex/gender outcomes that do not result in a spontaneous abortion.
I do believe that in a western artificial binary system of sex designation, those who have the desire and are able to have reassignment surgery should be entitled to the "reasonable accommodation" of treatment as full members of their reassigned sex for all purposes.
Those who for whatever reason cannot have or do not want (I am in the former group) reassignment surgery should be entitled to a similar but not absolutely-the-same level of "reasonable accommodation. If there is a sex-segregated facility in which public nudity is expected, "reasonable accommodation" requires that they be treated respectfully. There are ways to accommodate a pre-op/non-op WBT in a women's detention facility, just not with the general fully-female population. We should not be treated as male. (For that matter, pre-op/non-op, and even post-op, MBTs should be given a wider latitude in terms of where they should be held - and not necessarily in a general male population, even for those who are post-op. I have learned that I should *not* ever assume that MBT's will feel "the same but opposite" to the way I feel.
For that matter, I don't know of the existence of any MBT separatists who make phalloplasty/metoidoplasty a sort of "bright line" for legal and other recognition, the way WBT separatists do with vaginoplasty. (I don't know of any MBT separatists at all, though they might theoretically exist).
So - Autumn was clarly treated inappropriately by the Park Police. She may not have been entitled to placement in the general female detention population, but should not have been treated as male at all.
NO! and neither do you..
ReplyDeleteNo Leigh, I DO get it. YOU never will. PLEASE go back to your delusional bubble of hatred and externalized self-loathing and leave those of us living in the real world to our very neccesary battles.
ReplyDeleteAnd JoAnne, thank for for making the point I've been trying to make so much more eloquently and well laid out than I could. I try to be that clinical but it gets very hard to retain enough calmness to do so once they start in on twisting words and personal attacks. Thank you for that.