Ha Ha Tranny Jokes are So Funny! (To Privileged Rich White Gay Men)

So everyone favorite gay celebrity, Neil Patrick Harris, is guest-hosting in what is now Kelly Ripa's morning show until Regis is permanently replaced. During the opening banter segments, he offhandedly makes a stunningly disrespectful transphobic joke, about sounding like a "tranny" by DEEPENING his voice. Because AHAHAHA!!! Trannies are men in dresses amirite? Ohhhhhh that's so hilarious!

Well, unless of course you're one of the millions of trans women who will face verbal and physical abuse today just for leaving the house trying to be themselves. We don't find dehumanizing humour that funny.

Now of course we all know that if NPH had made a joke about sounding like a black men and then done a "Sho 'nuff Massah, I shines it up reel gud fuh you!" voice, the media, the NAACP, all sorts of people would be ripping NPH to shreds for such blatant bigotry. But we're just trannies, it's still okay to tell hateful, hurtful dehumanizing jokes about us. We need to lighten up you tell us. Don't be so damn sensitive you tell us. Learn to laugh and take a fucking joke you tell us.

We hear such condescending dismissals a lot. Sadly we get most of it from white gay men.

Popular and widely read Gay Blogger Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God has a pretty good track record for being supportive and respectful of trans issues. He's posted positive articles, deleted blatantly transphobic comments, and generally been a decent guy to trans folk.

Well, that is until trans activists targeted Dan Savage. Dan Savage is a popular influential wealthy white gay advice columnist with, (I'm sorry, suck it the fuck up, it's the fucking TRUTH), a long documented history of transphobic bullshit.

When trans activists glitter-bombed him twice, out of very justifiable anger, well, suddenly Joe changed. He stopped deleting blatantly anti-trans bigotry from the comments on his blog, and according to his blog entry about the afore-mentioned NPH slur, now apparently finds it perfectly okay to be condescending and dismissive of trans people when a white affluent gay celebrity makes a tasteless, unfunny, hurtful and casually dangerous transphobic joke.

I expect the bullshit that you see in the comments on his blog. I'm used to Joe's readers showing nti-trans bias. The majority of his commenters seem to think the following as a rule.

1) It's just a joke, we shouldn't take it so seriously.
2) We're oversensitive crybabies blowing things out of proportion.
3) We should focus only on the religious right and not attack our gay "allies".

Let's answer those one by one shall we?

1) No it is NOT "just a joke". Transphobic jokes of that nature are told purely at our expense. Trans people themselves are the punchline. Jokes like that feed off of the worst and most-reinforced negative trans stereotypes. When the ONLY point of a joke is to emphasize how weird and different and freakish someone is, it's not comedy, it's negative affirnation of the stereotypes that get us beaten up or murdered just for existing. I know, I've been hospitalized by teenagers shouting tranny and other lovely things at me as they bet me.

2) Trans women, especially trans women of colour, get beaten up, bashed and outright murdered at near ten times the rate of gay men. So tell me how, knowing this, we're blowing things out of proportion? And yet a gay man getting beaten up or killed will always be widely and extensively covered by gay media, while most trans assaults and murders barely get a mnention in their own local news, let alone much notice online.

3) We focus on the religious right AND our gay "allies", because the bulk of gay activists have repeatedly proven they simply DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT US.

There are boatloads of evidence of this. In attempting to get ENDA passed, gay activists kept cutting more and more trans-inclusive clauses from the bill, until we were essentially erased from it entirely. They claimed this was to make the bill easier to get passed, and that they'd come back for us. But it was really just throwing us under the bus. Once gays have equal rights in every aspect, they won't care about helping us. Most gay men look down on us anyway. They view us a lesser because we've happily thrown away the masculinity they so cherish.

There are so many fights going on across the USA to push for gaty marriage, gay adoption, gay job and housing protections. But bills try to grant those same rights to trans people rarely get much attention except from Religious Right assholes drumming up fears of crossdressing rpists in bathrooms to prevent thebills passing. Where are most of our gay allies then?

"We'll get to you, honest. We just gotta finish our stuff first. Try not to get killed while we fight for marriage!"

I'm sorry but, well, fuck you Joe Jervis. You crossedthe line, and now you're just yet another privileged white gay man throwing us under the bus when we become inconvenient.

You may have just lost a regular reader.

A Note On The Sidebar; The Sequel

I will no longer be cross-posting my blog entries as diaries on Pam's House Blend. Autumn Sandeen, whom I considered a friend and had frequently passionately defended online against shallow bigoted comments, decided to throw me to the wolves and scold me for a non-existant TOS violation in the comments on one of her PHB posts, for the SOLE purpose of showing a poster with a proven on-record history of baseless anti-trans trolling to whom Autumn needed to prove absolutely nothing that she does not "play favorites" with TOS violation warnings. I understand why Autumn did so. But I neither accept nor approve her decision to cower before a troll attacking her unfairly by sacrificing a friend who stands up for her just so she could "prove" how impartial she is.

Because of this sad act of cowardice by Autumn to appease a troll who will not actually care in the end and will still find excuses to attack Autumn and call her a man regardless if I get a token scolding or not, I have removed PHB from my sidebar and will never again comment on the site nor crosspost to it. I cannot in my personal good conscience support or contribute to a site where such an egregious act of personal cowardice and selling out a friend for meaningless brownie points takes place.

Apologies to Pam Spaulding for my decision. It hurts me deeply to be betrayed by a friend like this so publicly. It hurts worse to realize that at least one of the accusations I so frequently defended Autumn against turns out to be true; That she in fact IS a self-serving person who puts herself above others and will step on good people to elevate herself. I hope Autumn continues to do the good work she does do, but I DEARLY hope she stops to look at whom she hurts to do it sometimes.

My Letter to my Member Of Parliament About Bill C-389

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

(I have just sent this to my district's Member of Parliament, Sukh Dhaliwal. I encourage all my fellow Canadians to do the same with their local MP's. As Mercedes on Pam's said, you can find the contact info for your local MP by typing in your Postal Code here.)

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As a member of your constituency here in Surrey, a voter, and a member of the trans community, I implore you to vote to pass Bill C-389. This bill, despite the lies and fearmongering that members of the religious right are engaging in, is not going to let "men put on dresses so they can rape women in bathrooms and claim they're really trans women". That is utterly reprehensible fearmongering invented by religious bigots who distort faith to justify inequality. What it will do is provide protection and dignity to a very beleaguered class. As you are a person of color, I KNOW you understand how bigotry for something you cannot change, in your case race, feels when the ignorant paint you with assumptions and broadstrokes. Trans women cannot change who they are. They do not go into bathrooms to harass women. We go into bathrooms to use the bathroom, same as everyone else. And Crossdressers are NOT trans women and do not use opposite sex bathrooms. Predators who would harm women tend to be very sexist insecure men, and are EXTREMELY unlikely to sacrifice their masculinity by dressing as women just to access women's spaces.

I was arrested and spent a night in jail this past January in PoCo because a security guard decided I didn't look womanly enough, called me a perverted faggot, and called the police. I was violently raped in juvey as a teenager and the entire night in jail I was wracked by flashbacks. The incident, despite being sorted out the next day when I showed the judge the F on my BCID, left me traumatized and afraid to so much as pee when out in public for months. I gave myself a goddamned kidney stone from holding my bladder til I got home rather than just use a restroom. The passage of Bill C-389 would ensure that women like me who are guilty of absolutely nothing except being born with our brains wired differently, (and yes, science HAS proven that MTF Transsexuals do in fact have the biological brain construction of a natal female), from having to risk this kind of humiliation at the hansds of bullies and bigots who mock and ridicule us just for having the courage to be ourselves.

Last weekend was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual day to remember trans women murdered the world over every year. Google Angie Zapata for an example of what women like me risk happening to us every single time we leave the house because we aren't protected under the law.

Imagine if your son or daughter came to you and told you this was who they really were, knowing the danger they will face just by being honest about that. And then remember that all of us, every trans woman, we too are someone's child. And like you, your family, like everyone else, we have the right to be protected by law, and to live with dignity, and to be free from bigotry and harassment just for being who we are.

I am asking you, not as a voter, or a trans woman, but simply as a human being.

Do the right thing. Ignore the fearmongering of religious bigots who bastardize their own faith to make excuses for hatred.

Vote yes on Bill C-389.

Thank you.

Penny Sautereau-Fife, Surrey BC.

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.

Looking For Clouds In A Silver Lining

EDIT 04/24/2010 - I have since seen the actual film and am utterly horrified by much of it. But i stand by my opinion that we can use it to our advantage as a tool to teach people what NOT to believe about us. Therefore i'll leave this blog entry as is, with this added note that i think isreal luna is a fucking hateful little moron and needs his ass kicked.

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Yesterday, on Twitter, my friend Autumn Sandeem from the always effervescent blog Pam's House Blend brought a movie trailer that she found horrifying and offensive to my attention. Video below.



Now, I love Autumn and she is a very smart cookie, but I look at this movie trailer and think something completely different than she does. Autumn's complaints are as follows.

- The film looks to be exploitative and trashy
- It potrays Trans Stereotypes
- It trivializes real trans violence
- Using real trans murder victims in the marketing is offensive

Now a lot of my trans sisters have openly admitted to being awed by my ability to stay positive about my hope for the world regarding trans issues when we still get so much shit just for being us, but I watched this trailer and I saw something completely different, and I'd like to take this time to explain to all my trans sisters why I think this movie is a good thing and should be supported and celebrated actively, not shunned and villified.

First of all, yes it's trashy and exploitative. It's an Homage to trashy sexploitation revenge movies from the 70's. It bloody SAYS so. But that's a good thing. Because the audience for cheesy trash like this is generally made up of cis folks who otherwise wouldn't pay much attention to trans issues. Seriously, do you know how many men realized how evil rape really is after watching I Spit On Your Grave? This is EXACTLY the kind of subversive message movie that changes minds. People who watch this movie will subtly be persuaded as they watch it how wrong transphobic violence is.

As for using the names of real trans murder victims in the trailer. This too is a GOOD thing. Why? Because at least half of the people watching this who aren't Trans are going to be curious about those names. Some guy for example who's never really been exposed to news about Transphobic violence, will see Angie Zapata's name and get curious. So he's going to go and Google her and read about an innocent vibrant young woman who was brutally murdered by a bigoted asshole who targeted her just for being different. He's going to read statements from her mother and siblings tearfully lamenting what that asshole stole from them.

He's going to learn about a real flesh and blood three dimensional young woman whose loss has hurt people and he's going to be horrified and he'll learn to be more sensitive to trans people.

That is a GOOD thing.

I'd also like to point out, however trashy this movie is going to be, the trailer makes it a point to call the acts it draws from, and the attack in the movie that sets up the revenge plot, HATE-CRIMES. It's not whitewashing it. It's not for a moment suggesting we deserve it. It never comes CLOSE to saying "These people are freaks and it's okay to hurt them".

No this trailer is saying "These women are going to go get revenge on some hateful douchebags who hurt them just because they were different".

Another point I'd like to bring up is that while, yes, most of the ladies starring in this movie look like drag queens, there's still diversity here. There's a fat one, there are a few different races among them, and a few of them just look like plain average women. The one who got hospitalized and comatose for example, NOWHERE in the trailer, even once she dresses to kill so to sopeak, does she ever look like any "tranny" stereotype. She always just looks like a woman, period.

I DO understand why some of my sisters hsave a problem with this movie, but I honestly think they're looking at this all wrong. This movie is a HUGE opportunity, if we react to it right.

Instead of screaming "TRASH! STEREOTYPES! EXPLOITATION!", which will just make a lot of people tune us out, here's what we all SHOULD be doing.

Support this movie. Get it played as often as possible to as many audiences as you can reach. And BOOKEND the movie. Explain what this movie gets right about us and then close with a Q & A. This movie WILL make people more curious about our real lives, and it WILL make a lot of people more open to seeing us as worthwhile and deserving of respect.

The truth is, the loud hateful bullies are NOT as numerous as you think. You just see more of them because they ARE loud. Most cis people don't hate us, they just don't understand us, and no one is educating them about us in a way that they can relate to. This movie will open that door for a LOT of people, and instead of screaming about how the door itself is decorated, we should be the concierge, showing people through that door and helping them to a comfortable table.

This is a situation we can use to our benefit. Kneejerk reactions to the trashy stuff won't help any of us in the long run.

For now let's just help as many people as we can through that door. You can complain about the paintjob later.

Some Very Important Video...

Please Support this cause.

Consider Me Reminded

Sometimes I forget. I really do. I forget how it can take just ONE transphobic cocksucker to completely destroy me and reduce me to feeling like a fat ugly freakish blob of worthlessness.

I just got home from a night in jail you see. Technically I was in jail because I had a warrant out for my arrest, for a failure to appear at a court date I didn't even know I'd had, for a bogus shoplifting charge I thought I'd beaten a few months ago. But as I don't break the law, chances are I'd have never been in a position to have this warrant discovered had it not been for the transphobic cocksucker at Safeway.

See last night Fran and I made the two hour trip out to Port Coquitlam to meet my mom. We were waiting for her at the plaza near her house and I dipped into the Safeway to use the bathroom. On my way back out of the store a middle eastern man identifying himself as store security forced me physically back inside the store, choked me and said I was under arrest for trespassing, because, he said, I was violating a condition of my arrest from two weeks before by being on Safeway Property.

Now, how I managed to be in his store on Christmas Eve stealing hot dogs and DVD's when I was home on Swine flu Quarantine puking every half hour is a miracle I don't think I'm magic enough to be capable of, but the fact is he was insisting I was the man he'd arrested that night and screaming at me about being a perverted faggot for going into the women's washroom wearing a skirt.

So my night from hell begins with my being ungendered by a security guard insisting I'm a man and lying through his teeth about a non-existant prior arrest to justify his accosting of me and excessive force. I couldn't breathe as he was choking me. But by the time I convinced trhe store manager to check my id to confirm I'm female and check their own records to confirm my claim that the douchebag was lying, (I take a little comfort in the angry look the manager gave him at that point), the police had already been called.

So I apparently had a court date on December 19th that I missed. Mostly because no one bloody informed me I HAD one. So because of the warrant I was arrested. The minute I set foot in the cell the flashbacks began. I was fighting them the entire night. On the bright side, the cops at the police station respected the F on my ID and put me in the women's section.

The sheriffs at the courthouse this morning, not so much.

They put me in with men. They refused to feed me when they fed everyone else. When I complained of getting groped they said there was no one any of those guys would touch my fat ass, I probably just wanted them to because I was a little tranny faggot. Even the female officer ignored my claims of rape flashbacks. They made me wait FOUR HOURS after the Judge, (The only one in the whole damn Courthouse to read the notes and respect my gender) said I was free to go.

So let's review.

In the past 24 hours, I've been misgendered, physically and verbally assaulted, fat shamed, slut shamed, sexually assaulted while in custody, endangered by the Sheriffs who were supposede to keep me safe in custody, and generally made to feel like a fat ugly faggot in a dress, all because a prick with a badge didn't like me using the women's bathroom in his store.

God I want to fucking die.

I have court again on Monday for the bogus shoplifting charge I thought I'd beaten. I'm tired. I'm going to plead guilty and ask for Time Served despite being innocent because I don't have any faith in the Justice System anymore. In a case of my word against a cis male security gaurd, I won't win. I'm just the freak tranny, who's going to believe me?

Transformations

A friend of mine recently gave me an issue of Transformations Magazine, a porn mag focusing on..... well that's what unsettles me. I can't figure out if it's supposed to be a magazine for Transgendered people, porn shemales, or a showcase for really ugly crossdressers.

The "woman" who publishes it is a lifelong crossdresser in his sixties. He seems hellbent and determined on blurring the line between men in women's clothing and women born male. This is a very big red flag for me given my recent and ever growing frustration with Crossdressers.

Now I'll play nice enough to use their word, and not refer to them as transvestites. Being an intersexed woman who loathes the words "hermaphrodite" and "shemale", I can fully understand a Crossdresser not wanting to be called a word that brings to mind an image of an ugly man in lipstick selling his ass for money, as I'm told by many CD's.

And I try, oh my fucking god how I try, to be non-judgmental and accepting of differences, and to a point I succeed. I accept a crossdresser's right to wear whatever the hell he likes, and do as ever he wants while dolled up, so long as no one is harmed in the process.

(For the record, my definition of "harmed" involves serious bodily injury resulting in irreversible damage or scarring or death, not offended sensibilities disgusted by a man in panties and having a puritan hissy fit.)

But in thelast few years, Crossdressers have been slowly trying to wedge themselves under the transgender umbrella and that's where I draw the line. I even hear Crossdressers claiming dressing is no more a choice for them than being gay is to a gay man or being a woman is for girls like me.

Bullshit.

Crossdressing is a fetish. It is a taboo engaged in by horny men with emasculation fantasies who get off on the sauciness of breaking a taboo of society.

Crossdressers almost universally dress only at home or at special parties. And very few of them can be bothered to do their damnedest to pass as a normal female. Most crossdressers dress slutty for the extra thrill. The feel of women's clothing on their skin gets them off.

And those clothes area goddamn choice. It's their choice, more power to them if it makes them happy, but it's still a goddamn choice. They choose to dress up. They still go to work dressed like any other man, and their biggest fear is their wife and co-workers finding out and calling them a pervert.

Crossdressers are not in any way transgendered. They still identify as men. They don't dress full-time 24/7. And dressing makes them horny.

Anyone who does dress full time and wants to be called a she isn't a Crossdresser. And therein lies the problem.

Non-Op Transsexuals are being used to blur the line between men in dresses and women with penii. Transsexuals who go the full route to surgery have a bad habit of thinking any woman who decides she doesn't need surgery to be happy isn't a real transsexual, let alone a woman.

This attitude is no better than the pseudo-feminist hate mongering against transwomen under the "women born women" dogma we fight so much of late, like in the current local (Vancouver BC Canada) case of Lu's Pharmacy. Google it.

Wannabe feminists who really don't have the first clue what real feminism means, tell trans women we don't count and never will because we weren't born women.

And then those same transwomen turn around and tell non-op transsexuals "You're not getting the operation? Well sorry but you're not really a transwoman then."

And THIS is what has given Crossdressers the foot in the door to do more damage to our fight for simple acknowledgment than any cissexual woman privilege does.

Non-op transsexuals get told they don't count by a group already being told they don't count. We tell them they're just Crossdressers. The ACTUAL crossdressers in turn then latch onto them. You're just like us they say. And we're just like you.

And that's how Crossdressers have gotten themselves underneath the transgender umbrella, making it that much harder for us women to get our equal acknowledgment. A hateful place like Lu's Pharmacy, when arguing their exclusion of transwomen for example, can just point at the men in lingerie and say "See? That's a man in a dress, now you have to prove YOU aren't just a man in a dress too. If we let YOU in, we have to let HIM in."

And this horrid repulsive magazine Transformations is the very definition of this destructive line-blurring bullshit. They have a section on "Transgender news", but fill it with articles about drag queens and men having their cocks nearly cut off in freak accidents.

The young lady who was the centrefold is very clearly a transgirl, having breasts, and very visibly undergone electrolysis, hormone replacement therapy.

But the centrefold spread was called "Boy Girl of the Month".

For every advertisement for products to help feminize skin,aid breast growth, and retard beard growth to help transwomen, there were twice as many ads for sissy slut mags, forced feminization websites and bad tranny porn. The 4 or 5 actual transwomen in the mag looked like women. The 80 or so crossdressers looked like Rocky Horror extras. Half the articles focused on crossdresser fetish clubs, and what few mentions directly there were of transgender or transsexuality were always worded to denigrate us as women and make us sound like effeminate men in drag who just went that extra step and got a boob job.

I'm a blunt and honest woman. And I respect the right of any man or woman of any configuration to do or be as they wish so long as no one is harmed.

But I fucking hate Crossdressers right now, and I want them out from under the Transgender Umbrella. And I want my sister transwomen to stop belittling non-op transwomen, and just accept your non-op sisters so that the CD's can't co-opt them to try and pass their harmless fetish off as an involuntary state of being like transsexuality.

They have a choice. We don't. Stop rejecting our non-op sisters and giving the ones who can choose free reign to make us look like men in dresses. It's hard enough getting accepted by society without being rejected by your own kind and bastardized by the wannabes.

It was just a joke...

DISCLAIMER; I am not angry at Meandering Muse. She's a cool badass chickie and I consider her a friend on the internet. I'm posting this blog entry to answer her confusion in her most recent blog, here, as to why some of her trans readers got upset that she chose to use the word "tranny" instead of "transgendered" in what she believed was a cute funny way. Now I know some of my sisters, (you know who you are), would immediately write off Muse as just another privileged cis bitch who doesn't understand us and blah blah hate hate etc etc, but I know Muse is a cool intelligent woman who honestly meant well. Not understanding why a word hurts is NOT the same as intentionally seeking to hurt you with it. I love my grumpy T-sisters on Twitter but not every cis woman who makes a verbal fuck-up is out to bury us. So after reading Muse's latest blog, read as follows my polite and calm explanation to her as to why someone got pissed off at her over the word "tranny".

To my friend Meandering Muse

Since you aren't a transwoman hon you don't have the first person experience to understand this, but, the problem with "tranny" is that it's Nigger. Kike. Gook. Fag. It's a hate word, a weapon word. It cannot be reclaimed or disarmed, and you cannot use it as a joke or a cutesy shortcut because "transgendered" sounds too "clinical and scientific and boring."

If you, as a cis woman use it, no matter how light-hearted your intent sweetie, you're GOING to piss transfolk off.

Secondly, "transgender" does in fact cover those who never transition or have surgery, because it's a blanket term invented by Crossdressers to co-opt the gender issues of various transsexuals and intersex folks, in order to pass off their silly harmless sexual fetish as something they cannot control the same way a transsexual can't change the gender gap between their body and brain without medical assistance.

While I know enough to know that you as a cis lesbian woman probably did genuinely believe you were being cute and can't understand why anyone would be upset, because of your own privilege, (and yes, even lesbians have privilege over transwomen), I sadly know several embittered transwomen (whom I love anyway) who've gotten the shaft from life more than I have in regards to dealing with the privileged assumptions of cis women, some openly haters, some who just don't fully understand their own language mistakes.

You cannot use "tranny" to crack a joke or be cute. You're not trans. You haven't earned the right. You may as well be a white man cracking nigger jokes. Would you think he was really just trying to be cute? And even if in his ignorance of how it really feels to a POC to be called nigger he honestly did think he was only being cute and funny, would that excuse his misinformed use of the word?

No one can ever safely use a weaponized hate word a funny cuteness. Someone will always take offense to it. There IS no safe way to use a hate word cutely. I hope you can understand why the other person or persons got so upset with you now that I've explained it to you calmly without yelling.

I greatly appreciate your supportiveness to trans/is issues, but that supportiveness is not an excuse to use a word that hurts us as joking cuteness. There is no free pass for hatespeech, not even that which was genuinely intended to just be funny.

It's the little things sweetie. The little things like this are a big part of what stops people from changing.

After all, doesn't it horrify you every time some idiot college jock cracks a "joke" about rape like it's really no big deal?

A non-trans saying the word tranny as a cute joke is a very big deal to transfolk. And no matter how good the intention, no good can come of doing it.

PERSONAL ASIDE; As I was typing this, I find it very disturbing that the spellchecker happily identified tranny as a possibly misspelled word, (which is good), but it never once flagged nigger or any of the other racist words I cited as examples of how hateful a word Tranny is. So.... does this mean "Nigger" is actually in the goddamn dictionary??? WTF???