About the Florida Shootings

This is very simple. Please clean out your ears and listen. I will NOT repeat myself.

THIS WAS NOT A MUSLIM CRIME. THIS WAS AN ANTI-QUEER CRIME.

The skin colour and religion of the shooter is FUCKING IRRELEVANT. His targets were QUEER PEOPLE. In a country where Christian Republicans have introduced over 600 bills in the past 6 months alone to limit or erase LTBGQI rights. This is NOT about fucking Islam. It's about America's rampant hate for Queer people reaching it's logical conclusion. When you go out of your goddamned way to dehumanize and other us, some asshole with a gun is GOING to eventually try to gun us down like animals. 

Islam did not cause this to happen America. YOU FUCKING DID.

Stop blaming foreign brown people. Take responsibility for YOUR hatemongering.

You yell and scream about trans women in bathrooms but it's somehow the entirety of Islam's fault a guy murdered a bunch of queer folks.

Fuck you, fuck your bullshit fake "outrage" at all the "American lives lost". YOU DIDN'T CARE ABOUT US TIL A BROWN MAN SHOT US.

So don't fucking act like you give a flying fuck about us NOW just so you can pimp your Islamaphobe Agenda. Don't use queer people to justify hating brown people. Don't use an act of hatred to create and spread more of it. YOU got us killed today, NOT Islam.

Grow the fuck up and take responsibility for the climate YOU created America.

Dear Trans Exclusionary Lesbians

Just so we're clear; if you're a cis woman who identifies as a lesbian and you refuse to even consider dating a trans woman solely because of her genital configuration? Solely because you'll only fuck other women if they have a vagina? Who will happily tell yourselves that trans man you're fucking is just a really butch dyke and not a man?

Congratulations! You are not actually a lesbian! You are a vagina fetishist!

"Lesbian" means "woman who is sexually attracted to/romantically interested in other women". Trans women are women. Trans men are men. If you claim to be a lesbian but you are willing to date/fuck trans men while absolutely refusing to do so with trans women, you are not a real lesbian. If you care more about a pussy being in your face than about the fact that you're dating a man who happens to have one, you are not a lesbian. If you were hot for that cute chick at the bar until she said she had a penis, YOU ARE NOT A FUCKING LESBIAN. You are a fetishist obsessed with vaginas and you have ZERO clue what lesbian love truly is. 

A lesbian loves women. Period. That is literally what being a lesbian mean.

You're not a lesbian. You're a hetero porn cliche.

Let's make a point here shall we?

Assuming you identify as a lesbian, look at these two pictures and tell me which one you're more likely to want to date, fuck, or maybe even marry someday.

  If you said the woman on the left without any hesitation? HUZZAH!!! You are, thus far, a healthy normal lesbian.

HOWEVER! 

Let's ask again, this time let's ask that same question, except now we'll point out that, duh, both of these people are trans, and you have no way of knowing what you might find in their underwear. Or let's go a step further, and assume that both of these people are pre or non-op. The woman has a penis and the man has a vagina. She's still the same woman you were attracted to just a minute ago, and he's still the man that you didn't even give a second thought to before you knew what was in their pants.

Are you still more likely to date the woman? Do you care more about who a person is than how a tiny section of their flesh is arranged? Congratulations! You ARE a real lesbian!

But... if your answer changed? If you decided you'd rather fuck the guy with the beard than the beautiful woman? You're not really a lesbian. You care more about body parts than people. YOU ARE TRANSPHOBIC, no matter what you tell yourself to the contrary. No matter what intellectual hoops you jump through to justify your skewed shallow preference.

And you really need to ask yourself WHY your preference is so focused on body parts instead of the person who owns them.

But the bottom line is that if your dating criteria puts the contents of someone's underwear above all else on your list of criteria, you're not a lesbian, and you need to take a good long look in the mirror.

Fuck the Bigots and Haters, This is Who and What I am!

I have real, natural 48 F breasts. I did not buy them from a surgeon. There is no plastic, no silicon. I grew them when I turned twelve. I am very proud of my breasts, and very comfortable showing them off.

Yet TERFs will and have repeatedly claimed my being proud of my breasts and willingness to show them off, (because no cis woman has EVER done that or felt that EVER right?), is proof that I am a male crossdressing autogynophile. Despite the APA long ago discrediting Autogynophilia as even being an actual real thing. It doesn't exist. I DO.

I was born with a uterus and a penis. I was born with one testicle and one ovary. I recently had the testicle removed. I was born with a tiny vaginal opening that a doctor surgically destroyed and sealed up.

Yet TERFs, (none of whom are actual doctors or biology experts. NOT A GODDAMNED ONE), will shout in my face telling me "Intersex doesn't work that way liar! You're just a confused man!"

I have no sex drive. I rarely masturbate if at all, and prior to my recent surgery only to make unwanted erections go away. I don't date, I don't pursue anyone, I don't look for sex. I'm a Demisexual, meaning I can only even ENJOY sex if it's with someone I'm already emotionally connected to on a deeper level. I don't do one night stands or casual sex.

Yet TERFs inst I'm a "Pretendbian", that I'm a man crossdressing to con lesbians into hetero sex, to "trick" them into sexually interacting with a penis. Even though I NEVER ask or expect ANY of my sexual partners to even LOOK at it let alone touch it if they don't want to, and even though EVERY woman I have EVER had sex with knew EVERYTHING about my body going in and STILL chose to fuck me of THEIR OWN GODDAMN FREE WILL. But try telling TERFs that. To TERFs I'm just a rapist dressing in drag to trick poor unsuspecting lesbians into my bed so I can sexually assault with my evil penis.

Speaking of my penis, I still have it. This is not by choice. I still have it because a minor day surgery to remove a testicle can be done locally and all related expenses are fully covered by Pharmacare. Full SRS is an invasive surgery that in my state of physical health I would be highly unlikely to survive, cannot afford the non-surgical expenses, and cannot afford the airfare. Pharmacare pays ONLY for the SRS itself, not any travel or hospital costs outside of BC, And I would have to travel outside of BC to get it if I could find a doctor willing to ignore the likelihood of my not surviving the operation. So I long ago made peace with my penis. I'm stuck with it. It's permanent. I can either hate it and end up killing myself in dysmorphic despair, or I can accept it's just a body part and get the fuck over it. So I got over it. Besides, unless I'm aroused it looks like a normal cis female clitoris anyway.

Yet TERFs say that BECAUSE I accept my genital as is and made peace with them, it proves I'm not a real woman, because if I was really a woman NOTHING could make me accept having a penis, even though they don't think trans women who DO have SRS are "real" women either, and are thus directly contradicting themselves by saying so.

This. ALL of this. This is what I deal with EVERY FUCKING DAY. EVERY day TERFs and other transphobic assholes like MRAs attack who and what I am as a person, invalidate my body and my history, deny my personality and experience, and deem themselves more expert in who and what I really am than I myself am.

This is DAILY LIFE for me. And for so many other trans and intersexed women worldwide. This is the kind of derailing invalidating dehumanizing pure raw unadulterated HATRED we face every day just for EXISTING.

Go ahead, tell me I CHOSE to feel this way. Tell me I CHOSE to be a woman with boy parts because it just gets me horny. Tell me I CHOSE to live a life guaranteed to include the risk of being beaten to a pulp or even murdered every single day just by leaving my apartment.

Go on. Tell me that. I DARE you.

No one would EVER choose this. The only choice I ever made about my gender was to stop living in fear and denial and to just be who I really am.

I am a woman with factory extras I never asked for.

I am beautiful, strong, intelligent, compassionate and kind. I am selfless often to my own detriment. I only have sex with people I love and trust and feel safe with, and I HAVE no secrets about my body or who I am. I don't "trick or deceive" ANYONE. The women I've been with are not coerced or fooled or conned. They CHOSE to be with me. And they are not magically bi or straight for doing so, (unless they WERE bi to begin with). A lesbian who chooses to fuck me is still a lesbian because I AM A WOMAN.

I am NOT a crossdressing rapist. I am NOT a confused crossdresser. I am NOT a "Pretendbian". I am not ANY of the hateful transphobic narratives TERFs lob at my head every day.

I am Penny, hear me roar. And feel free to stare at my tits because FUCK the haters, my tits are EPIC.

Arguing with Cathy Brennan 101

Prominent TERF Hatemonger Cathy Brennan being herself.

Trans Woman; Your statements are ignorant hateful bigotry with no basis in fact.

Brennen; You're a man and a bigot and a racist and I speak for all cis women and lesbians. Also, cis doesn't exist.

Trans Woman; No, you speak fot yourself and your followers only. Cis DOES exist. And exactly how am I racist for pointing out that you're a liar and a bigot?

Cathy Brennan; Stop trying to erase me and replace me with a pink monkey!

Trans Woman: Pink monkey? The hell? When did I ever mention monkeys?

Cathy Brennan; See! You cussed! You're clearly a violernt rapist and want to harm me! I feel threatened!

Trans woman: Wait what? Where did that even come from? I haven't threatened you in ANY way!

Cathy Brennan: Well I'm blocking you now. I've proven you're a violent rapist planning to replace all women with unnaturally coloured primates and EVERYONE can see I'm right. I must now block you for my own safety because you clearly want to rape me. Repeatedly. For weeks on end. Later Mister Pretendbian.

Trans Woman; ............................................................ um............................... what just happened here?

The Bug Brennan & Friend Comedy Hour!

So... according to a pair of TERFs on Twitter, (one of whom I'm pretty certain was Bug Brennan on a sock account), my Twitter Avatar somehow proves that I'm really an "Autogynophile Man".

My Twitter Avatar

Can ANYONE explain this chasm-like leap in logic to me? Do only trans women have breasts and show cleavage or pose sexy? Have cis women NEVER done this EVER in the history of womankind? Is this one of their sad deluded "Only a man would pose like this" disconnects from reality?

I know one of the accounts tweeting TERF hate at me was a Bug sock, because she claimed I was a "famous violent autogynophile".

1) I'm nothing CLOSE to famous. I'm barely "vaguely heard of"

2) I'm not violent. I haven't been in a fistfight since my mid-teens. I have NEVER threatened a TERF with harm of ANY kind, nor have I ever taken their bait and harmlessly wished they'd die in a fire so they could twist it into proof of my "violent nature". For Bug to say I'm violent is a pure unadulterated lie to pad her false narrative.

3) I'm not Autogynophilic. Autogynophilia is the act of being sexually aroused by dressing as the opposite sex or imagining being them. It is more common among cis women than cis men, and, despite the claims of bigots, not prevalent among trans people AT ALL. I have never in my life been sexually aroused "by the thought of being a woman". I AM a woman. With next to zero sex drive. On the rare occasions I DO get aroused, it's because a woman I love is getting my motor going. Taking the pic above was NOT done for MY own sexual gratification, it was taken for the benefit of people who love me.It was one of the rare times I felt actually beautiful and so I took pictures for my beloveds.

Bottom line, TERFs have, yet again, proven that they're sad bald-faced liars, and that they need to lie to make their case because proven facts are simply NOT on their side.

If by any chance Bug is reading this, (And I KNOW she is because she's proven she stalks me now, trying to make me one of her poster girls for how Trans Women are "All Violent Men in Drag Out To Rape Women"), I'll make you a challenge.

I will give you my birth name, and leave you free to go digging all you like. You will not find ONE violent incident to my name outside of sealed Juvey records, and I've already publicly discussed the fights in my teens that put me in Juvey. You can dig until you hit molten core and will NEVER find ANY facts to prove your claim about me.

But we both know you won't accept my offer. Because you're a Doxxer. You've likely ALREADY picked through my life with a fine tooth comb looking for something to attack me with. You already KNOW your "Penny is violent" claims are bald-faced lies Bug. If there had been anything you could find that you could actually use, you'd have posted it all over the place.

I scare Cathy Brennan. Not because I'm "violent" as she falsely claims. But because she doesn't know how to discredit me. She doesn't know how to deal with me. My being intersexed is a pertinent reminder that she's wrong about sex and gender being immutable black & white constructs. By just EXISTING I prove Bug a liar and a bigot. And she doesn't know how to dismiss me.

She blocked me on her primary Twitter a few years ago, NOT because she was scared of me for harassing her, as she claims on her "I'm a Victim!" blog. (See my last blog entry for further details on that.). Twitter Records prove SHE was harassing me.

No, she blocked me because I was refusing to play along with her childish goading. She was looking for another "Oh go die in a fire!" tweet she could twist to fit her narrative, goading me with simplistic "your penis proves you're just a man" tweets. I kept replying "But I have a uterus too. By YOUR definition that makes me a "real woman" right?"

She couldn't figure out how to respond to that. And blocked me. And yet since then she's tried AGAIN to pick fights with me on Twitter TWICE, through her sock accounts. And always with her sad ridiculous claim that I'm a famous violent fetishist crossdresser. And every time I completely trounce her, not with fists, but with FACTS.

Because I HAVE the facts. And she does not.

I've said it before, I'll say it again; If you have to make up blatant lies to pad your argument, your argument was never valid in the first place.

A Disturbing Trend

As the professional hate lobby loses battle after battle in their war on gay tights, and they suck less and less money from donors through fearmongering against gay people, I'm seeing a very unsettling but sadly unsurprising trend.

You see, the hate groups won't admit it publicly, (well, most of them, a few have conceded), but they know they've lost this contrived culture war against gays. They still fire volleys but there's no gunpowder left in those shells.

They know that more and more people actually KNOW real gay people. And knowing real actual flesh and blood gay people dispels all the fearmongering bogeyman stories that the Religious Reich likes to spin to scare the fearful and ignorant into giving them money. They know their donor base is either dying off or waking up.

The problem is that these hateful people, who swear they're not bigots while blatantly lying through their teeth about gay people to sow fear, NEED that donor money to survive, because as hateful and dishonest as they are, there's pretty much NO other way for them to have an income that grants them the life they've built on the backs of gay people. They NEED to have a bogeyman, an intangible "other" they can use to terrify the ignorant into paying for their mansions and caviar.

And so, while trans folks have always had to deal with ignorance and hatred, even FROM gay people, the Religious Reich in the United States has heavily ramped up the transphobic bile of late, stirring up more anti-trans fear than ever before, and it's working.

Articles about trans stories like that of Coy Mathis have always attracted ignorant hateful and stupid people to the comments sections. But of late the transphobic bile has multiplied. Where it used to be reasonably balanced in comment sections between the ignorant haters spouting bile and actual trans folks countering them with facts and reality, lately the haters seem to be drowning us out, overwhelming us with sheer numbers and shouting over us to drown us out. The hate is a flood now and it's difficult to not drown in it. 

And it's Religious Reich hatemongrrs like Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, Jennifer Roback Morse, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbara, and Linda Harvey ramping up the whole "Transsexuals are just men in dresses who want to rape your women and children in bathrooms!!!" Meme that has caused this sudden surge in trans hate.

You'll note they almost never discus trans MEN when they spout their bile. Trans men don't even exist in their eyes.

And that makes it even more important now more than ever for us to stand up to these professional bullies, to counter their every lie with the truth, to dissect their dishonest fearmongering with facts and reality.

To show the world we matter as much as anyone else and have every bit as much right as everyone else to be protected from discrimination and abuse under the law. 

No matter how hard it gets, how much bile we have to wade through, how hopeless it often seems, we MUST keep fighting. The Gay lobby isn't going to stick their necks out for us. WE have to fight for our right to exist. 

Because the haters are getting us killed. And we have to disarm their transphobic bile as the gays did their homophobic bile, and render their bigotry impotent and powerless. 

Because the alternative is just rolling over and dying. And that is no alternative at all.

A new Chane.Org Petition For You All

Go Here To Sign.

Why This Is Important

While browsing the web yesterday I stumbled across this quiz page.

http://www.chacha.com/topic/people/quiz/14/male-or-female

The quiz on that page is dismissive and demeaning to trans women. 8 of the 10 women pictured in the quiz are Transsexual Women. The key word there being WOMEN. Right from the start, the whole quiz is based on identifying "Fake" women by asking you to determined if the women you see are male or female.

I answered female to all 10, out of a morbid curiosity to see if this would follow the path I feared it would, and sadly, it didn't fail my expectations. When I scored two out of ten, I was greeted with this lovely transphobic garbage;

"You don't know Jack! (Or Jane!)"

"You're not good at pin pointing the exact gender of another questionable person - what's up with that? You don't know Jack about looking for the tell-tale signs of a man/woman! Brush up on your skills, buddy!"

Trans women are "questionable people"? Accepting them all as women means I can't see "telltale signs of a man/woman"?

RIIIIIIGHT.

So I tried to be nice and contacted them privately to point out how blatantly transphobic this quiz is, explain to them WHY it's demeaning and transphobic, and ask them to either fix the quiz's wording or remove it entirely.

THIS is the condescending bs they sent me today.

"Hi Penny!

We truly appreciate your input in regards to our "Male or Female" gallery. I'd like to indicate that ChaCha prides itself in providing content that appeals to a vast array of individuals in all walks of life - that includes those in the GLBT community. We would never publish anything that could be viewed as derogatory or hateful to any race, religion or orientation as we openly respect and accept diversity. However, ChaCha does generate galleries and quizzes that are primarily for entertainment purposes, which are meant to be light-hearted and interesting.

The gallery in question was authored in a tasteful way and does not exhibit any language or attitude that would defame a transgendered individual. Our content team has reviewed the gallery and determined that the material is acceptable and will not be removed from our site.

Again, we truly appreciate your thoughts and insight in this matter.

- ChaCha Support
Thank you,

Customer Relations

Ticket Details
Ticket ID: 142017
Department: Customer Relations
Priority: Low
Status: Closed"

I'll bet you my left leg their content team doesn't have a single bloody trans person on it.

So they had their chance to do the right thing privately. Now I'm telling the world about the way ChaCha.com views trans women, and how blatantly they think such blunt misgendering, demeaning transphobic crap is acceptable, non-defaming and low priority.

To say nothing of the two cis women in the quiz whom the site author's clearly think nothing of comparing to men just to justify mocking trans women.

So tell ChaCha.com, this quiz IS defaming, demeaning, offensive and transphobic, and that they need to stop ignoring the complaints of trans women and strt respecting them.

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.

Dealing With Classic Derailing When Teaching About Trans Lives

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

For the past two weeks I've been all over the damned net trying to maintain my temper while dealing with a very depressingly high concentration of white middle to upper class gay men posting comments on various websites in reply to articles or blogs about the SNL Estro-Maxx sketch or the Craig Ferguson "My long lost half sister Peg" sketch. There are reasons so many trans folk are losing faith and trust in a large chunk of the gay community, feeling like we're conveniant tools to help fight their pet causes but to be discarded or thrown under a bus when WE need them. Honestly I actually have less issues with femisogynist lesbians bashing us the last two weeks than with smug dismissive gay men.

The general consencus among these white Gay en is that we in the trans community should just lighten the fuck up because these two skits were all in good fun, just harmless jokes doncha know? We're just too damn oversensitive, we need to lighten up and grow a funnybone.

Yadda yadda yadda.

I've cited Derailing for Dummies so many times the past two weeks I almost have the whole bloody thing memorized.

So I'm going to paste a couple things here. The comment of mine that got the most likes on Disqus and got the most people saying "Okay maybe you're right" of the hundreds I've posted the past two weeks, and the classic derail attempt it was in reply to.

The Derail attempt. (After I'd been pushed to start cussing in frustration at the bullshit lengths these guys were going to to avoid admitting the harm being done. 500 points if you can spot the classic derail attempt).

"It's really too bad that you can't keep a civil tone and refrain from the profanity (and that goes for everyone)--it would really give more credence to your arguments. That said...do you happen to notice that "Peg" seems pretty happy with herself? So, if you're taking the leap to casting her as transgender, she's out and proud. But I agree with the previous posters who equate this to Milton Berle, Flip Wilson and I'll add Jonathan Winters and all the Kids in the Hall and Catherine Tate (look them up). The comic conceit of "obvious bad drag" does not a transgendered character make. So before you cast stones at CBS and Craig Ferguson, consider what you're really criticizing. (In this case, it's simply a monotonous skit."

And my reply, the one which got the most Disqus likes and got through to people.

"Nope, sorry, but you're just classic derailing again to be able to dismiss me so you don't have to acknowledge you're completely wrong. Using a tone argument, "You're being too angry/hostile/profane therefore nothing you say is of any import" is classic derailing done by privileged idiots who don't want to have to expand their worldview to include the lives of marginalized people. This is how you convince yourself you'e better than me and therefore your inherant superiority automatically disempowers my justified rage in your mind, and you can dismiss me as overreacting.

So the only one losing ANY credibility here is YOU. Especially given the examples you cite, which back up NOT your arguments but mine. Earlier you argued that men wearing women's clothing didn't automaticaly equate to trans bashing. I agreed but argued that in the case of the SNL sketch and the Ferguson sketch it did because gender variance was the sole and only point of the "joke" in these cases. By citing comedians like Berle, Wilson, KITH and Winters, you're only strengthening MY argument, because NONE of those comedians were playing gender itself as the joke. They were all always portraying actual women when they crossdressed for comedy. Flip Wilson's Geraldine for example was NEVER played for "Man in a dress" laughs, she was played for "Angry black mother" laughs. The character was a straight-on woman, and the jokes were rooted on her attitude, NOT her bodyparts.

SNL and Ferguson cannot say the same. The entire point of both sketches was to mock gender variance, and you CANNOT argue it away or deny it in Craig's case just because the guy playing Peg has come out before as male characters and tried to disgust the audience.

Both sketches relied on negative demeaning stereotypes of trans women to get their laughs. Both mocked trans women as silly freakish people who are just weird and abnormal and there to be mocked or treated like sexual deviants. Both used facial hair to emphasize the whole "This is just a man in a dress" meme.

So sorry asshole, but your derailing attempts have failed and so has your lameass privilege based argument. And my very justified anger, amplified by your staggeringly self-absorbed ignorant arrogance, does not dilute the fact that I am RIGHT, you are WRONG, your privilege has made you ignorant of what trans people have to truly put up with, the damage shit like this does us, and the damage YOU do by perpetuating it rather than educating.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. YOU are not trans, so YOU do NOT get to tell US what is or is not offensive to us."

I wish it didn't take me being pushed to the limits of my already pain-reduced patience to drive me to a point where I can articulate myself enough to actually get the fuck THROUGH to people, but sometimes anger can be a good tool if you find the right lens through which to focus it.

I just wish I could've gotten through to more people. The bulk of those I've been dealing with still think we're all just uptight humorless trannies who need to take a joke.

But if SNL or Craig had done a sketch with a white guy in blackface singing Mammy, or a guy playing a hyper effeminate gay man looking for 10 year old boys to show his "lollypop" to, these assholes would be first in line out for blood demanding SNL/Ferguson apologize for the bigotry and that they remove the offending sketch.

But hey, we're just silly trannies, we just need to learn to take a joke. Right?

Wrong.

And I don't care who I piss off by having the nerve to stand up for myself and my sisters. Our lives are NOT material for bad comedy.

The Flip Side of Isms

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

As a woman who is mixed race, overweight, intersex, and a lesbian, I've had to put up with all the major ism's and bigotries we all know and love. (Snrk). Racism, sexism, fatphobia, ageism from teenagers who think anyone over 30 is useless, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera. I know all too well that bigotry causes harm and is destructive.

But earlier today I got sucked into an argument with some now former friends on Twitter over Ableism and it reminded me that every "ism" is a double edged sword and that humanity in general is mostly selfish self-absorbed lazy cowards unable to take responsibility for themselves.

Ableism for those unfamiliar with it is fear and/or abuse of physicaly and/or mentally disabled people. As a disabled person also, I'm not in the least oblivious to the fact that ableism DOES exist and treating disabled people dismissively as if they're automatically useless, crazy, lazy or faking for sympathy happens a lot and can be very hurtful and destructive. But like so many "isms", I find more often than nor it's a cheap defense used as an excuse to be coddled or protected from reality.

I'm sure most of you have heard about yesterday;s shooting in Arzona, which among other things left a goddamned NINE YEAR OLD CHILD DEAD. Now to me, when something that bad happens, the last thing I'm thinking about is me or how words make me feel. My thoughts were squarely on the dead child and feeling heartbroken and angry that this even happened.

Naturally a lot of people think the shooter was completely batshit and said so on Twitter. As someone with a history of mental issues this, according to my ableism fighting "friends", should automatically hurt my fee fees and mortally offend me.

It doesn't. The bastard who opened fire in a crowd to kill a judge and a senator clearly is not right in the head. All evidence says he was a Teabagger, a group of bigoted hateful people to begin with, most of whom are very much not right in the head. From people who still insist Obama is Muslim or foreign born despite overwhelming evidence otherwise to people who spend millions to prevent GLBT equality at all costs while letting homeless people, including children starve, I have ZERO problem with anyone calling these hatemongering delusional fuckwits "crazy people".

But to bitch at people for calling the shooter crazy and go into conniption over how you "won't stand for ableist fuckery" when a child is dead is not only bullshit but a serious lack of priorities. So I told them to get their priorities straight and focus on the real victims. They proceeded to just shit on me and act like I was betraying them to the "enemy".

They both ended up blocked when I got sick of trying to get through to them. And it reminded me that isms can all too easily be abused.

Seriously? How many people do you know who, should something not go their way, almost immediately blame an ism for it? A black man or a woman doesn't get the job they applied for and immediately accuse the employer of being racist/sexist? I know some employers are and would find excuses for it to avoid hiring "undesirables" but they're statistically few and far between. I know a gay man, friend of my parents, who is a complete and total douchebag, who actually accused the staff at A GAY BAR of being homophobic for tossing him out after other patrons complained he was drunkenly hitting on married men who told him no.

Well fuck that noise. It's bullshit cowardice. It's selfish self-absorbed responsibility deflecting stupidity. It's someone immediately claiming bigotry as a crutch because they don't want to deal with their own flaws.

I'm in a wheelchair. I don't whine and bitch and treat the world like it's out to get me. It's not Joe Blow's fault I'm in it, why should I expect him to coddle me?

I used to cut myself when severely depressed. I don't blame anyone else for that. No one put the razor in my fucking hand. No one forced me at gunpoint to put it to my skin. I did that. Me. My stupidity and I take responsibility for it.

So why can't anyone else just own their own shit? Why do people whine and bitch and think only of themselves and expect the world to hand everything to them because of something innate like skin color or sex or sexuality or something unfortunate but unchangable like a permanent disability? Why does everything that doesn't go your way HAVE to be someone else's fault?

Sometimes people DO screw you. Sometimes bad shit IS someone else's fault. When it is by all means hold them accountable. But when it isn't? Just deal with it already and move on. Learn from it, grow as a person, be better than you are now. Don't hide behind an ism to avoid admitting you need to work on something.

Seriously humanity, grow the fuck up already. Focus on the shit that causes REAL damage. Fight bigotry that's hurting people tangibly. Don't just sit and whine about your own feelings as if they outweigh the rest of the world.

After all, a child is dead. Is a bruised ego really more urgent than that?

Something to Make You All Laugh (Just Don't Choke On Your Drinks)

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

From my private messages on FetLife.com, wherein an anti-gay windbag, concerned for my well-being, (you know, that whopper lie these types tell themselves to NOT feel like hateful bigots) decided to try to save me directly rather than keep getting his ass handed to him in the forum he had been posting on.

This began because, like so many, I responded in the forum to his bile by using myself to deflate his "Only two sexes, nature says violating the opposite sex status quo is wrong yadda yadda" crap.

PurrrplePenny
PurrrplePenny 36IS
Surrey, British Columbia
written 1 day ago:

But you are indeed a huge flaming idiot. Having read your bile as it relates to dismissing the lives and loves of my friends here, which of course you insist is not hate or bigotry, (just like all ignorant bleating homophobes do), I'm afraid I must deflate that little bubble you live in.

First of all, there are most certainly NOT only two distinct sexes. I'm living proof of this troll boy. Go look at my pictures. I automatically just by existing prove you're mistaken and speaking out of your ass.

Second, homosexuality is VERY natural. It occurs in THOUSANDS of species, not just humans. It's a population control tool, when there are too damned many of something, Nature makes a small percentage gay, to curb breeding and provide extra care for the excess of offspring.

Third, "Love the sinner hate the sin" is the single biggest bullshit excuse folks like you use to hide your bigotry. Not only can I prove that the Bible is NOT NEARLY so anti-gay as folks like you want to claim, but it's a RELIGIOUS view, and religion, unlike homosexuality, is very much a choice. No one is born Christian, you have to be taught. But all credible research shows it is extremely unlikely that ANYONE chooses to be something so vilified that it risks getting them beaten to death every time they leave the house.

- A happily and very much legally MARRIED LESBIAN.

This got kudos from others in the forum, but he decided to then take it directly to my inbox.

Anon-dom
Anon-dom 49M
Beacon, New York
written 1 day ago:

I assure you that the attempts to justify same-sex sex will always be offensive nonsense.That something occurs in nature does not mean it is not deplorable or appalling.Your birth defect is unfortunate but not nearly as sad as your pretending it isn't.

If you DON'T "hate the sin",you're only PRETENDING to love the sinner...I'm not a religious person,I don't think the Bible is of divine origin,and I'm not advocating beating anyone to death.But to treat homosexual orientation as excusing homosexual activity is no better than telling an alcoholic to keep drinking until he dies...it's abandonment,not acceptance.There AREN'T any excuses for homosexual activity.
PurrrplePenny
PurrrplePenny 36IS
Surrey, British Columbia
written 1 day ago:

Offensive nonsense only to the small-minded and hateful like you dear boy, which thankfully there are fewer and fewer of every generation. Your kind is going the way of the dodo. People who AREN;'T ruled by outdated fear and bigotry accept us just fine. Facts are NOT on your side, the only kind of research that supporets your view is the Paul Cameron kind; discredited and laughed at by all credible research bodies, embraced wilfully by the ignorant.

There is no intrinsic harm in homosexual activity. Harm comes from being careless, same as with hetero sex.

You're still an ignorant deceitful bigot trying to hide your evil behind false compassion. There is nothing wrong with us, but a great deal wrong with you.

You still lose. Tata boyo, yours is a lost argument even before you speak it.
Anon-dom
Anon-dom 49M
Beacon, New York
written 1 day ago:

Trust me,I consider your arguments even weaker than you consider mine.Standards of conduct are not "bigotry",and the growth of a misconception's popularity doesn't make it true.
PurrrplePenny
PurrrplePenny 36IS
Surrey, British Columbia
written 1 day ago:

Oh I know you don't care about facts logic and proven science. I don't care if you don't care, you'll still never be RIGHT, and history will remember people like you in the same vein as Hitler or the KKK. THAT is a fact too. The only standard of conduct being violated is in your shallow tiny brain, the only misconceptions are yours and those like you. The truth is on the side of equality, what you espouse very much is hate and bigotry. Telling yourself you're being compassionate may ease your conscience, if you even have one, but it won't make it any less true that you're a bigot and a troll, and utterly worthless as a human being.

You have fun living in your little bubble of delusion, I garauntee you it will just keep getting smaller.

Toodles!
Anon-dom
Anon-dom 49M
Beacon, New York
written about 19 hours ago:

Facts and logic are on my side,not yours.That you seriously think that desire to engage in irrational behavior (same-sex sex?!) is anything like race,or that right and wrong are "equal",makes your school of thought the worthless one.And however big your "bubble of delusion" grows,it will never be anything else.
PurrrplePenny
PurrrplePenny 36IS
Surrey, British Columbia
written about 17 hours ago:

No dear, facts aren't on your side. I repeat, all reputable scientific and psychiatric agencies, peer-reviewed studies, and legitimate research prove you wrong. The only way to make it appear otherwise is to either cite thoroughly discredited researchers like Paul Cameron and the junk-science they use, or to take one tiny part of legitimate studies and intentionally distort it to make your case. There's a word for that; Lying. No matter what lies you tell, or how much you swear up and down it's the truth, your lies remain lies, and no proven credible research backs your side of the debate. You try to claim gay/lesbian sex is harmful. This is what is called a blanket exaggeration lie. Because SOME gay sex, such as careless unprotected sex, can have harmful results, (guess what? So can hetero sex), those like you will broadly claim ALL gay sex must therefore be harmful. This is another lie disproven by credible science. Gay sex, like straight sex, has equal risks and rewards, and safe sex negates a good chunk of those.

The bottom line is that you very much are a bigot and a troll, spouting disproven anti-gay rhetoric in a pathetic attempt to incite anger in complete strangers over the internet, most likely because your own life is so lacking in redeeming qualities that you're compelled to attack strangers whose private lives cause you absolutely no harm except in your own head, in order to stroke your own ego, and since you don't want to believe you're a bully or a bigot,. you lie even to yourself and cling to the lies you spout as "facts" when they've been repeatedly proven otherwise, and tell yourself you're trying to do a good thing by saving people from something no one needs to be saved FROM.

Canada is national proof that your side's rhetoric is a load of crap. Legal gay marriage has kept OUR economy afloat while yours is in the toilet. NO preachers have been arrested for still calling it sinful, and we've had openly gay soldiers in our military since 1994, and we're STILL the Military 9 times out of 10 that YOUR military calls to bail your asses out.

I know you'll basically stick your fingers in your ears and go LA LA LA at me. Bigots NEVER like admitting they might be wrong. Your arguments are no different than segregation arguments. Wrong is wrong, and no lie you tell, even to yourself, will change the facts.

But just because I know you're too ignorant and bigoted to risk acknowledging the REAL facts and admitting your mistakes won't stop me from utterly destroying your crap with the truth.

You go ahead and keep trying to lie to me if you like, I can outargue you til I die. The truth will NEVER validate YOU.

Toodles loser. That bubble is just going to keep on shrinking.
Anon-dom
Anon-dom 49M
Beacon, New York
new message
written about 17 hours ago:

Anything that tells you what you want to hear about this is nonsense.Browbeating the psychiatric community into giving up on trying to help you means they lose credibility,not that you gain it.Being same-sex makes same-sex sex wrong,just because the species has two sexes.Wrong doesn't have to mean illegal,but it does mean inferior,not "equal".

The comparison to segregation is insulting.Nobody gets up one day and decides,after a lifetime of never doing it,"I'm going to black today".The responsibility to never engage in same-sex sex,however,is equally binding on everyone,there's no exemption because you really want to.

The old rubber-glue line is tiresomely appropriate here...everything you say about my arguments only applies to yours.You're going to keep on claiming validation for your bad habits,and they'll never deserve it.
PurrrplePenny
PurrrplePenny 36IS
Surrey, British Columbia
new message
written less than a minute ago:

Nothing I say about your arguments applies to a single one of mine the boy. That's the beauty of it. I can easily provide peer-reviewed ratified research that backs up my argument, you cannot. So resorting to childish homilies to try (and again as always, FAIL) to deflate my arguments because you cannot EVER refute them using any real studies, facts or research, only further proves that deep down, YOU know that it's ME who is correct and has won. You have yet to provide me with anything but your own opinion and bigotry to validate your case, and even in that you've failed miserably. You don't give a rat's ass about people like me, and you're not "saving us" from some destructive life that exists only in the fevered minds of bigots. All you're doing is flailing in the wind, hoping if you can shame and guilt-trip us, a few folks with self-esteem issues might go waste thousands of dollars on Ex-Gay therapies that have been proven to never work and that cause serious psychological trauma. No one has bullied any scientific body into recognising our equality and validity, but those on your side frequently tried to bully them into rescinding those statements. Bullying is YOUR side's tactic, not ours. And when your side failed to intimidate valid legitimate institutes, you founded your own fraudulent ones to push your junk science.

There is no lie about homosexuality that you can tell that I cannot refute with truth and fact. You of course will continue to believe your sad old tired lies, because frankly you're a small minded idiot, I don't think you're even capable of opening your mind to truth, the lies are safer for your frail weak mind, more comfortable.

But as I've said, you believing in a proven lie, and repeating that lie ad nauseum to anyone who'll listen, will never make that lie true. I on the other hand just tell the truth, and telling the truth is the best way to defeat pompous lying windbags like you. There certainly is an inferior one here, but it isn't me or mine. Inferior is the mind so afraid of reality it will cling to a lie like a life preserver after your ship has begun to sink under the weight of it's own bullshit dear boy.

The problem with that is that you can only tread water for so long on a lie in the ocean of truth I have to drown you in before you too sink under the weight of your own bullshit.

*******************************

No reply since then yet, and he'll be booted off the site pretty soon, as FetLife staff are investigating the myriad of complaints against him for his bile.

The funny thing is that, as his profile on the kink social network reaches his list of his personal kinks and fetishes, it goes into perhaps the longest list I've ever seen of creepy disgusting fetishes, such as forcing his pet to engage in scatology by cleaning him up after bareback anal, and far worse ideas I won't even repeat here.

But of course those are all perfectly normal and healthy in his mind, so long as it's a man and a woman engaging in the literal shit-eating. But gays and lesbians just having normal healthy vanilla sex in a loving relationship? Oh HELL no, not on HIS watch!

I laughed my ass off at him for awhile..... until I realized he's probably Brian Fischer incognito. Or Matt Barber, or Porno Pete LaBarbera. God knows as obsessed as those three are with weird sexual fetishes that all us gays supposedly have, any one of them could be this guy and not blink. One of my FetLife friends posted this lovely message he had sent her.

"I see from your profile that you seem to be engaged in a relationship with another female. I see this all the time and it makes me sad because I know that you and also her have never found a real man that can hold your attention. Since lesbians don't exist and the relationships between the supposedly lesbian women are sexless I assume that you both do this for your protection or something? I'd like to talk further on this so here's my number xxx-xxx-xxxx. I'll anticipate your call soon."

Yeah, I think this MUST be one of the Wonk Triplets. The alternative is to believe there really are more idiots like Fischer, Barber and LaBarbera out there than I thought.

Goddess help us all.

An Open Question To The Extreme Right

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

Morally bankrupt monsters like Matt Barber, Brian Fischer Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins and Peter LaBarbera, to name even just a handful of these deplorable people, have spent the past month at the absolute height of their reprehensible dishonest tactics. They and those like them, the soldiers fighting the evil homuh-seckshual agenda in God's name, (despite not a one of them actually having the first clue what the Bible actually says, using popularly distorted passages to justify their hate-we-swear-isn't-really-hate-honest-now-stop-picking-on-us), have been desperately bleating out excuse after excuse as to why they think there's no blood on their hands when gay or rumoured to be gay teenagers kill themselves.

These brain-hurtingly offensive and morally bankrupt excuses range from simple dishonest bullshit to utterly deplorable backpeddalling and buck-passing. They've blamed equality activists for it, (these confused kids only killed themselves because T3H G4YZ tried to convince them they were *GASP* normal!), and worse, the kids themselves, (These kids really knew deep down how sick and disgusting they were, so that's why they offed themselves!). ANYTHING to avoid accepting even the possibility that the hateful bigotry they bust their asses to spread at every opportunity could possibly be a big factor in the cause of the homophobic bullying these kids endured.All because they're so entrenched in their delusional hate-fuelled belief that being gay is ungodly, unnatural, and serves no positive function to society, that they refuse to ever allow room for debate in their own minds.

Sorry but no, homosexuality is hardly socially useless. It reduces over-rampant hetero breeding that overpopulates a world that CANNOT sustain so many humans, and provides nurturing parental options for all the abandoned children that irresponsible self-absorbed hetero people give up because they had no interest in being parents but couldn't be assed to use condoms.

(That is not a knock against those who are poor or otherwise unable to keep a child they actually do want and give them up for adoption hoping their child has a better life than they can provide. To THOSE people my heart goes out to.)

What, however, truly DOES have absolutely no constructive value to society is hatred, bigotry, homophobia and lying in the name of God. Because these things cause only harm, leading to people being beaten, crippled nd murdered, or young people driven to suicide, because they're different, and for no other reason BUT that.

So here is an open challenge to those liars and killers on the extreme religious right, who very much DO have blood on their hands. I want all of you, especially the extra slimey ones like Porno Pete and Bamm Bamm Barber, to close your eyes, and imagine the following. If you can find any actual morality in your shriveled evil hearts, try to do so with a completely open mind.

Imagine that you have a teenage son, and that son is gay. He of course hasn't told you so because every day he hears your hurtful abusive dishonest anti-gay preaching and he internalizes it. Your son is miserable and unhappy, not because he's gay, but because you make him feel like there's something wrong with him. You make him feel like he's sick somehow, so he does all he can to bury it, hoping it will go away. He dates girls carelessly, fucking girls at random trying to man himself up, to chase the gay away, but with every girl he beds, inside he dies a little, because deep down it's still his football buddies that he thinks about.

But you just keep preaching that gays are sick and unnatural, and your son hates himself even more. And then one day at school, someone spots him looking at a boy for just a few seconds too long, and the rumours start. And because idiots like you keep teaching kids that gay people are diseased and sick, kids at school, with no proof your son IS gay, but based solely on those new rumours, start taunting him, ostracising him, even beating him up after school calling him faggot. And after that harassment and abuse at school he still has to come home to your garbage, reinforcing his feelings of self-loathing, cementing in his mind that he's a worthless deviant. And no matter how hard he tries to be straight, the gay feelings never go away.

And one day you come home from work and you find your son, dead on your kitchen floor after cutting his wrists open, because he felt so sick and worthless and abused that he finally decided being dead was better than living, that suicide was his best option.

All because of the kind of ignorant hate you and those like you spread.

YOUR son. Not someone else's. Not some poor kid you read about in the news and want to evangelize for your pet bigotry causes. YOURS.

YOUR son. This is very important. Imagine it's YOUR son laying there dead, YOUR son who ended his own life.

Don't deflect the question by insisting you'd never have a gay son, or by claiming that it's only gay activists convincing him he's fine as is that would cause him so much turmoil. We both know that's a cop-out, an excuse bigots use to avoid admitting to the harm they cause. Don't whine your bullshit about how your faith is being persecuted, we both know you don't actually have any. Don't sidestep the question by misquoting the bible or by distorting legitimate studies whose authors have publicly chastised you for distorting their work. It's cheap and cowardly and will only further prove your deplorability.

Just go look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly.

If you had a son and that son killed himself directly because the kind of hate you preach made him feel like death was his best option..... could you really live with that? Would you really tell yourself this was what God wanted? Would you accept any blame at all for your part in making him feel so worthless he had no better choice than to die?

Any of you among the Extreme Right who can answer anything except a plain simple "No" best enjoy your empty hate-filled lives while you can, because whenever your time comes, there's only one place your souls are booked for, and it's going to be awfully hot down there.

Every So Often, the System DOES Work!

Cross-posted on Pam's House Blend

I was just woken up by an unexpected phone call.

Normally, this would be extremely irritating as you can imagine. I barely get much sleep, so being woken up when I actually was passed out is a pet peeve.

This however, was a wake-up I can definitely forgive, as it was the BC Supreme Court Crown Counsel calling me.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with my legal battle with Safeway Co. Ltd. please direct your attention here, here, and here.

Why would Crown call me less than a week before my final court date? To inform me that, as the man whose job it is to prove I'm guilty of the crime I'm charged with and convict me, he has, after two months of investigation into the testimony and evidence presented during the first part of my trial in August, determined that Safeway's case is so full of gaping holes and blatant transphobia that it is not even worth the Court's time to persue it further.

I no longer have to law awake at night fearing the system won't care about the transphobic bullying I endured by Safeway employees that lead to the false shoplifting charges, or hope I may be found not guilty because proof and justice were on my side.

Because the Crown decided Safeway's bullshit was so mind-numbingly obvious he COMPLETELY DISMISSED THE CHARGES!!!!

Apparently, inasmuch as he was willing or able to tell me, his attempts to procure interviews with the abusive security guard who the arresting guard was forced at my first hearing to admit WAS there and had been suspiciously left out of his report completely, he determined my version of events was clearly the accurate one and that the security guard who testified had a vested interest in trying to pretend otherwise.

I don't know if I have the energy after a year and a half of my life has been chewed up by this to actually SUE Safeway, but I'm damned sure going to Ask them to reimburse me for the items I had paid good money for which the security guards confiscated wrongly as stolen property.

Today, I am a happy kitty. Sometimes, the system DOES work for us.

Feeling a Little Hopeful At Last

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

Before I begin, please read these older blogs I wrote in January for some background on my ongoing legal drama.

Consider Me Reminded
Giving Up Is Sometimes Survival

Now, after I had written both of those, I found out at my preliminary hearing I was in fact by LAW in Canada, NOT allowed to enter a Guilty plea if I did not believe I was in any way guilty of the crime I was charged with. After telling the Duty Counsel and the Justice Of The Peace my story and why I was pleading guilty, they informed me that by admitting that I did not feel I actually WAS guilty they refused to accept my plea. They understood why I wanted to, but assured me that Jail Time was NEVER a likely sentence for a minor shoplifting offense and that it would be tantamount to lying under oath. In tears I plead Not Guilty at the reccommendation of a judge and an agent of the crown whose job it was to prosecute criminals.

So yesterday, August 19th, was my trial date. I was apprehensive. My treatment at the Port Coquitlam court in January had not left me feeling terribly reassured in the fairness of the Legal System, and I had still been unable to re-locate my witnesses from the Safeway Parking lot.

And then the Judge called me Miss. He made it a point to clarify with me what titles and pronouns were appropriate for me, and on the rare occasion he fucked up a pronoun he caught himself and immediately apologised. While he did at times seem a little condescending in his need to explain every single procedure to me, he was otherwise bending over backwards to be accepting and supportive.

That alone gave me hope. But that's not all.

Only one of the security gaurds involved in the original incident in June of 09 showed up. The one who made the transphobic statements didn't attend, and the one who did had gone out of his way to exclude any mention of him from his official report.

And the gentleman who DID show up stumbled badly. He had trouble remembering details without his notes. He fumbled badly at EVERY turn. And I caught him in BLATANT lies that even the Judge scolded him for. Among the biggest lies was, when asked by the crown about my emotional state, he claimed I was neither emotional nor upset nor crying, but he felt I was angry and wanted to hurt him.

There was just one problem with that claim. And when it came time for me to cross-examine him with my own questions, (I can't afford a lawyer nor do petty shoplifting offenses qualify for legal aid), I nailed him with his own evidence.



This is the photo the LPO took the day of the false arrest. It was submitted into evidence months before the trial. Holding my copy of it, I asked Iyer, the LPO, to confirm his contention that I was neither crying nor emotional but simply angry I'd been "caught". He stuck to his story.

So I asked the Judge to look at my eyes in the photo and tell me what he saw.



The Judge said he saw, as this close-up shows, "Red puffy eyes, clear evidence of recent or current crying, and tears visible on my cheek. As it's a scan of a photocopy of a print-out the tears may not be fully visible here, but the Judge saw them clearly enough on his copy.

When the Judge asked him to explain why his own photographic evidence contradicted his memory of events, Iyer was at a loss, and hung his head mumbling a vague excuse about not remembering.

The trial ran long and the Court neared closing time, so I unfortunately had to have an adjournment until October, the earliest possible date in which the Crown Prosecutor could be free to resume trying my case. So sadly the ordeal isn't over yet.

However while I'm not going to jinx anything by saying this might be a slam-dunk, I AM very hopeful right now for a number of reasons.

- Iyer was caught in enough inconsistancies and outright lies that even the Judge scolded him.

- Despite my best efforts to maintain my composure while explaining my juvey rapes to the court as my reason for going out of my way to NOT break the law as I would rather die than go through that ever again, the Judge could see the tears and emotion I was fighting to NOT show and expressed sensitivity and understanding to it.

- The Crown, whose job it is to prosecute and convict me, when going over the adjournment with me and asking me about my dumpster-diving for restaurant leftovers, expressed far more concern about whether there were aid resources I could look into to survive better than garbage food than about any details of the case.

Get that last one folks? The GUY WHOSE JOB IT IS TO CONVICT ME was more concerned about my health and living situation than about discussing the actual trial.

As I said, I won't jinx anything by garaunteeing an outcome, but I feel very hopeful right now. Things SEEM to be leaning in my favour. And it gives me hope that there are places in the legal system where a trans/is woman like me can and will be respected, treated kindly, and taken seriously.

And hope is a very wonderful feeling. And I feel it so rarely that I need to share it. I hope that the hope I'm feeling right now might creep into the hearts of all my Trans Sisters and brothers. Hope that sometimes, people in Authority ARE capable of accepting and respecting us, and sometimes, just sometimes, the truth actually matters when it comes to our lives.

I'd rather share hope than misery. So the buffet is open brothers and sisters! Help yourselves! And wish me luck come October that this thing will finally end and I can move on with my life.

Bigotry Is Bigotry, No Matter The Source Or The Target

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

This is hard for me to write, seeing as the motivation for doing so is the loss of a friendship. I am a terminally honest person and I refuse to lie for any reason, even to spare someone's feelings. Unfortunately, when the truth hurts, you find out who your real friends are.

I know, as we all do, several Christians that complete pieces of shit. But I ALSO know, as I hope most do, several Christians who are good decent people who fight for equality right alongside us. These are PEOPLE, and they act based on their own religious choices.

Christianity itself is neither evil nor good. It has equal elements of both, but as a religious philosophy it is in itself nuetral. Evil or good taken FROM Christianity is the responsibility of each individual Christian, or the Churches that interpret it. Christianity itself CANNOT be good or evil, only what people choose to do with it.

So when a friend of mine today was blanket bashing Christianity as evil, and hurting and offending some of my Christian friends who fight for our equality, I stood up to her and took her to task for it.

Bigotry IS bigotry. Regardless of the source or the target. My friend assumed that being a Trans Woman who was forced into a trans version of a NARTH-like camp gave her impunity to bash all Christianity as ever she sees fit. This is utter bullshit. A bad experience NEVER gives you the right to shit on other people.

I myself have been hospitalized by a group of teenagers screaming that god hated my faggot tranny ass. I choose not to blame all Christianity for 7 idiots with an axe to grind.

So let me illustrate this point as bluntly as I can.

"I think homosexuality is evil but I don't hate all homosexuals!"

Sound familar? Of course it does. We hear it from NOM every day.

"Christianity is evil, but I don't hate every Christian."

A quote from my Twitter friend. See the parallel there?

When I meet an idiot Christian bigot tring to condemn my existance, I calmly point out to them the facts about the Bible and Homosexuality, since the truth does not justify the bigotry. I don't blame the religion itself because some idiot read the Bible wrong and uses it to excuse their bigotry.

And by that same token, I won't stand by while someone uses a bad experience to justify bigotry TOWARDS Christianity. ALL bigotry is wrong.

Sadly my now former friend didn't want to believe she was being no better than Maggie Gallagher. Her own words proved her bigotry. She even acknowledged she knew she SOUNDED like a bigot but swore she wasn't. And just like Maggie, my friend resorted to calling me a liar and accusing me of libellous insults rather than believe even the possibility that she might have bigotry in her heart. She resorted to lamenting how I had surrendered to "insanity and delusion" by lying about her and defending the evil Christianity.

The delusion of course, is hers. And she was the only one lobbing insults. I expect the blunt honest truth from my friends and they know to expect such from me.

Bigotry is bigotry. When even the bigot has to acknowledge that what they say might SOUND like bigotry (but fer sure honest totally isn't, I swear!), it's a sad lack of a grip on reality to be in such deep denial of it.

This is why I attack what people like the NOM folks say and do, not their religious faith. I attack their ABUSE of faith, not the faith itself.

Bigotry is bigotry no matter what coat it wears, and all bigotry is wrong. And I will not back down or lie about it to spare someone's feelings. I'm sorry that bigots feel hurt and insulted when they are called bigots. I will NEVER be sorry for telling them truthfully that they ARE bigots.

Even if the truth hurts, lies hurt worse.

Nom Strategist Louis J. Marinelli Declares Me Most Hateful Lesbian!

Crossposted as a diary on Pam's House Blend

To clarify, since I can only type so much in the title, he declared me, on his public blog, "One of the most hateful members of the homosexual community I've ever come across". Ew... bad mental picture.... ew ew ew....

Anyway, for those amonst you who, I'm very certain, are curious how mean and nasty I must have been to the poor little hatemonger to earn such a grandiose declaration, it begins with Twitter.

Louis you see, had retweeted a hateful tweet from fellow bigot nutcase Reverand David Mapes wherein Mapes tweeted "#inaintafraidtosay Homosexual Marriage is wrong!". Mapes and I have a history now of arguing Bible accuracy but Mapes is another story. So I took Louis to task for the retweeting suggesting it proves bigotry and pointing him to an abundance of proof that the anti-gay stuff in the Bible is not actually anti-gay but anti-rape and anti-woman, and NOT actually about homosexuality at all.

Louis tweeted back that his was NOT a religious or Christian organization so he had no idea what I was talking about. So I asked him if not religion based, then give me his reasons proving my lesbian marriage is causing him or society any harm.

Like the bullying homophobic coward he is, he sidestepped the question by claiming since I'm not married, he didn't have to discuss my non-existant marriage as it would be "antithetical". I showed him my BC Canada legal marriage certificate in response.

To no one's surprise, he dismissed it as a worthless piece of paper that means nothing. (Which makes me wonder; if it's so worthless why do he and Maggie and Brian fight so hard to keep you USA queer folks from getting them like we Canuckleheads do?).

So I posted an entry on my blog showing his hateful tweets and pointing out how he had basically publicly revealed his bigotry, hatemongering and cowardice by showing his tweets and pointing out his refusal to answer simple honest questions, because to answer such questions honestly would, as the Prop 8 trial proved repeatedly, force him to admit gay marriage will do society good and no one will go to jail for saying they disagree.

Now poor poor victimized Louis felt that by only posting a couple of his tweets I was both misrepresenting him and making myself look like an angel, and so he dared me to post our entire Twitter exchange to my blog so people could, in his words, "see who the REAL hater is". I doubt he expected me to call his bluff though. Because you see, when I replied that I would be more than happy to do EXACTLY that if he just answered my honest question, I never heard from him again. He began to ignore me completely, as if I didn't exist.

Cut to Saturday, when Louis posted a blog entry about the Summer For Marriage Tour's stop in Albany New York. As Pam of Pam's House Blend herself has pointed out, attendance was abyssmal, showing how little support NOM really has. Of course, facts never stopped Louis from telling a good lie, so in this blog entry he posted pictures from the Albany event.

Not just any pictures though. No, these pictures were carefully taken from specific angles in ways designed to manipulate truth. His pictures both made the Supporter turnout look bigger than it was, and also attempted to make the pro-equality protesters look like big mean rude bullies.

Unfortunately for Louis, I happen to be a damned good photographer and something of an expert in Angle Manipulation, as my BCIT professor taught us SPECIFICALLY how to spot dishonest news photography designed to give a specific idea as to what the photo is showing.

So both in the comments on his blog and in an entry on my own blog, I deconstructed each of his pictures as they were shown on his blog to show EXACTLY how he used dishonest photography to distort the truth. And in so doing made Louis angry enough to completely unravel his lies by himself just to prove I was wrong about one detail.

He immediately posted another blog in which he posted more pictures to prove thata pair of elderly harmless black labs he had tried to claim were there to intimidate NOM supporters did in fact belong to some of the pro-gay protesters. Bravo Louis, I conced I was wrong about an assumption I made based on the photos YOU originally chose to use to fearmonger amonst your supporters.

However...

The NEW pics he posted actually hurt his case, BADLY. These pictures not only proved that the protesters AND the dogs were a safe respectable distance from the audience, but also clearly showed that audience was MAYBE two or three DOZEN people AT ABSOLUTE MOST.

And on top of that, if you'll scroll to the bottom of his second blog entry, just before the comments start, he posts a screencap of one of my comments to his earler blog, specifically the one dissecting the original dogs photo, as proof of my evil hateful ploy to deceive his followers with intentional lies against him, and closes his blog by saying "So much for this comment by one of the most hateful members of the homosexual community I have ever come across."

So I've apparently pissed Louis off so much by basically tricking him into exposing his lies and bigotry by himself that he's chosen to single me out as among the most hateful; homuh-seckshuals EVER because I used facts and logic politely to both prove AND trick HIM into openly confirming what all rational sane people already knew; that Louis is a hatemongering homophobic bigot fighting to stamp out equality SOLELY because gay folks creep him out.

If one's success is measured by the calibre of one's enemies, well then I've made the big time folks! I can sit at the Big Kids' table now because King Louis says I'm among the very worst of our kind! Yay for me!

You folks might note in the comments of his second blog, a LOT of people outright ridicule him for claiming that of me based on my polite, logical fact-driven comments. Some of whom had previously been supportive of him on older blog entries. Which means driving him to the point of condemning me personally has actually cost louis some supporters.

If that is the result of him declaring me a most hateful homo, I wear that badge PROUDLY. Because nobody with a brain, common sense, and and ounce of integrity reading his words and mine will ever believe a word out of his mouth now. Face it Louis, you've become one of our biggest assets in the battle for equality, because the more folks hear your insane hatemongering garbage? The more of them that will side with us in disgust of your bile.

Keep up the bad work Louis!

When An Honest Answer Will Screw You, Dodge The Question

At least that's the lesson I learned from my Twitter exchange with Louis Marinelli III, head of the Anti-Equality organization Protect Marriage; One Man One Woman. Which is like, so totally NOT a religious group, and like, fer sure in NO way in bed with NOM, and would like honestly I swear never condone hatespeech against homosexuals in their honorable battle to protect traditional marriage from t3h gayz.

You see I tweeted him. His Twiiter is @OneMan_OneWoman. At first I gave him some factual ACTUAL Bible quotes that prove the Bible can only be Anti-Gay is intentionally distorted. His reply?

@ShamanOfHedon We are not a religious organization, let alone a Christian organization. I have no idea where you are coming from.

So I replied linking him to any number of the literally HUNDREDS of webpages out there from various gay bloggers and news outlets that handily and undeniably prove the heavy Christian and Mormon fundraising that keeps him in business and his links to many religious organizations including many officially declared as Hate Groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Then I asked him, DARED him even, to give me a straight honest answer. I asked him for just ONE, only one, logical reason based purely in proven inarguable FACT, with absolutely NO religious background or basis whatsoever why my marriage was Wrong. He didn't answer for two days. I tweeted that his refusal to answer was exactly what I expected, because he HAD no answer. So he finally tweeted back, with this charming little pile of tripe.

@ShamanOfHedon Can't give you a reason because you're not married. Therefore, to talk about your 'marriage' to a woman is antithetical.

See what he did there folks? He doesn't HAVE to give me an honest answer because I'm not really married! Well gee whiz he sure has me there!

Oh wait...



Nope, he kinda fails with that reasoning. See folks, I'm Canadian, where religious nutcases HAVEN'T been successful in bullying away true equality. My marriage is every bit as legal and valid as his, and I'll bet good money a lot more loving and honest given how easily this asshole oozes lies and hatred like he's drinking water.

So only easily frightened folks already drinking this guy's Kool-Aid wouldn't see right through his response. Louis just proved, publicly, that he is a coward and a liar, always ready to use blatant dishonesty and distortions to lie his way out of being honest. He claims he can't answer me because I'm not married, which I just proved is a lie. We all know the truth.

He can't answer me because to give a truthful straight honest answer would shoot him in the foot, because if he can't sneak some religious basis into his answer to justify his actions, he's left with nothing but admitting it's because he hates gay people and he doesn't want us to be truly equal to him. He opposes Marriage equality because he is a hateful bigot and wants us to be forever second-class and sub-human. And if he gave me an HONEST answer, then he and his cronies buddies at NOM couldn't whine about how they're being bullied and persecuted whenever anyone calls them bigots, because an HONEST answer would require ADMITTING to bigotry. And Louis will NEVER do that. Whining about this completely imaginary victimization is his best way of getting god-fearing folks who never do any fact-checking to send him money.

Oh, one little post-script here. Since he weaselled out of answering my question, I asked him another one that I'm pretty sure he's too cowardly to answer.

I asked him how many starving homeless American children could he have clothed and fed with every dollar he's spent fighting marriage equality.

Let's see him sleep with hungry children on his eyes.

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.