#because it means I finally can call myself a transsexual

[isdalinarhot]

I like cis Dalinar 4 trans Sadeas for breeding kink reasons….. but I also like t4t sadalinar for depraved horny transsexual reasons…….. all I know is cis4cis sadalinar is for cowards and weirdos

[djnusagi]

It is 2003. I am 4 years old. Every day I'm dropped off at the daycare center in the community college my dad attends. All my friends there are girls. We play dress up with a big milk crate full of clothes. I want to wear one of the dresses. I am told it's not allowed because I'm a boy. It is 2005. I am 6 years old. I make friends with a girl in my class. She is my best friend and we are together every day. One day she says she can't be my friend anymore because I am a boy and boys are gross and I'm weird. I don't want to be friends with any of the boys. They all bully me and hit me and pin me to the ground. But that's ok because that's just how boys play. I have no friends anymore. It is 2006. I am 7 years old. I stare at a woman in an advertisement in one of my mom's magazine. She is beautiful. I want to grow up to look like her. I realize I will not grow up to look like her and will instead grow up to look like my father. The thought fills me with fear. I go up to my room and cry. I draw a picture of myself as a girl. I go to sleep praying that I will wake up as a girl named Sarah, and that my life as a boy will slowly fade from my mind. I try to kill myself through strangulation in the school bathroom. I obviously fail but my attempt on my life is discovered anyway. My parents are furious that I would be so selfish. It is 2009. I am 10 years old. I have one friend. He hits me and calls me a faggot but he is nicer than any other boys at school. I am over at his house. His mother speaks on the phone about a gay man they knew who got something called a "sex change". I do not know what this means but it piques my interest. I desperately want to know more, but I know that it's taboo and wrong.

It is 2011. I am 12 years old. I discover what "transgender" means. I spend hours on the computer, looking at websites about Male to Female Transsexuals. I treat the transsexual roadmap like a bible. I want to transition right away. I tell my school counselor. She is supportive, but implores me to consider simply being a gay male crossdresser like her son. I do not want that. I want to be a girl. I tell my parents. They tell me I have been brainwashed. That I will never be allowed to transition and that if they catch me looking at websites about the matter I will be punished. It is 2012. I am 13 years old. A year of constant begging and pleading has convinced my parents to take me to a gender specialist. I think I will finally get puberty blockers, or maybe even estrogen. I am interrogated for hours by an adult about my sexuality, sexual desires, and whether or not I like women's clothing. I like boys and girls, which I tell her, but I do not have much in the way of sexual desires, because I am 13. She takes this as deceit. At one point she touches between my legs and rubs my genitals through my pants. I do not want this. But I will endure it for the privilege of being allowed to transition. In the end she tells me there is no way I can be trans, because I am attracted to girls and interested in anime, which is a "male interest". It is 2013. I am 14 years old. Every day I roleplay in chatrooms with strangers. I do not want them to be sexual but they quickly take on a sexual nature at the insistence of my rp partners. I have been doing this for a year now. This is the only place I can be a girl. I exchange skype info with a few of these people and begin chatting regularly. A man in his late 20s asks me to be his girlfriend. I accept. At least he sees me as a girl. It is 2014. I am 15 years old. I have begun growing scraggly hair all over my neck. I have been in a daze for weeks. I cannot focus. I feel detached from my body. I am like a zombie. My dad takes me into the bathroom and shows me how to shave. He pats me on the back and tells me I am a man now. I go into my bedroom and cry. Later on my parents discover the roleplaying and my boyfriend. My ipod and my laptop are confiscated and the door is taken off my bedroom. I am placed under strict monitoring and supervision. I try to kill myself. I wake up alive in a hospital bed. I am taken to a large building where I sleep on a cot and am watched by doctors. I don't remember a lot from this time period. I went home and watched evangelion for the first time.

It is 2016. I am 17 years old. The door is put back on my bedroom. I am given back my iPod and am allowed to take my laptop into my bedroom by myself. I stay inside every day watching pirated anime because it lets me forget about reality. It is 2018. I am 19 years old. I get my first smartphone and immediately download grindr. I hook up with strange men who hide me from their wives. Being fucked by them is the closest I get to feeling like a girl. I find out about a student at my community college who sells a variety of sedative pills. It is 2019. I am 20 years old. I am spending all my money on xanax, percocets, oxycotin and similar pills. I take them more and more often and in higher doses over time. I start coming to class high. I fall asleep in the hallways from time to time. This is the only way I can numb the constant ambient pain caused by my unaddressed gender dysphoria. It is 2020. I am 21 years old. The whole world is locked down. I am forced to stop taking pills and replace it with copious amounts of weed, which is now legal. I am no longer in school. I am high all the time. I can't sleep at night. I want to be a girl so badly. It is 2021. I am 22 years old. I will start school again in September. I have started hormone replacement therapy, but I know it is too late for me. My body is mangled beyond repair by years of drugs. I have taken to excessive caloric restrictions in order to lose weight. The hormones don't do much, but they help me sleep better. I am sober now. It is 2024. I am about to turn 25 in a month. I see an article headlined: "my trans kid experienced a joyful, anxiety-free girlhod - all thanks to puberty blockers". I want to cry but the tears won't come. I know that should have been me. But it wasn't. I will never be a girl. I will never be a woman. I will never be happy.

[glitchdollmemoria]

just finally fully processed that like... i dont really suuuuuper identify with the label of "trans man". ive known for a while that im iffy about calling myself a man at all, usually if i do its in a sort of performative sense if you get what i mean? like the idea of a man. the concept. but im not a man in the sense of being a Binary Man, which is why i also tend to feel more comfortable calling myself more casual terms like guy or dude, or terms that include femininity like girlboy or ladyboy, or neutral terms, or just making sure to play around and mix up whether im calling myself a wannabe milf or a wannabe dilf at any given moment.

and i DO very much identify as trans, transgender, transsexual. those are all labels i regularly use for myself both externally and in my own mind. but ive realized my transness doesnt really change that i dont entirely identify as A Man. im like, schrodingers man. im a man when its funny or hot or when i appreciate the differences between my gender and my partners gender. or im a man when i feel forced to pick between only two options.

but ultimately when i do call myself a man, im never saying it in the way most men call themselves men. theres always a degree of separation there, like a fogged up glass wall. i can write messages in the steam. i can draw a smiley face. i can draw my lover. i can draw a funny dick with huge balls. and the men on the other side can do all the same, we can even play tic-tac-toe. but we arent ever going to be on the same side of the wall.

for the record, theres also a fogged up glass wall between myself and other women, but the glass has cracks in it - not enough that i could ever break through and be the same kind of woman as them, but enough that if im not careful, ill get cut and start bleeding all over the damn place. and so, growing up, i distanced myself from my own womanhood, less in the sense of avoiding other women but in the sense of avoiding acknowledging the similarities between their genders and mine. if i tried to interact with womanhood, id get cut, and then everyone would see what i was made of, and theyd say "womanhood cut you so you could never be a man".

but now that im on hrt, im beginning to realize just how many differences there are between myself and binary men. i knew i was nonbinary before hrt, but i wasnt able to see just how much. my body has given me so many new similarities, but they make the differences so much more obvious. so i start to try drawing on the woman side of the glass again. i can better see where the cracks are, so i can better avoid being cut. i draw messages, and a smiley face, and my lover, and absurdly huge boobs, and i play tic-tac-toe with the women on the other side. i realize i can almost be one of them, the same as i can almost be one of the men, and i can do it without getting cut as much. and when i do get cut, its not as much of an issue. i know how to bandage my wounds by now, at least better than i could before. there are more people who dont care about seeing my blood spill. there are more people who can see my blood and appreciate it for what it is. its not a big deal. its just how i was made.

and then i find the cracks in the other side of the wall, as im doodling on it, when my finger gets sliced on manhood. and i realize: my blood was never one or the other. because now people are looking at it and saying its the blood of a man. it was all one big joke the whole time. it was all fake. it was all just people threading strings between one thing and another, and coming to conclusions about their own perceptions without considering the reality of my body, of my existence. my blood, and muscle, and sinew, and bone, and hair, none of it is "man" or "woman" on its own. people are the ones trying to claim otherwise.

and all i can do is bandage my wounds. so what am i?

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Life Is Proud: Life Of Agony’s Mina Caputo: “I don’t like being called transgender or transsexual… I’m a beautiful human being”

Pioneering Life Of Agony singer Mina Caputo opens up about letting go of the past, spirituality, and the Pride movement during the third instalment of Kerrang!’s Life Is Proud campaign.

“You’re setting off landmines inside of me!” says Mina Caputo. We’re 35 minutes into a filmed interview which we are conducting as part of Kerrang!’s Life Is Proud campaign in celebration of Pride Month.

Our conversation thus far has embraced everything from the work of psychologist Carl Jung and his study of the dark side of the mind through to the disinformation of modern media, and on to the liberating impact of artists such as Robert Plant and Freddie Mercury.

The ​“landmines”, though, consist of a few questions about Mina’s remarkable career and her own journey to find herself. They do, indeed, trigger explosions – delivered with her customary frankness and forays into deeply emotional territory.

Mina’s story starts in Brooklyn where she was born in December 1973. At the age of one, she lost her mother to an overdose. Her father was also an addict – ​“I grew up pulling dope needles out of my dad’s arm,” she told Kerrang! last year – and when he OD’d she had to identify his body. Both moments, she says, armed her to face the real world, providing her with ​“spiritual juice” as she also began to seek solace in music.

Raised by her Italian-American grandparents in a brutally traditional atmosphere, Mina experienced a sense of gender dysphoria from a young age – something she carried with her when she formed alternative metal band, Life Of Agony, in her teens. Her sense of alienation increased as the band’s popularity grew and she continued to feel at odds with the bristling machismo, muscle-flexing and sheer violence within the East Coast scene.

“Life Of Agony were a very different band from the jump,” she says. ​“But that time taught me to protect my neck. It taught me how to be afraid of my own unique authenticity. The first five or 10 years of my career, we were abused. There were lots of comments, like I’m a gay junkie, because I looked differently and I sang differently. We were left out of scenes and we were left off bills. But I knew why: because were bad-ass and we rose to the top really, really fast. People didn’t like that. Other bands didn’t like that.”

For Mina, her quest to find herself had become a key issue which she had to address. In a conservative scene, her experimentation with her image and sense of sexual exploration came at a price.

“I started painting my fingernails and toenails with Jonathan [Davis] on a tour with Ozzy Osbourne and Korn [in 1996], and that was seen as rebellious!” she smiles. ​“And I started going onstage wearing a big women’s fur coat and getting so much shit for just being different – and for being someone unlike the scene had ever really seen. I was a trendsetter, a physical trendsetter. And being in that scene, it was horrifying.”

Things came to a head following the release of Soul Searching Sun, Life Of Agony’s third album, in 1997, when Mina finally decided her only option was to leave the band. Against all odds, LOA would reform in 2003 and continue to release a string of acclaimed albums, their story documented in the no-holds barred documentary The Sound Of Scars.

“I felt afraid, I felt like dying,” reflects Mina on the struggles she endured as she quit the band. ​“I felt like my cellular structure was continuously dying and I wasn’t alive or living, I wasn’t sharing my true self. I was definitely afraid. It took me to quit the band because I wasn’t being true to myself. I had to get away from my band, the label, everyone I worked with.”

A hugely varied solo career spanning over 10 albums and endless collaborations followed, but Mina still feels that history weighs heavily on her.

“No-one wants to let go of my past story. Every lame rock journalist starts of the article in the same way because there’s no more creative writing anymore. Everyone’s cutting and pasting. ​‘Mina Caputo – once Keith Caputo’,” she snorts.

“Everyone has to keep reintroducing the fact that I’m a freak, born anatomically a boy. No shit! I’m a different creature. I’m not trying to be a boy, or trying to fit into your dickhead masculine world! Nor am I trying to fit into the genetic female world. I don’t give a fuck! I don’t give a fuck about fitting into your marginalised soulless, fear-based spiritually bankrupt world. I’ve gone my own world, my own internal world. I’ve got my music. I’ve got small selection of friends. I’ve got my money. I’ve got my divine protection. I’ve got my studies. I’m not a stupid motherfucker! I study quantum physics! I study Hopi American prophecies! I study philosophy. I’m well-equipped for this fucking world!”

Mina’s bravery in the face of adversity remains inspirational. Experiencing the distrust of ​‘otherness’ during her childhood, she has battled against prejudice most of her adult life. And, yet, she admits that her decision to come out as transgender in 2011 was far from easy.

“It was very, very scary,” she reflects. ​“I didn’t tell a lot of people until my body started to change and I couldn’t hide it anymore. For the first year of hormone therapy, I kept it hidden.”

She is also honest enough to admit that, even a decade on, she still suffers from moments of self-doubt.

“It’s not like, ​‘I’ve arrived! I’m fucking whole!’” Mina says, triggering another explosion. ​“I battle with things every day. Some days I think about going back to living as a guy. The pressure of the world, of politics, of the garbage surrounding me – if I let it get to me, I can get sick. My immunity will collapse if I let the world fuck with my power and who I am. And it’s a good thing that I’ve been doing yoga for 30 years. I’ve been meditating for just as long. Thank the ancient gods and that I’ve downloaded the wisdom codes to give me the strength to carry on.”

Mina’s self-preservation and spirituality is evident in most of her interviews, and yet her quest has also contributed to her ongoing sense of frustration with the world she sees around her.

“I think I am a gentle and considerate human being and I believe in true equality. I want everyone to be in love with their lives and the planet itself,” she nods. ​“That’s what life is about, but there are people and organisations that try and get in the way of that so I get frustrated and angry about that.

“Society, the political paradigm, all of it – it’s one big farce, one big façade! It’s very inorganic and anti-life. I don’t care if you’re Democratic or Republican, nobody is leading with love. Nobody!” she continues. ​“Even in Britain. Your policies around trans people – and it’s the same in America – they’re trying so very fucking hard to continuously disempower the human species!”

The idea of codification is something that Mina frowns upon, so how does she view the Pride movement as a whole?

“Pride is a very ego-driven ideology and I work really hard to cut the strings of my ego,” she explains. ​“Pride means different things to different people. The LGBTQ community wants love from the outside world, but I think the LGBTQ community needs to start loving on one another. We’re never going to get respect from the rest of the world if you don’t do that. You have gay guys constantly coming down on trans girls, you’ve got trans girls coming down on trans girls, you’ve got a new fucking word every day and you can’t say this or you can’t say that.

“If Pride gives people a feeling of wholeness, then it’s a good thing. I know it makes a lot of people happy. But you’ve got to create your own circle in a sense rather than be defined by someone else’s narrative.”

Describing herself as ​“a lone wolf”, Mina concludes our conversation by pointing out her issues with the labels ascribed to individuals by society.

“I don’t like being called transgender, or transsexual, or trans-this or trans-that. I’m a beautiful human being. I’m a gender-creative child. I’m very different. I don’t subscribe to these one-dimensional ideas. My mind is too vast, my mind is like the Dao, you know? I wear my heart on my sleeve all the time and that’s what being genuine and authentic is all about,” she offers as one of her parting shots. ​“But if you’re asking me how I am? I’m full of love, full of harmony and thankfulness. What else do you want?”

[gynoidgearhead]

I feel old.

At the risk of confirming that I have finally shriveled up into a moldy crouton who represents an impediment to progress: It’s absolutely freaking me out to realize I’m going to have to navigate a version of the LGBTQIA community and discourse where there are people involved who are young enough to have completely missed a lot of the things that inform my positions about transgender issues. (Context here if you want it.)

I privately rolled my eyes at Natalie Wynn (of ContraPoints) for saying on Twitter that she sympathized more with “old school transsexuals” than trans women younger than herself, because she felt excluded when people were explicitly asking for pronouns instead of attempting to gender her correctly without asking. That was, I thought, ridiculous - gendering somebody correctly at a glance is a minefield, especially once you start to factor in nonbinary people; and accommodating people who couldn’t fit under that paradigm was, I thought (and still think), worth giving up a little hit of personal gender euphoria and vanity-stroking.

But... fuck. She’s only five years older than me. I am older now than I was when I started this blog by a wider margin. I’m a whole-ass decade older than some of the people dipping their feet into The Discourse on this site.

And today, I finally learned what Wynn meant on a more visceral and complete level, and I’ve felt it. I have stared into the void, and the void has stared back.

And I hate myself for it, because I know that it means I am now a Problem.

There are trans kids alive today whose first exposure to the idea of transgender people wasn’t through crass jokes. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who didn’t have to watch (or hear about) trans women getting dragged out onto Jerry Springer, to be publicly humiliated and sometimes even embroiled into physical fights. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who grew up with a more holistic and inclusive version of the internet, who have had access to information about transgender-related topics without having to go to dodgy websites. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids today for whom positive transgender role models have been present on television since they were pre-teens. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who had immediately supportive parents and who even may have begun transition before puberty. This is a good thing!

I am none of those things. That makes me sad, but I never thought of any of those things as alienating me from younger people. Today I finally found the one that I think does, and I don’t know how to deal:

There are trans kids alive today who have had access to online trans communities since they were old enough to go on the internet, and have thus been subjected to the griping of older trans women and transfem people about the ways public opinion and the media used to vilify trans women and transfem people specifically (before trans men were even on the media’s radar, really), but who missed the entire cultural backdrop from which that griping was born in the first place. This is... I don’t know, just a thing that has happened.

On one hand, the trauma that older trans people have had to live through is absolutely real. Past events are absolutely real, and there are things that younger people can and should learn from history. I know my understanding of queer culture has been deeply enriched by learning about the history of the movement. If I have things to say about my lived experiences, why shouldn’t I?

On the other... how long are communities really obligated to support backwards compatibility? At what point are older queer people like me just making our trauma into the next generation’s problem? I can’t even begin to count the number of times I thought to myself about an older queer person, “please just move on and accept that things are different now, that this is the cost of progress”. I thought that about people as young as Natalie Wynn. I’ve thought that about a lot of people I’ve run into on this site. Was I wrong to think that about them, or are younger people right to think that about me?

This post brought to you by the word “transandrophobia”.

I initially rolled my eyes at hearing that coinage: “‘Transmisogyny’ exists to describe the intersection of misogyny and transphobia,” I thought to myself. “The term ‘transandrophobia’ posits the idea of misandry as a dominant cultural force,” I thought to myself. (”They even missed the opportunity to just call it ‘transmisandry’,” I thought to myself.)

“‘Transmisogyny’ exists because trans women and transfem people have unique problems to deal with, and those problems just aren’t applicable to trans men and transmasc people and don’t even really have counterparts,” I thought to myself, not accounting for the possibility that the situation could have changed, that those problems that were breathtakingly obvious to me might mostly be footnotes today (I’m still not convinced that that’s the case, but I at least owed it to other people to stop and consider the possibility), and that new problems might have developed that need to be talked about, which means sometimes new language is needed.

So I learned something today. I’m not sure if I like what it says about me, and it makes me feel closer than ever to irrelevance and the dustbin of history, but I have to suck that up and deal with it like the adult that I am. I owe humility to future generations. I’ll be damned if I turn into the old coot who spends too much time scolding people who are mercifully young enough not to have felt the same wounds I did, let alone to the point of inflicting them myself.

[sapphos-darlings]

I’m proud of my mother. She was born in the 50s into a conservative family, if you can consider them conservative in rural Finland in the 50s - the father brought in the food, the mother stayed home tending to a flood of kids never having the energy for all of them, leaving them often on their own to look after each other, hoping they’d all make it through the day but in the end, no one had the time to make sure. They were hunters and farmers, traditionally Christian as far as I can tell. The community they lived in had a lesbian couple that everyone knew about but nobody talked about; it was taboo and shameful. Being gay wasn’t right. My mum’s straight, too, so this was easy for her to internalize.

She became a mother late at at 37. I’m her only child. First, I was gnc. She wanted a daughter she could dress up pretty and pamper. I wanted nothing to do with dresses and my favourite way to pass the time was to climb trees and roll around in mud. My mum gave up on the dresses very fast. I played with wooden swords and bows that my dad and my neighbours built me. The neighbours told my parents I’d grow up to be a vegan feminist activist, in words that made sense for the time. Everyone knew I was strange.

My dad was mostly drunk and away from home, so my mum raised me much on her own. She never implied in any manner that what I was doing was wrong or improper or that I wasn’t good as I was. I had sleepovers with girls and boys all the way until early teenage, at which point we separated naturally. She once told me she was afraid what’d happen when I’d first have “boy troubles”. I never had boy troubles. She wasn’t prepared for the troubles I was going to have, though.

At 10 years old, we went to a concert together. I fell in love with the singer of the band and spent my next two years fawning over him. I think at this stage, everything was going as intended. I don’t think she even remembers this phase now, because last year, she asked me in all honesty if I’m a lesbian.

I’m not a lesbian, but you might not know that.

I was scared that I was when I turned 12 and found myself attracted to Avril Lavigne’s promo picture in a CD store. I got over my freakout in about ten minutes, but my attraction to women (not Lavigne) survived. At 14, I was involved in a weird relationship with a girl my age. I don’t remember much of it other than that I was very bad at playing relationship, and I feel guilty she left her girlfriend for that mess. At 15, I fell in love for the first time with a girl I’d love for the next decade, desperately, painfully. Between there somewhere, maybe at 13, my mum found me crying in a closet because my best friend had a crush on me and I was scared to tell her I didn’t want to be in a relationship with her. My mum stumbled over the word “boy” when she asked what “he” wanted of me. I know she knew then, but we never voiced it.

I met a crossdressing gay guy around that time. He went by the name Cherry and wore cybergoth outfits and makeup, and he turned 18 a couple weeks after I met him. My mum let me go to his birthday party and stay until 1am, and later go visit him in the capital on my own over multiple occasions, once personally meeting him and giving him a hug. He was wearing platform boots and hair extensions and probably fishnets on some part of his body. She loved him because he was like a big brother to me, and never questioned the way he presented himself or worried about him being a bad influence to me, because he made me happy and I felt safe and excited to be with him. I also had a major crush on him which I think everyone was well aware of, but it was a safe crush, because I was 13 and he was 18 and like a big brother to me, and I was a girl and he was gay and everyone knew that, too.

When I was 16 and we went on a vacation in Europe, I spent all of my time finding the means to talk to the girl I loved at all times. I racked up an insane phone bill and couldn’t care less about the Pride parade in Rome, because I would rather lock myself up in an overheated Internet shack that was no wider than our bathroom at home to talk to her for hours online. Then she met another girl and chose her to be her girlfriend, only to tell me years later she hadn’t chosen me because she was too afraid of losing me, which made no sense to me. I felt like my world had ended. I didn’t stop crying for weeks and I signed myself up in a hospital because I was afraid I’d kill myself over the heartbreak.

I think it was around that time I started going to Pride, too, but regularly only when I met my next girlfriend around 18. I was always scared to go to Pride, not because I was afraid of showing I was LGBT but because I was scared of being the target of an attack like a bombing or a shooting. One year, we were the target of a gas attack, but I didn’t even know that, because I was marching at a different section of the parade and only heard about it later in the news. I don’t know if my mum was aware we were dating then with this girl, but I think she did. I think at this stage she’d already settled on me being a lesbian, it was just unspoken between us. She’d once asked me, because I wrote fanfiction most of my teenage and I always showed it off to her because I was proud of what I was writing and it never occurred to me it might have been inappropriate or offensive that I was writing about gay relationships. She vehemently denied this for years, because according to her, she’d never spoken the word “lesbian” in her life, much less referring to me.

She did speak it, last year, though. I do believe she spoke it when I was a child, too, when she asked me if I was a lesbian. I know she did. I said I wasn’t, because I’m not, but I understand that the evidence stacked up against me. Obsession with same-sex media, Pride parades, girlfriends, girl crushes, heartbreaks over girls, never once a mention of a real boyfriend or any material boy crush aside from those I had to a few chosen celebrities, fictional characters and idols, all of whom were unattainable and never as strong and overwhelming as the love I so obviously felt for women - I don’t blame her for thinking I was a lesbian. I’m not sure if “bisexual” entered her vocabulary at any time before last year.

At 19, I came out to her as transgender. She said she didn’t understand but that she’d try her best and support me no matter what as long as I would be happy, and what I was doing was making me happier, as I was obviously unhappy and struggled with difficult mental health issues for most of my life. She accompanied me to my meetings at the gender clinic and spoke with my doctors and nurses to understand. She tried her best to remember my pronouns when speaking in English, and even though she failed and has always failed, she did learn to call me by my new name without a fault. She’s never regarded me as a man of any sort and that’s alright, because I had and have her support no matter what. So here we were for the main part of my 20s - she thought I was a lesbian and knew I’m transsexual.

It’s only these past two years we’ve really talked about any of this. That’s the size of the taboo she was raised with in terms of the LGBT matters. She might have asked me once if I was a lesbian before, but even to herself, she’s denied ever voicing that word. Last year, or a bit over, when I was 27 or 28, she finally did consciously voice the question over the phone: am I a lesbian?

No. But that was the first time I ever vocally came out as a bisexual. I’ve never hidden it, but I’ve never come out either. I’ve always just either “been” or left it unspoken. All my friends have always known, and all of the Internet has always known, and I’ve never kept it a secret, but within the family, it’s been unspoken.

She was alright with that. We talked about my transition a little bit, if I was happy with it, if it made me happier, or if I regretted it. (It made me happier, I’m happy with it. She was relieved to hear that.) Other than that, we’ve never spoken of it, but all of this is why I respect my mum more than I probably have ever respected anybody else.

I’m everything she was taught to think of shameful and bad her whole life, everything she struggled to accept as a part of “normal”, as something natural. I’m exclusively female-oriented bisexual, gender non-conforming, and a diagnosed and transitioned transsexual. She couldn’t possibly have a child deeper in the LGBT than I am. And not once in my life did she make me feel like I wasn’t good as I am, like I wasn’t allowed to be myself and express who I am and look up to the people I did. She always made sure I’d be safe to her best ability, but her concern never restricted my freedom to be myself and explore my identity, and her concern was never made to be my problem, or something I had to take responsibility of.

And this year, because the pandemic had moved the Pride parade by a few months and because that meant that my best friend (that girl I dated when I was 18) probably couldn’t join me because of her career situation, I asked mum if she’d come with me to Pride, because I don’t want to go alone. I fully expected this to be the last thing she couldn’t do. Earlier, she’d asked me to come to a gay movie with her because she really wanted to see it but couldn’t make herself go alone. That had been a throughoutly difficult experience for her - yes, she’d enjoyed the movie, but it had made her feel very conflicted because of the values she’d been raised with and the prejudices she was trying to fight. A Pride parade just seemed way beyond there - I just needed to ask because yes, I did need someone to go with, but also because I wanted to show her that I wanted to take her, and that she’s welcome to be a part of my life even in the ways that we’ve always been afraid to discuss. I’m happy to share my identity with her openly, because she’s been accepting and understanding of it and never given me a reason to feel like I can’t be honest with her. It was more symbolic than anything. And like I expected, she did hesitate, but what I didn’t expect was that she’d tell me “yes”.

I’ve never been more proud of her than at that moment. I know how much it means to her to say “yes, I will come with you to Pride”. She had to reassure herself that for her, it doesn’t mean anything else than that she’s proud of me, and supports who I am and my right and the right of everyone like me to be who we are. I reassured her about it too - Pride is full of straight allies. Pride is full of parents, partners and children, even dogs and horses of people who are LGBT. She’s not making a statement about herself by being there. She doesn’t need to come out as gay to join Pride with me. She can just be there for me.

But it means the world to me that she agreed.

I’ve quite literally never been the girl she wanted me to be, and my friends were never the friends she imagined her child having when she was planning for me. But she’s never, in any manner, implied or let me think that she didn’t love me. She’s never made me feel like I wasn’t right for being who I am. She never let her doubts or questions or concerns or prejudices keep me from living my life and pursuing happiness as it came to me. Not once.

And for that, I’m proud of her. I couldn’t have a better mother.

[destroyyourbinder]

stumbling blocks

This is why I can't uncritically believe that gender transition is good, that gender transition is justified, even if some people who have done it are satisfied with their decision. It is because to believe it is good or justified is to believe this.

There is a special class of female people who cannot thrive so long as they leave their body parts intact and unmodified, so long as they do not conceal from others that they have them. These people cannot live their best lives, or perhaps even tolerable lives, unless they undergo medical intervention to make various aspects of their bodies imitate various aspects of male bodies and unless other people studiously ignore or never know that they are female. This fact about this special class of female people has absolutely nothing to do with how female people are generally treated-- as subordinates, as sexual objects, as lacking full personhood legally and socially-- but instead comes from somewhere else entirely. If conditions improved so that no girl grew up scared of men raping or killing her, if conditions improved such that a girl did not grow up feeling like she would have to fight the weight of human history to achieve anything at all, if conditions improved so that female puberty did not mean the death of a woman's participation in her own potential, then there would still be a class of female people who wished to become like men and live like men, and who would feel horror at their own bodies insofar as they still were distinguishable, somehow and somewhere, from the body of someone male. In a world with no men there would still be a class of female people with inchoate longings for their breasts to disappear and something else, maybe incomprehensible in this female-only world, to happen to their genitals. Perhaps you could say that in a major city's hospital delivery ward today there will be a few infant girls who will be destined to be miserable, someday, so long as they cannot get a surgeon to slice open their bodies so that they and everyone they know can never be reminded again of the femaleness of their own flesh. Perhaps we can call this fact about this special class of females an illness, even though there is no other illness like this. There is no other illness that we say is synonymous with a desire, where the cure and the fulfillment are the same.

I truly can't believe that there is such a condition, that it is inevitable there are these such not-women, and they ought to be made more perfectly-not through scalpels and syringes. I can't believe that there are women who are essentially, necessarily limited by their womanhood, even a womanhood understood and lived without misogyny whatsoever. I can't believe that any woman's ideal and most meaningful life could depend fundamentally on rearranging her body and erasing herself as a woman in public view.

Are there happy trans men? I'm sure. Are they happy because they transitioned? Who knows. People incorporate all sorts of things into their growth and life stories, including those things deeply traumatic and those that never should have happened. Trans people often present themselves as infinitely fragile, but like all people, they are more resilient than they give themselves credit for. So I have to ask, given that there are those who have transitioned or had transgender-related interventions who are now happy, who claim they could not have even survived otherwise: if they would have failed to survive, what would have killed them?

Gender dysphoric people often cite the lives of older transsexuals and the most marginalized gender non-conforming people in order to give voice to their fears that their lives will be intolerable, dangerous, perhaps deadly, if they are not converted into the other sex or some reasonable facsimile. But inner identity turmoil did not kill these people: it was HIV/AIDS, gay bashing, violent johns, police brutality, medical neglect, alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic violence. These things are the result of discrimination, marginalization, misogyny, homophobia, institutional violence: all social and environmental factors. Transition is supposedly justified by something else entirely; as trans people remind us, not all of those beaten by their fathers or the cops or their husbands or their pimps end up wanting to be a different sex.

So then we cite those who died by suicide because they could not survive themselves. This is often the crux of the whole thing: it is justification for the utmost urgency of gender treatment and justification for the most radical forms of medical intervention, such as genital surgery and the transition of children. Transition may still be compelling for those who understand that they are trying to hide from the cruelties of the world, but it becomes a much sadder journey, one traversed with grief and depleted of personal validation. For those who believe or fear that the existence of their own bodies as they are will force their hand against themselves, it must seem liberating to be freed from this bizarre kind of danger: the danger that their body demands its own destruction should it fail to comply with the desires of its animating force.

What is this desire or need to be male and seen as male at the potential cost of one's life? Why would a female person hold both the desire to be male and the desire to die so long as being male is not realized? It seems reckless for medical professionals to treat such distress, a perverse threat against oneself, with something that purports to ease the threat by making the body comply. One should not make a policy of caving to a dictator, even if the dictator is yourself, and even it is you that gets to make your own demands. Because the question is the same as with all such narcissists: what if the body ceases to comply, what if the demands for compliance change, what if it's never enough?

I could manage to tolerate-- barely-- my own breasts so long as they were small, but in my early twenties they ballooned, and I wanted to die. I truly, deeply wanted to die. And then my scope broadened and broadened until I found myself staring at my toes in flip flops, next to the hairy and knobbly toes of my male friend J., and I thought the subcutaneous fat on my feet was an excellent reason to declare the end of all hope and go home to a furtive fistful of Benadryl and Tramadol and Valium and Vicodin, washed down with brandless 'tussin from the back of the fridge. Nobody noticed I was all fucked up, in and out of sleep for a couple days; I spent months of my life like this, often triggered by the most humiliating (then and now-- for different reasons) bullshit: the length of my palms, peach fuzz, the diameter of my areolas, the wear patterns of my jeans, a single "ma'am". Gender dysphoria is peculiar; it is both self-avoidance and self-holding one self-hostage. It's the pattern of many self-harming, self-dramatizing practices; there's a reason many trans men have eating disorders or are cutters.

Transmedicalists might stop me here to fret about framing gender dysphoria in terms of these mechanisms. But absolutely none of this follows the pattern of a neurological disorder. Who truly has a phantom beard or phantom lack-of-thigh-fat? What person unable to recognize the left side of their body as their own is ragingly envious of exactly half of everyone they meet? Nobody with neuropathy of their feet rigidly pretends they do not have them in public. And please tell me where "Ms." and "Mr." are represented in the body map.

When we revisit the question above, why hold both the desire to be male and the desire to die so long as one is not male, this all looks tremendously stupid. Female trans people have tied themselves to a chair and seem to be holding the end of the rope: why not just let go of the whole thing and be freed? And indeed, this is what many transphobes note and thereby ask of trans people. Just shut the fuck up, stop being so sensitive, just accept yourself already, you're never going to be really the other sex, quit whining about facts and threatening us over reality, go ahead and kill yourself and see if we care. So the trans solution to justifying themselves in the face of invalidating, insensitive-to-cruel questioning of dysphoria-logic is to locate the desire to be the other sex outside of their realm of responsibility. See, I was tied to the chair since I was born, and I really can't reach the knots! I have been cursed with this desire to be male and cannot be rid of it, so the only thing that can be done is to be rid of what conflicts with this desire.

What rid me of the majority of my dysphoria was not desperately trying to reach the knots. I could not "just accept myself". I did not "learn to love my body". I remained "too sensitive" no matter what I tried. The ironic key to dissolving my gender dysphoria was telling the transphobes that they were wrong. Not about biological sex or its permanence, about pronoun usage or whether trans women were real women and trans men real men, but about the fact that gender dysphoria was unjustified, stupid, a gratuitous sign of privilege, a plaything for the bored or a figment of psychosis.

I was not crazy: being female was truly bad. I was not delusional or dumb: I was channeling directly the history of women's existential despair. I was not a spoiled brat: I had suffered enough and did not want to suffer anymore.

When my dysphoria became justified it finally became within my reach, and slowly, slowly, I picked apart many thousands of twists and ties.

Was I responsible for my own dysphoria? In many ways, no. I think this is the tremendous fear of most trans people, and female ones in particular. If they take responsibility for healing their dysphoria they are supposedly responsible for its genesis, and this is unbearable. This phenomenon, more than any other, is what tells me gender dysphoria is not neurological, not inborn, not the ensoulment of a man in a woman's body, not just "identity" and its affirmation. It would not be unbearable to be saddled with causing your own distress at being female unless you really felt somewhere that your distress was for good reason and caused by factors outside your control.

I really didn't need to be responsible for it through and through to take enough responsibility to guide my way out. Maybe my head is truly predisposed in some way to have trouble with existing in a sack of meat or to set me in these stupid traps, but in a world where women were truly safe and free, I don't think I would have fallen into this one. I got to the point where I did not need to believe my dysphoria was inevitable or innate, a disease or disability or problem with my brain, to believe that it was ok for my feelings of rage and hopelessness to be channeled in that way. I did not need to prove those who challenged me wrong by proving that erasing myself would fix my lot, dammit. I could use my agency instead to tell them to fuck off. I could learn I had the right to validate my own self rather than to bounce in devastating insecurity between the opinions of Supporters and Enemies. And gradually and almost without realizing it, I found that it was not my body that was the problem, it was not my rejection of my body that was the problem, it was what my body meant, what my body supposedly allowed others to do to me, that I was not meaningfully allowed to object to any of this, and that there was a question in society about whether or not there was a me at all alongside the body. My dysphoria had gone inside out, gone color-inverted, I found old angry girl-child change in the upturned pockets of pants I didn't know I was still wearing.

My stumbling block is that I can't believe transition is more justified than a girl looking at her lot and saying: this is a bunch of fucking shit, peace out of this body, peace out of this world. I don't usually use such language, but here I am. My stumbling block is that I can't believe this girl needs her tits cut off more than she needs someone to tell her: I know. My stumbling block will always be that I don't believe the best use of an angry and desperate girl's crushed-but-surviving autonomy is for decision-making about which cosmetic surgery she'll get. My stumbling block will always be the part of me that sees above, the part that sees the twins of my own grief at seeing my body and sees my girlfriend's grief at seeing her scars.

And so a woman is never ruined, wasted, an idiot, ugly, crazy, a freak for choosing hormones or surgery. She is making a bargain. Informed consent goes far beyond understanding the medical consequences of injecting testosterone, of removing breast tissue or the uterus and ovaries; informed consent means understanding the terms of the bargain, that one is making a bargain at all. So long as we frame transition as surviving oneself, whether for reasons of treating a medical condition or simply tolerating the unfortunate condition of not-being-male, we cannot hope to approach informed decision-making for anything about transitioning genders. (How do the medical professions deal with approving the reasonableness of a patriarchal bargain? There is a reason I don't believe they should.)

And so long as critics of transition-- whether conservative or "compassionate" gender critical feminists-- frame the women and girls who are attracted to it as delusional, stupid, spoiled weirdos they will drive both the desire and inability to take responsibility for healing it even deeper. My challenge to you if you fall in this camp is to think harder about your own bargains. If you're straight or bi you've made more of them than any angry asshole with a dirt-stache and blue hair you could possibly meet on Tumblr. If you're a lesbian you've made more than you'll probably want to dig out. It was lesbian collective inability to see their own bargain-making that convinced me I was trans and not just an unfeminine and angry dyke: I wasn't bold, brave, full of pride, always knowing who I was, with every decision I made, including those about the shape and color of my shirts and the branding of my personal care products, always being an authentic expression of who I was meant to be. I mean, if I had to deny my entire life-context to discover what desires were deep inside me beyond my responsibility I hoped they were bigger and grander than wearing flannel and talking about my rubber dick.

Honesty could have only helped me realize that women have it shit and lesbians have it real shit, and we all have to figure out how to deal with it in the end in a way that doesn't keep us up all night. So: what do you have yet to be honest about? How are you dealing with this whole raw deal, anyway? What keeps you up all night, and what have you put to bed, and what's lurking underneath?

My final stumbling block is this: I think telling other women these things is more important than letting us all keep it inside, to our own little private selves, imagining we're surviving so long as we don't reveal exactly how. I think telling other women these things is more important than telling them they can go to some guy with a knife who will take care of it all. Your decision, though.

[cyberwavelit]

Throwback Transsexual - Short Story

“During the early 21st century another sexual revolution took place that saw the rise of diverse sexual identity. The liberation movement of the previous century, which had been created by marketing companies to advance consumerism, had reduced the populace’s morale apprehensions, including sexism, racism, and classism. Although race, sex, and gender seemed to remain an issue until the 27th century. Thanks to scientific progress the human species was able to switch gender with the help of surgical procedures and hormone treatments. Because of this, the human species is also known as ‘selective hermaphrodites.’ Although this notion of diversity was common there were still many who believed that the division of male and female into further sub-genders was salacious and immoral. There were many protests.”

The interactive lesson paused. A panoramic hologram showed a 21st century street. It teemed with human life. Short, small, large, tall; they came in a variety of shapes, genders, and sizes.

“I have further questions. This interests me.” Said the viewer, moving a finger over the frozen image. “Simulation, take me to 2020.”

The viewer was shown a series of personas to choose from. The finger picked what appeared to be a male, with the caption: “Androphilia cisgender.”

The chamber morphed into a virtual space, instantly converting the circular room into the same city street. Cars and buses surged through New York’s financial district. The male figure stepped out into the roadway and waved his hand to pause the simulation. He realized how cumbersome and archaic their transports were. In the mirror he could see his own reflection. The viewer accepted his role as male.

The protests from the lesson were occurring across the traffic, where people had been holding signs and marching in a circle. They were still frozen when the unassuming avatar, in blue jeans and a shirt with a heart, approached them and pressed “Play.”

“What the f–.” Said a portly man with callused hands. He wore a t-shirt of an older man with a beard with a heart on his palm. “Where’d you come from?”

The avatar stared at the impassioned simulations and wondered what they would do if they knew they weren’t real. “I’m a student, of sorts. I have questions.”

The sign read, “Save the children.” The overfed man stared at the way he was dressed, “Get the hell outta here, kid. People like you don’t have the right to be called human.”

“I am not human.”

“Ah ha! See!” The man’s female concubine chimed in. “This poor boy don’t even know what he is! You belong with them.” She pointed. Her sign read, “Words R Important.”

Chaos broke out. Another group was opposing the protesters. These men and women did not have signs and appeared to be younger and less happy. They shouted in protest of the protesters and wore lighter colors, mostly neon and pink.

The viewer stood in the middle and studied both sides. Over the constant vocalizations he could not understand the purpose of this forum. To his left a woman stepped from the youthful crowd and held up one of her fingers.

She held it like a weapon, “Trans voices need to be heard so shut up! How do you expect people to defend themselves if they can’t speak!”

The player-controlled avatar spoke softly, “How should I defend myself?”

The woman froze and finally said. “I mean I guess you can talk, but don’t expect anything to change, you bigoted piece of sh–.”

“I ask that you not judge me and I will not judge you.” He interrupted. “And we can all live in harmony. Or would you rather not have it that way? Without two opposing sides there cannot be a conflict. Therefore, one side must oppose the other. It is the law of nature. When one ideology comes into being, so too does its opposite. But why do you fight if you are the same species? From what I understand of this conflict, you want accommodations to make your lives easier, yes?”

The woman nodded and rolled her eyes. “There are trans people suffering right now because they’re bullied in schools and rejected by society.”

“Things are bad all over.” He said. “No one is going to help you do it on your own. That would defeat the purpose of life.”

“You’re insane. Go to hell!”

He began to feel something he had never felt before, frustration. “I do believe that adaptation is important to survival but have you evaluated the consequences of your actions? Is it worth it?

“Yes.”

“No.” said the viewer, ending the simulation. “I didn’t think so.” There were more questions but it no longer mattered, especially since the truth was so malleable. The right side was not well articulated. Both sides had been disorganized and blinded by anger. It wasn’t their fault. Weakness in the human species wasn’t their downfall, it was their unending need to feel enlightened and their propensity for conflict. Which, the necrefertarian supposed, wasn’t all that bad. As the room returned to normal the squid-like being activated the shower module and began to mate with itself.

[lesbianfeminists]

We, lesbians, will get to say who we are and who we are not. Politically, sexually, emotionally, within our communities. We will have space to discuss owning ourselves. I’ve been wanting to do this issue for a year or two, in part to explore how we understand “lesbianism” in the present, in part to respond to attacks on lesbian identity. I believe the ideas that lesbians can sleep with men, that faggots can call themselves dykes and dykes can avail themselves of male privileges by calling themselves faggots, that men can be women and women who pass do it because they’re simply “playing with gender” — are meant to divide and destroy us, to drive us literally out of our own minds. But I feel already driven out. Or more like I’m driving a car with no brakes down a side road in the mountains and it keeps picking up speed. I don’t know how to contain myself and make a nice, neat, clear argument. I have to finish ten books first, reread everything that came out in the last twenty years, find out exactly what deconstruction and essentialism mean. How am I going to do that, edit the magazine, go to work and have a life? But I’ve got to try. I understand lesbians’ claim to own ourselves (well, it’s a stance more than a reality) as heroic. Our minds, our bodies, our labor, our sex, our heritages are constant staging grounds for war. Vastly out-powered on every front, we manage to survive and, for moments, thrive. Owning ourselves is, after all, no small feat. That lesbians are different from “women” means something. Consider, for a minute, women’s bodies: women have been owned for centuries. This isn’t just some old-fashioned out-of-date political conceit — it’s why the abortion rights fight is so ugly, why fundamentalism is surging across the globe. The appropriation of female labor — including reproductive labor — is the cornerstone of social organization in the world we know. The resurgence of “family values” is the brother-movement to the ethnic “cleansing” movements we’re seeing worldwide. These movements are a strategic reestablishment of hierarchical male power that positions individual men to rule and fight for rulership and resources. But in order for men to do this, women have to be kept in line. Men create ideas about what woman are in order to control them. These ideas vary from culture to culture, but their use is the same: to isolate females, to control their reproductive functions, to use their physical labor to support and enrich males, to keep females out of public spheres as much as possible — certainly out of positions of power.  ... Other lesbians of course have written papers and books on the way these things work — I think of Marilyn Frye and Monique Wittig in particular. But the point is: a lesbian is in opposition to a “woman” by her very being. Of course we have to work on men’s terms to make a living, but even so we mostly rent our bodies out. A lesbian body is, theoretically, a body that no man owns. Which may be why so many folks are out to “bend” the definition of a lesbian out of recognition. If the word lesbian loses its power and meaning, but the distribution of wealth, resources and opportunity remains overall the same, who benefits? In the midst of the San Francisco Bay Times’ current “gender debates,” Caryatis Cardea wrote: “If a woman who sleeps with both females and males is a lesbian; and, if a man who submits to surgical procedure to bring his body in line with his acceptance of sex role stereotypes, is a lesbian; and if a straight woman whose spiritual bond is with other females is a lesbian, then what is a female-born-female who loves only other females? Soon there will be no logical answer to that question.” Every gay paper is filled with these “gender debates.” It’s the ’90s — you are me and she is he and we are all together (okay, so the Beatles did it 20 years ago, that only means they were ahead of their time, not that we’re just following an old groove, right?). Transsexual men and their friends call lesbians hate-mongers, fascists and “essentialists” for not opening every lesbian and women’s organization to them. It’s in vogue for everyone to be a bi-sexual (the “natural” human state, which, oddly enough, makes lesbianism “unnatural” all over again). ... Many of us, who perceive men as destroying the world, are reluctant to give up the old dichotomies: men war, women nurture. We can argue forever (and seem to be) about whether it’s being born with a womb or being socially constructed that makes us “women” without being able to come to a final answer. But the more we understand attributes (self-reliance, adventurousness, curiosity, domesticity) as options instead of innate qualities, the more choices we have as individuals. Lesbians tend to choose from the full range of available attributes (and occasionally invent some of our own). That doesn’t mean we don’t know where we live — all of us must choose, at some point, whether or not to cast our lots with the “women.” Individual choice alone does nothing to change power structures. Men can (and do) call themselves sensitive and understanding in order to maintain their power in new social climates (Chevron cares). Queer Nation has picked up the idea that women and men are “created” and given it a popular spin: get behind the fluidity of identity, don’t be a rigid role-monger, don’t cling to your label like a reactionary to a life-boat, be flexible. It’s an attractive idea. So attractive that you’d think somebody would have thought of it before the late ’80s…. As many womyn, particularly womyn of color, have noted, the more you have power, the more you don’t use “labels” to define yourself (you don’t see a lot of Rockefellers in the midst of these debates). It’s the use of the “label” that states: I have to assert my own identity. All of us who have to consciously name ourselves have, at some point, been uncomfortable with this (if for no other reason than that someone we don’t like can claim the same label). But you can’t change power structures by simply proclaiming these “roles” (gender, class, race) culturally constructed, and therefore bourgeois baggage. Sure, roles are absurd — and they exist for reasons. “Deconstructing” them without challenging the power of those who make them necessary doesn’t accomplish anything — it’s only playing dress-up with fancy words. This idea — everything is fluid, we can change the world by blowing straight people’s minds, we can overcome our origins — is nothing new. European and American cultures have a long “bohemian” tradition, and gender-bending has, in fact, been around since at least Shakespearean times. It’s a parlor game the privileged play, and they let some of us “others” in so the game doesn’t seem rigged. It doesn’t go to the root. And along the way it accomplishes the power structure’s dirty work: it makes it look like we can “transcend” who we are and all become “human.” Race and class become things we can shed — and should try to. Womyn-only space is invaded and neutralized. Which is why it seems to me so important for us to do the work of claiming ourselves. Our own bodies, our pride in them. As often as we have to.

“Notes for a Magazine,” Elana Dykewomon in Sinister Wisdom, spring/summer 1993. 

[secretkelly]

My Wish To Stop Oppression

MY WISH – STOP OPPRESSION

Stop Oppression. We can do it if we just be ourselves with out word slinging and violence. Why is it we transpeople feel we need to talk back to a group of guys that clocked us in public? Why do we need to escalate it so it’s another transsexuals death in vain? A beautiful individual working her/his way down the path of peace within her/his self. The peace they will never be allowed over an escalated argument or dating a man or woman under false pretenses. I’ll go more into this topic later. It’s a minute out of our day that we were name called, but we have 23:59 to keep on our path and the rest of our lives. I say let’s bury our pride and worry about ourselves and safety first. Too many transsexuals deaths come from escalating the issue of hate. We think standing up and yelling back at the person/persons emotionally bruising us is going to make them change their mind or change what was said that made us so mad. I can tell you it won’t. I have always believed you can always catch more bees with honey. When we decide to take part in the word slinging it escalates the hate more and gives them the catalyst to make it easier to physically harm us. Who knows if that day it will be a beating or death. Why play with fire people?

I don’t get why we give these people filled with hate so much power over our lives? We should worry more about what we think of ourselves and what our loved ones think, before instigating a mob of haters. So they called us a fag, a man, a woman, a dyke, a pervert, or whatever lame attempt they can throw at us let them have it. In the end we know who we are and what path we are on. Let him have his view, if thats what it takes to keep us safe for another day. We still have our view, he hasn’t taken it from us. The media hasn’t stripped us of who we are, like they’ve done to so many of us. Hold dear to things in our life we value and love. Remember that tomorrow we most likely won’t even remember the incident the day before. This keeps us safe and gives us the time we need to achieve our genders we need to be viewed as, live as, and love as. Escalating hate in an instant we can have this ripped away from us. Remember time is precious, life is precious, and lying on a morgue table still pre-operative is not a wish I have for myself. My wish is to get these men and women that have beat us and murdered us not to have the option of a slap on the wrist with a thing called an insanity plea. That judicial systems finally start seeing these crimes as hate crimes. We need to stop giving these people the angle they need to be set free for our deaths.

Lastly with ladies and gentleman that go around tricking men and women on dates. I beg you to think of your actions before you keep practicing this habit. I realize you need to be treated as your gender, and maybe you think in your head you can’t be treated solely as that gender if they know. I assure you this isn’t true! Let’s remember our dead. Let’s remember the beautiful teen Gwen Araujo who played with fire and in the end was burned. No she did not deserve this, she was a teen girl wanting to do what every teen girl does her age. It would be great that we were blessed in that way, but we as transwomen have limitations we need to understand this and embrace this. To protect ourselves. To stop our murders. Let’s stop giving these people of hate an excuse to dismiss who we are so easily by killing us. I am sure I’ll get many debaters on this, saying this is cowardly, but dear it’s smart. Why throw away your life so easily? Why do you feel the need to give these people who you only knew for that instance so much power on who we are? This issue goes on a lot with transmen also tricking women, violence is less in these instances, but please remember Brandon Teena, another young transperson wanting to be viewed as what he was, a man. He wanted to fall in love like everyone does, but loving under false pretenses under any admission will never work out. There are those rare and lucky cases where tricking did turn out good for the transmen and women, but don’t base these rare chances on fact or your fate.

Let’s talk about what we should do. Let’s ignore the people that don’t understand us on the streets, and put our anger towards getting our voices heard politically, by openminded supporters, and by each other. Let’s stop hating on one another and focus this energy on getting transwomen and men jobs, opportunities, and equal rights. Let’s try to figure out a plan to make sex work less of a stigma of what transsexuals are and do. Let transwomen and men that have the means open businesses and hire other transpeople. Many are doing this now, let’s stick to doing this. Let’s work on helping our weak and making them strong, instead of focusing on the people that would rather see us dead. Let’s donate money to activist groups that are fighting for our rights in Washington, in our counties, and in our cities. My wish is to become a more unified, caring, and helping community rather than a community that reads one another, because one girl is less transitioned than the next. My wish is the lover of transwomen and men stand with us to battle discrimination and oppression. My wish is to see less transsexuals having money for sex and more mainstream jobs, even if it’s just stripping. My wish is to bring our sisterhood and brotherhood together instead of transmen being on one side and transwomen on the other. Let’s stop oppression now. Let’s use our voices to uplift, instead of defending all the time. Most of all let’s stop our murders, that’s my wish. XoXo Kelly

[pope-francis-quotes]

28th May >> (@VaticanNews) #Pope Francis #PopeFrancis In a wide-ranging interview with Mexican media network Televisa, #PopeFrancis responds to a series of questions concerning his pontificate and the state of the world.

Pope Francis interview addresses violence against women and more

In a wide-ranging interview with Mexican media network Televisa, Pope Francis responds to a series of questions concerning his pontificate and the state of the world.

By Vatican News

Mexican journalist and writer, Valentina Alazraki, has been the Vatican correspondent for Televisa since 1974. In an exclusive interview, published on Tuesday, she asks Pope Francis questions ranging from abortion to migration.

Building bridges not walls

One of the first questions regards the border wall with Mexico. Pope Francis responds by repeating what he has always said, namely that “whoever builds walls ends up a prisoner of the walls he builds... Instead, those who build bridges make friends, shake hands, even if they stay on the other side... But there is dialogue”, he says.

Young people

Turning to the subject of young people, the Pope warns of how youth risk “losing their roots”. He confirms his advice “for young people to talk to old people, and the old to talk to the young, because... a tree cannot grow if we cut off its roots”. The Pope encourages youth to “dialogue with the roots, receive culture from the roots. Then you grow, you bloom and you bear fruit”.

Violence against women

The Pope also addresses the issue of violence against women. Without attempting to give what he calls “a sociological explanation”, the Pope does say that “women are still in second place” and, often, being in second place can mean “to be the object of slavery”. Here he gives the example of prostituted women and speaks of his own visit recently to a rescue shelter in Rome. The Pope goes on to praise the role of women, saying “the world without women doesn't work”.

Relationship with the media

In the interview, Pope Francis responds to a question regarding his relationship with the media: “I feel comfortable”, he says, “I tell you the truth, don't I?” The Pope admits that, sometimes, “the questions may be more difficult to answer”, but he thanks journalists for their patience. “Some questions have made me think”, he continues, giving the example of the trip to Chile when journalists asked him about alleged cases of sexual abuse in the country. “It was largely some of the questions asked with much respect on the return trip”, he said, that helped him realise he had not been adequately informed on the subject. The Pope says that when he returned to Rome, he “thought, prayed, asked for advice and decided to send an Apostolic Visitor, who uncovered what I did not know”. And that “was a help”, said the Pope.

The McCarrick case

The interview also touches on communicating information and the need to clarify matters to both the press and people in the pew. Here Pope Francis confirms how “we have to explain”, especially when it is a question of “presumption of innocence. The McCarrick case was different, says the Pope, because “it was obvious”. Which is why he was able to “cut to the chase before the trial” and remove McCarrick from both the cardinalate and the clerical state.

The Viganò case

The interview continues with a question about the Pope’s silence over unanswered accusations by former Nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. “Those who made Roman law say that silence is a way of speaking”, he begins. He also says that, in the case of Viganò, he made a choice to trust the honesty of the journalists: “I said to them: "Look, you have everything, study for yourselves and draw the conclusions… And the result was good, it was better than if I started to explain, to defend myself”. Pope Francis confirms he knew nothing about McCarrick: “I said that several times, that I didn't know, no idea… otherwise I wouldn't have kept quiet”. He again explains his silence, saying “firstly the evidence was there for you to judge”, and secondly because of the example of Jesus: “in moments of viciousness you can't speak, because it's worse. Everything is going to go against you. The Lord taught us that way and I follow it”.

Migrants and refugees

The Pope also answers questions about migrants and refugees, something he calls a top priority in today’s current world scenario. “The phenomenon of migration is such that I have taken in my hands the Migrants Section of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development,” he says, because every day we receive news of more deaths in the Mediterranean. Pope Francis comments on the problems that arise from some political leaders enforcing policies that close ports of entry, obliging boatloads of migrants and refugees to return to dangerous waters. He reiterates his belief that not only must we have the heart to “welcome”, but that we must follow up with the unique process of “accompaniment, promotion and integration”.

Pope Francis acknowledges that not all countries are able to follow up on that process, but he invites leaders to take into consideration how far they are able to do so, and that requires both dialogue and agreement, he says.

The Pope also mentions the reality of humanitarian corridors as a positive response to the global emergency. He gives the example of Sweden, “because during the dictatorships in the 1970s in Argentina and in Latin America, the so-called ‘Operation Condor’ worked very well”. Pope Francis explains that thanks to that project, Sweden received many Latin American refugees. They were welcomed, given language training, temporary housing and help in seeking employment. Sweden was able to do this, he says, although today it is harder because of the numbers. However, he says, the system has worked, pointing to some of the children of those migrants who today are government ministers.

Pope Francis goes on to speak about how when countries make political agreements and set boundaries, migrants - who are the weakest and most vulnerable – are the ones who suffer and often end up being trafficked, enslaved, tortured…

He also speaks of the need for security for those who are repatriated: “In order to repatriate we need dialogue with the country of origin; not simply build a wall or close the doors of the house”.

Why does the Pope care so much about migrants today and talk so much about migrants? “Because it is a burning problem”, he says, underscoring how he also continues to talk about life, protecting life, and against abortion about which he reminds the interviewer, he has said “some very hard, very hard things.”

Abortion

On the subject of abortion, the Pope says, he always asks two very clear questions: “Is it fair to eliminate a human life in order to solve a problem?”. The answer to which is: no. “Second question: is it fair to pay a sniper to solve a problem? No. Abortion is not a religious problem in the sense that just because I am Catholic I must not seek an abortion. It is a human problem”, says Pope Francis. “It is a problem of eliminating a human life. Period”.

Relationships with governments

In the interview, the Pope refers to how, during his travels, he sometimes finds himself in situations in which political leaders may be champions of policies with which he disagrees. Pope Francis says he always strives for dialogue and for the best possible outcome. In his speeches, he says, he touches generically on what may be the problems of a country, but in private, he takes another step, always making the effort to give encouragement in achieving good. “I find something good in everyone”, he says, “be it good will, also in non-believers, they always do something good”, he says, reminding the journalist that it is never good or profitable to speak badly of others.

For the first time, the Pope reveals that "Don’t speak badly of others” is the title of a pamphlet he has had distributed in the Roman Curia in the Vatican. “Gossip is a universal defect and it applies to everyone”, he says, “to rulers, non-rulers, children, young people, men, women, everyone. They say that women are more gossipy: rubbish! Men are also gossips”, says the Pope.

Another question in the interview focusses on possible controversies deriving from gestures and words spoken privately to individuals such when as the Pope embraced a transsexual person and his partner whom he received at the Casa Santa Marta, or his words to a divorced Argentinean woman over the telephone in which he reportedly said she could receive Communion.

'Irregular' situations

“Sometimes people, because of the enthusiasm of being received (in audience), say more things than the Pope said, let's take that into account”, explains Pope Francis. Still, he adds, we are all children of God, and no one must be discarded. “I can't tell a person that his or her behavior is in line with what the Church wants, (…) but I do have to tell them the truth: 'You are a child of God and God wants you that way, settle it with God'”, he says. God loves all of his children, continues Pope Francis. Specifically regarding the lady from Argentina, the Pope says he does not remember exactly what he said to her: “I must have told her: 'look in ‘Amoris laetitia’, it tells you what you have to do’”.

Homosexuality

Underscoring his belief that we are all God’s children, the Pope reiterates his stance regarding the fact that families must love and include all of their children, including those who are homosexual. He vehemently denies ever having said homosexuals are in need of a psychiatrist. But, he adds, that “doesn’t mean I approve homosexual acts, far from it”.

Finally, Pope Francis clarifies his famous quote: “Who am I to judge?”. He made the comment during an inflight presser while returning from Rio de Janeiro soon after becoming Pope. The comment seemingly raised a lot of expectation within the global homosexual community that allegedly hoped he was going to go further. In the interview with Televisa, Pope Francis notes that Catholic doctrine has not changed. Rather, he warns against the temptation to take words out of context, and as far as doctrine is concerned, he defines himself as a “conservative”.

Topics

POPE FRANCIS

INTERVIEW

HOMOSEXUALITY

PROTECTION OF MINORS

FAMILY

MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES

POLITICS

28th May 2019, 14:47

[dimitrippy]

Pride month may be over, but it is also important to retain some sense of it. So here are some book reviews. If you've read these books, you might not like what I have to say. If you haven't, you may find that you don't want to. Or maybe you're so intrigued by what I've said, you'll want to read them anyway. The books I've chosen to read and review are (in order): This Book is Gay by James Dawson (2014), Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (2003), and Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager (2017).

Note: I am an independent person with no affiliations and I am doing this for fun, I am by no means a professional book reviewer.

This Book is Gay by James Dawson

I'm gonna start right off the bat and say that this book is... out-dated. Published in 2014, this book is a crash course on all things gay... but that's it. Despite many a disclaimer within the book itself, I found the writing to focus almost exclusively on homosexuality, with very little focus on bisexuality or being transgender. 'Well' you may say 'the book is GAY.' And right, it is, but the author, James Dawson, touted it as a guide to all things LGBT, which it wasn't. I understand the lack of nonbinary genders being mentioned, as the term did not really become widespread until very recently, but many trans people will find themselves unhappy when their eyes flick to the words 'transsexual' and 'transvestite'. Not to mention, in a later chapter about sex (skipping this chapter is an option, Dawson makes that clear) diagrams that equate genitals to gender. Overall, incredibly cisnormative. I'm not going to lie, Tumblr may have made me overly bias to any sort of queer literature created by a cis, gay man, but a good LGBT book should really spread out the attention between all of the letters.

I also found the writing style to be, for lack of a better word, trite. And I guess another good word would be condescending. Don't believe me? Dawson refers to sex as 'sexyfuntimes' at least 3 times, if not more. I understand that this book was written to appeal to young adolescents who might be questioning their sexuality or gender, but the word sex was already being used. Why change it to sexyfuntimes? Anyone reading the book should KNOW what sexyfuntimes means. Once was funny, but to keep using it to refer to consensual bedroom business made me feel like the author didn't care about his target audience. Speaking somewhat from experience, an adult talking down to me always made me feel like shit. Teenagers aren't stupid. Us adults need to start acting like it. ( that's not to say that teens can't be stupid, but generally when consuming content that is meant for them, it can be alienating.)

Then the author wrote a chapter on religion that I felt was written from a Christian-centric point of view. The author himself said he had limited knowledge about certain religions but went ahead and wrote about them anyway, assuming knowledge. This is a book that contained interviews with other queer people, you couldn't have found queer people of faith to interview? That just seems lazy to me.

Another big BIG problem that I had with the book was the chapter called 'Gay Saints'... or something to that effect. I had to return the book and I'm writing a lot of this from memory, which is quite good but can't always remember everything...

Anyway, I'm sorry, but however they may have felt while functioning as a boy-band, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are NOT gay icons. They're nothing more than two young men that over-zealous straight girls wish would get together. Sure, they may support the queer community which is all well in good but to refer to 'Larry Stylison' as a gay icon just... left a bad taste in my mouth. Also, Dawson referred to Macklemore as handsome which is just... not correct.

Honestly it felt like a lot of these 'icons' were straight people. And of course gay people have been idolizing straight people for basically forever (look up Friends of Dorothy) but one moment of activism does not a gay icon make.

Not to mention that leaving out Billie Joe Armstrong out of a list like that is criminal, considering he's been an open bisexual and supporting LGBT punk bands since Green Day became popular.

… Also a crime to leave out Prince but there are some battles you can't win...

Still, it would be remiss of me to not mention that this book was meant to be read by EVERYONE, not just by LGBT kids. I definitely understand the need for a book like this, but the queer community has become so fast paced and new terminology is updated and accepted on a near- daily basis. And I, personally, would not recommend this book to my friends (unless my friends want to know the book i'm slamming – LOL ). Perhaps a companion book titled “This Book is Trans” or “This Book is Queer”? Or maybe keep the title and come out with a second, more inclusive edition.

I would, however, recommend it to young, questioning kids and their parents – should said parents be aware of their kid's situation. I also recommend it to straight people who have very little interaction with LGBT people but who want to understand us a little better. I know I said the writing was condescending at times, but it is a good resource for people who aren't gay or who aren't sure what they are yet, especially if they don't wanna dig through Google, trying to find non-homophobic sources.

My overall opinion in a nutshell: Mediocre and non-inclusive

Score: 4/10

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

I'm not going to lie, if I had read this book in middle school or high school, I probably would have LOVED it. Pretentious teen romance was probably my favorite genre. (Something I don't talk about very much because everyone on Tumblr has a boner for hating the king of pretentious teen romance novels, John Green, and I rather like him.) Now, however, it is... to be honest it's uninteresting drivel.

The story focuses on local gay high schooler, Paul. Paul has ALWAYS known he was gay and everyone in his small, shockingly liberal town (shocking because it's so small) doesn't really care, except for the parents' of his friend, Tony, another gay high schooler. (only Tony's parents are homophobes and they have to lie about stuff just to get him out of the house)

We have other great characters! Such as Kyle, the bisexual who won't call himself bisexual because he doesn't like labels, also Paul's ex. Infinite Darlene, a trans girl who Paul does not call trans, only drag queen. She is homecoming queen and captain of the football team and also the other drag queens in school (???) don't like her because she's too masculine. Cis drag queens hating trans women, what else is new?

We also have Noah, the pretentious artist new kid and Paul's crush. And Joni, who was Paul's best friend but dumped him for her crappy boyfriend.

Right? The sheer amount of characters made my head spin too. And the drama with everyone was... too much. The only redeeming moment was when Tony finally stood up to his parents. Which he did so in, again, an unrealistic way.

And I'm not even going to mention the motorcycle cheerleaders.

So by the end of it, I was pretty disappointed.

Until I read the author's note. 10 years after it's original publication, David Levithan answers some questions about the book and gave a myriad of reasons as to why he wrote the book the way he did. He explained that he knew how unrealistic some parts of the story were, and that that's why they were there. Because as unrealistic as it was, it is something that he wants to one day be a reality. And that while we're far from that reality, it's something we should always, always be working towards.

There's something very brave about that. It's definitely true that there are far, far too many tragic stories featuring LGBTQA+ characters, but this is nothing short of a very happy story published in a time when stories like that simply didn't exist. A jaded queer person (such as myself) might brush off the pie in the sky life that Paul leads, but ultimately there really is nothing wrong with writing happy endings for people like you.

Should you choose to read this book, I recommend the new edition that comes with the author's note. It puts the entire novel in a much better perspective. It also has a short story featuring Infinite Darlene.

My overall opinion in a nutshell: Pretentious but well meaning

Score: 6/10 (points taken away were re-added after reading the author's not

Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager

As an avid history nerd who doesn't read nearly as much historic shit as they should, I loved this book. Clear, concise, and with a detailed bibliography in the back, Queer, There, and Everywhere gives us undeniable proof that people like us – queer people – have always existed.

Starting in ancient Rome, through the civil rights movement and up the the present, Prager makes the context easy to understand by using modern language and beginning each chapter with a brief flashback to each figure's time. While many scholars look at things from a cishet lens and use the language to match, Prager does pretty much the opposite, making a disclaimer at the beginning of each chapter any time modern terminology or certain pronouns usage needs to be used for clarity.

This book doesn't just cover cis, gay people over the course of history, it has something for everyone across the spectrum of gender and sexuality – trans and nonbinary people, lesbian pioneers (no, not 1800s pioneers),George Takei, and much, much more.

While queer history can be a touchy subject, Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World makes it so that our history can not, should not, and will not be erased.

My overall opinion in a nutshell: Fantastic and a necessary must for any person who needs a brief course in queer history.

Score: 8/10 (some of the historic figures she picked struck me as far-fetched, plus use of the outdated terms transsexual and transvestite)

[ommadusk]

So, the @TSVoices (Transsexual Voices Matter) Twitter and Facebook came and went and is back again. There’s plenty I could say about the group’s initial statement. The claim to be diagnosed with ‘rare acute forms of gender dysphoria’ is just silly because whatever gender dysphoria is, the justification for treatment is that the condition supposedly is chronic, and anyway what we know about male transsexualism points again to this being a chronic condition. There’s a lot of whining about how the identity of ‘transsexual’ is being swept aside by ‘transgender’, which is a fair argument and one I’ve used myself, but as usual it’s what the statement manages NOT to say that gives the game away, and add to that the continual claim to ‘woman’ throughout the statement lets us all see exactly what this is:

It remains to be seen whether this group stand for anything different. They could have specifically identified and condemned the use of ‘TERF’ and the attack on female homosexuality; if they’re that concerned about respecting female culture, spaces and the lives of women, I’d look for an explicit distancing from the use of ‘lesbian’, ‘mother’ and ‘woman’. Unfortunately many of ‘the good trans’ still can’t bring themselves to this more evolved point.

Remember TSRainCrew? Tried to sell themselves as the ‘good trans’ and made similar arguments about cultural distinction. Yet in reality their spokespeople ended up being just as big dicks as the gendersists they criticised.

If they’re going to be different, they actually have to be different. Else this is just another attempt to claim a higher spot on the validity hierarchy.

– my comment earlier (16 August) on the resulting @TSVoices Mumsnet thread

Of course there are many other things their self-serving statement omitted, like how for example homosexual and gender non-conforming minors are being instrumentalised by transgender activists in order to validate their own claim to identity, but I digress. What is properly amazing is how quickly this group reverted to classic male transgender activist behaviour. NO SURPRISES THERE.

‘Choose your enemies’

‘Radfems verbal abuse of their allies too’

Unsolicited DMs

It’s pointless my analysing these further as, of course, we have all seen this sort of shit before: if they’re going to be different they actually have got to be different. And here they have shown so clearly how they really are no different at all, and the whole thing was an exercise in claiming validity: how can you credibly complain about your own erasure when you and other members of your group so freely steal women’s language, culture and lives? Idiots.

@AngryBird ‘identifies as a mother’

  The problem here of course is that the people who are speaking for this group simply do not listen to what women have to say, instead they brush off their concerns with a casual mansplain and lap up the validation cookies thrown them by all the women out there who really do want a world where they and transsexuals can stand together to face a common problem, or even just be able to get on with their own lives and battles in their own way, without interference from the Manosphere.

Finally, despite our opposition to those transgender activists which have started this ‘rewriting definitions and rules’ campaign and ‘twitter sex wars’ we remain strong allies of both reasonable women and reasonable and genuinely suffering transsexuals. We all are humans.

— Transsexual Voices Matter (@tsvoices) August 16, 2018

Yes, transsexual voices matter, but again we are in the situation where these voices are elevated over and above the voices of women. No change there, then. In case I’m not making myself absolutely crystal clear, what I am saying to @TSVoices is, hear this: in the words of Pink Floyd ‘you’re just the same as all the rest’. And yes, that feeling of discomfort you are having right now is déjà vu.

So, where do we go from here? Well, I get to say exactly the same damn thing I have been saying for years:

Disavow any claim to ‘woman’ and ‘female’, including all subsets, ‘lesbian’, ‘mother’, ‘sister’ etc., these are never yours to take;

Clearly and unambiguously denounce male violence against women without exception or qualification or any other way you lot keep trying to wriggle your way out of it;

Affirm that human beings are sexually dimorphic mammals and that what you presently call ‘trans women’ are biologically male;

Be honest about gender, this means recognising autogynephilia as a primary cause of male transsexualism and that the entire concept of ‘living as a woman’ when applied to trans males is just sexism;

Use your activism to support the rights of transsexuals, but not at the expense of women, and not as is so clear in this case to claim a higher step on the validation hierarchy;

Don’t ever use threatening language to women, and while your’re working on that, learn to apologise for being a dick when you’ve been a dick;

Don’t try to undermine women’s voices by using the term ‘radfem’ as a synonym for extreme, just like you actually did;

Fight against today’s fashion of coding sex role nonconformity in children as these children being ‘born in the wrong body’, this is dishonest and incredibly cruel and should be right at the top of your agenda;

Recognise that your own interests are best served by repositioning the trans movement, not the women’s movement; and

Listen to women.

The End.

Transsexual Voices Matter So, the @TSVoices (Transsexual Voices Matter) Twitter and Facebook came and went and is back again. There's plenty I could say about the group's initial statement.

[la-saffique-blog]

on my “bisexuality”

to preface, i read a post on here mentioning that lesbianism actually consists of two components: being attracted to women, and also not desiring dick. (clumsily paraphrased, to be sure.)

i have called myself openly “bisexual” since i was about 13 or 14 years old. i instinctively knew i liked girls; i used the word to consciously describe precisely that active attraction to girls.

i just never stopped to consider whether my “feelings” boys were actually attraction or not, i just always assumed they were - because everyone else was attracted to them.

i remember being distinctly annoyed and bored by the fact that somewhere around puberty, all your girl peers start to notice boys and talk about them and develop crushes on male celebrities. i just couldn’t understand it: men really look so bland and uninteresting, i’ve never found their bodies “hot”, and the more masculine a man was, the less interesting i found them to look at.

but all the girls were doing it, and i was weird and odd enough already that i wanted to avoid further ostracisation, so i thought i’d give it a go - and on hindsight, i genuinely “trained” myself to be attracted to men’s faces.

unsurprisingly, all the men i have ever been attracted to have been fairly androgynous- or effeminate-looking. the kind of faces where if seen in the right light and you squinted a lil, they could be pretty dykes. (young leo dicaprio, anyone?)

also cue: emo boys, goth boys, 80s hair metal band boys - basically any subcultures where men dressed androgynously, wore make-up, and had long hair. this also tricked me into thinking i was attracted to “both genders”, with transsexual males (transwomen) actually being the “ideal” because it combined both! 

(imagine that - me developing my own garbage version of queer theory in the very early 2000s, well before it became easily accessible and mainstream. transsexual women (transmen) didn’t even “exist”, in the sense that i never heard about them, or saw pictures; they just weren’t talked about by anybody. if i had just seen pictures of them - besides chastity bono - i would have realised that actually, i am wildly more attracted to them than transsexual males, and i wouldn’t have felt so confused about why i actually find most transsexual males, no matter how “well-passing”, ugly.)

and so i slowly and rigorously trained myself over time be “interested” in men. i remember desperately trying to pick a boy to “have a crush” on, because there were no other girls who liked girls - even the one female friend i had seemed to “succumb” eventually, and i didn’t want to be alone.

i started kissing and having experiences with boys, and the physical moments were awkward and uncomfortable; but for a weird girl who had been largely shunned and friendless up to that point, finally receiving attention was intoxicating. 

(plus, i was horny as hell and just wanted to know what kissing anybody at all felt like. we will take a lil walk down memory lane later on, because boy, do i have stories.)

but i really wanted to try kissing girls.

at 14, i was at a lil house party with all my classmates, and i saw two of the girls in my class kissing to the roaring approval of the boys watching them. i was like hell yes! finally! so when i saw one of the girls alone, i nervously asked her if i could kiss her.

the incident is seared forever into my memory, because she looked terrified, squeaked “no”, and literally ran away.

in that moment, i understood a lot of things: if you wanted to actually kiss other girls, you were a freak. just because a girl is kissing girls, doesn’t mean she wants to kiss girls. it was only okay if the men approved it. 

so i packed myself tightly away, knowing that if girls found out i wanted to kiss them without men watching, they would run away from me - nobody could ever know. 

i should point out that in the whole time i was at my school, to this day, i know of only one (1) girl who was openly lesbian. there are many i am suspicious of in hindsight; but i had no lesbian representation in the whole time i was growing up in the south of france. they just didn’t exist anywhere at all, except in hateful stereotypes or straight men’s fucked up fantasies.

with my self-esteem completely eroded for many reasons, i pushed on with boys, ending up in abusive relationships, or with kind boys who adored me but i just lost interest eventually, after the fizz of hormones and novelty wore off. even being a “bisexual” became hard, because when i proudly said it out loud, boys would just roll their eyes and say that all teenaged girls say that for attention; it wasn’t real; girls could only kiss other girls because the boys found it “hot”.

when i first met actual lesbians who were actually my age, it was the first year of university. sadly, i was on my second abusive relationship with a man, completely unaware that it was going to escalate horrifically. he was controlling and obsessed with me “not cheating”, so when i asked him if i could at least experiment with girls since i had always wanted to as a “bisexual”, he said no.

so i became cemented as “the straight girl who talks about being bisexual all the time”, even though secretly i yearned to be with them. france had left me pornsick with severe body image issues, too, so even though they all thought i was hot, i just thought i was ugly - after all, i didn’t look like the lesbians in lesbian porn. why would they want me?

i shied away and jealously watched from my horrible cage as the established lesbians paired up with the other curious and questioning girls. god, i wanted to join in, so much! but no, my circumstances meant i could only watch, so i did - and all those curious girls ended up with men right afterwards. 

trying to understand my “bisexuality”, i would read about it a lot and come across the statistics of how bisexual people most often end up hetero-paired anyway, and i felt deeply disappointed with that. it felt like a death sentence. 

i felt trapped somewhere between “lesbian” (when i read about lesbian culture, i was drawn to it like a moth - but then i felt guilty, because i was a “bisexual” who was prying into a culture that wasn’t meant for her) and “fake bisexual” - the girl who pretends she likes kissing girls, but only when the men are watching; the girl who talks about it for cool points but never follows up on eating pussy; the girl who, even after a passionate relationship with another woman, ends up marrying the ugly straight guy. 

i genuinely feared that’s what i was, because i didn’t like those girls very much at all. i rightly understood why lesbians were wary of those girls, and didn’t want to date them. i despaired that maybe girls don’t really love other girls in the end, they always love boys, and that i was that hypocritical girl because i had all these bfs and no gfs. 

and then i felt locked; i was sure i preferred girls, and i didn’t want to be “bisexual” if that meant marrying a guy, but i had no “proof” that i was a lesbian. and that just made me worse: i didn’t want to just hook up with the first lesbian i met, just so i had “proof” that i liked women.

i had so many confusing questions, so many answers i needed, but “bisexual” never answered a damn one of them. that simple word seems to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy: even though i knew i liked women, for as long as i was “bi”, dick was never completely out of the picture. i never stopped long enough to question whether i was actually into dick or not, i just carried ploughing my way through unpleasant, uncomfortable, boring hook-ups with men.

after over a decade of touching dicks, i can confidently say, i don’t fucking like them. 

[fairplayforwomen]

  Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared. Lesbian erasure is real. As a lesbian myself, I’ve noticed friends who of course want to be LGBT friendly and show their solidarity by sharing LGBT links. But without knowing it they are sometimes inadvertently sharing and supporting an ideology that is contributing to the erasure of my own lesbian community. This guest post is a must-read for all lesbians and anyone who cares about us. 

Nic Williams.

  Guest post by Iwantmycommunityback

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few days in particular about transactivism and lesbians and thought I might try to put some of it into writing, partly to try to make sense of it and partly because I still keep seeing people refer to the ‘LGBT’ or ‘LGBTQ’ community and equating transactivism with lesbian and gay rights.

I think the most obvious impact of transactivism is on young lesbians being encouraged to identify as heterosexual transmen and to subject themselves to damaging medical treatment, the effects of which they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. I think Janice Turner’s article in the Times already covers that issue very well (here).

One of the problems for young lesbians (in addition to the rise in lesbophobia particularly among the young) is that, when they reach out to ‘their’ community, eg join an LGBT group for support, what they get isn’t their community at all but something very hostile.

Gender critical feminists will be familiar with the idea of trans-identified males co-opting women’s identities, women’s rights, women’s spaces etc for their own ends but there are other forms of appropriation going on, particularly in the (former) LGBT ‘community’ (including transsexuals themselves having been co-opted by people who don’t have body dysphoria and who marginalise them as ‘truscum’) . For lesbians, in addition to the appropriation of womanhood, I think the two main additional identity appropriations that cause problems are:

  Transbians

These are heterosexual biological males who identify as women and, therefore, as ‘lesbians’ and have hijacked our community (support groups, social groups, bars, forums, you name it) and believe that lesbians should be open to having sex with someone with a penis if they ‘identify’ as a woman (see ‘the cotton ceiling’). This group has widened further e.g. including ‘transfeminine men’ and men who identify as a woman part-time (so get to walk through life as a heterosexual man but just ‘identify’ as a lesbian for a few hours to access a lesbian group or lesbian club night where they are of course the most oppressed person ever and must be centred at all times).

As well as being included in our groups, they are held up as examples to us. For example for International Women’s Day one group had a talk from an ‘inspirational woman’ who was a biological male, who hadn’t had any surgery, was dressed as a bloke (not that that should make any difference.), had a bit of stubble going on and identified as non-binary (pronouns something like ‘zie’) not as a woman. Like, not only could they not find an actual woman who was inspirational enough to fill that spot, they couldn’t even find a man who was prepared to say they were a woman. Stuff like this is being funded by charity grants intended for women and for lesbian and gay people.

Don’t quite believe it? Here’s just a random selection of biological males who identity as women found on the lesbian section of some well known on-line dating sites…..

‘Queer’ straight trans allies

This is pretty much a consequence of the above. For those who don’t know, queer is now used as an all-encompassing term for anyone who doesn’t identify as a heterosexual “cis” person. However, it is also preferred by certain people over terms like lesbian, gay and bisexual because it does away with what are considered the rigid boundaries of ‘gender’ and sexuality e.g. Homosexual, lesbian and gay meaning being attracted to the same sex, bisexual as being attracted to ‘both’ sexes. This allows people to reject these categories and the idea that there are two sexes.

Take, for example, Lily Madigan who is a biological male who has now come out as a lesbian and is dating a woman. Let’s presume for a moment that this woman (let’s call her Chloe) is a) a biological female b) and a passionate trans uber-ally. Chloe is a bio female who is dating a bio male with a penis who wears a pink hoodie and identifies as a woman. Say, before that, Chloe was dating a bio male with a penis who wears a blue hoodie and is, therefore, a man. Maybe in her next relationship, she will date a bio male with a penis who has purple hair and identifies as ‘genderqueer’. Therefore, Chloe can now say that she dates men, women and genderqueer people, including both cisgender and trans people. Therefore, she is a queer or pansexual woman.

Along with the transbians, these ‘queer’ woman become involved in what was formerly the lesbian and bisexual women’s community. However, these trans uber-allies have a lot of views that are contrary to the interests particularly of lesbians. They believe that lesbians have ‘cis’ privilege and also that lesbians (along with gay men) are the most privileged people in the LGBT community. They believe that lesbians are narrow-minded and transphobic for only wanting to date other biological women and oppress transwomen who can’t break through the ‘cotton ceiling’ of their underwear.

I’m not even sure when this stuff started because, like most of us, due to the blurring of the meaning of words, I just didn’t see it happening. A lot of the main online websites, blogs and forums for lesbians started to change, with different women running them and, over time, a shift in the tone – lots about trans inclusion and more references to being ‘queer’ and open to relationships with anyone, about how some people (the lesbians) had privilege in our community and should prioritise these other people, less representation of butch women (despite the talk of blurring of gender boundaries/genderfluidity) etc.

It was only years later, when someone who knew the women who had been running one of these websites was talking about who they were and who they were in relationships (bio females in relationships with bio males, basically) that the penny finally dropped with me.These were straight women appropriating our identity and lecturing at us and marginalising us in our own community.

This blurring of the language enables them to do it – but even in cases where you can see it for yourself (e.g. if you are looking at what is clearly a straight couple, who you know will be read by everyone they meet as a straight couple, even if the guy is wearing a bit of eyeliner) you couldn’t say anything because now it would be transphobic to say that he wasn’t a woman (or genderqueer or whatever).

      Why aren’t lesbians speaking out more?

It’s no always easy to spot what’s happening

Firstly, I think it takes a while to see what is going on. This for a number of reasons including the deliberate blurring of language, the shutting down of any discussion or even thought on the issue through the repetition of mantras such as transwomen are women and the misrepresentation of this issue in what we consider to be ‘our’ trusted (LGB) news outlets, organisations, websites etc. We also might be relying on our positive experience of and friendships with traditional transsexuals without understanding how much the trans movement has now changed (traditional transsexuals are often demonised in this new world order too and called truscum). There is also the tendency to conflate trans with gay issues when they are not the same at all. From my own experiences of coming out and being oppressed on the basis of being different, I know its so easy to automatically feel solidarity towards and feel angry about any oppressed group, especially if you are being told that other views are ‘anti-LGBT’ and coming from ‘anti-LGBT’ organisations.

  Many lesbians aren’t aware things are different now

Some lesbians aren’t really that involved any more so aren’t aware of what is going on. Many lesbians will have accessed the LGB community, lesbian support groups, lesbian/gay bars when they first came out, when they were looking for a relationship, in times of difficulties etc but are now happily settled in a relationship and don’t feel the need to access those resources. They will still have their lesbian ‘community’ but that will mean texting their friends Sarah & Jo and Claire & Debs and arranging to meet up at their (straight) local pub for the evening. Any involvement with the wider LGBT community will be more minimal like maybe watching the Pride Parade once a year or occasionally reading something on an LGBT website about some awful transphobes who are attacking the LGBT community. They will think back to the transsexual people they knew 10 – 15 years ago who were nice people who just wanted to get on with their lives.

  Young lesbians have no where to go

3) Young lesbians these days are more likely to be identifying as transmen rather than as lesbians.  For the few who do, they lack access to a real lesbian community which could introduce them to an alternative to the current discourse. They have little opportunity to discuss shared issues, learn from others’ experiences and have other lesbian women on their side. Young lesbians who aren’t accepted or feel isolated in their school, family, community etc will seek out an LGBT youth group and this community they reach out to will heavily endorse the transactivist agenda as part and parcel (and absolutely central) to their identity. Where else do they go and how do they know that there is anything else?

  Nobody listens to lesbians anyway!

4) The low status of lesbian women within the LGBT community also stops some speaking out.  I don’t think people outside are really aware of how much misogyny and in particular hatred of lesbians there is from some gay men.

  There’s a big personal cost to speaking up

There are big risks to speaking out for women. These risks are increased if you are a lesbian as it is coming from your ‘own’ community and being a lesbian puts you under suspicion of being trans-exclusionary (ie penis-exclusionary) anyway. If you run a lesbian business or events, you can’t risk being anything other than pro the trans agenda or they will destroy your livelihood. And I’m sure most of us have seen the threats and actual violence meted out to those who dare to disagree. There’s also a fear about just broaching the subject with another actual female lesbian because you don’t know how many of you are onside so it’s a risk. From tentatively raising the issue with a select few, I do know lesbian friends who have got concerns about this but we are very cautious and tentative about saying anything to other women because of the risk. The bigger stories like the closure of MichFest and the men wielding baseball bats to keep the lesbians in check on Women’s Marches and Pride Parades are just symbols of the way we are being policed. This is now what happens to what is left of lesbian events, lesbian-run businesses etc, if we don’t keep in line.

    Our lesbian voice has been diluted from within

Finally, simply, as I’ve explained above, another reason some of ‘us’ don’t oppose or seem to actively support transactivism is that not all of ‘us’ are actually ‘us’. As lesbians step away from the LGBT ‘community’ and more ‘lesbian and queer women’ emerge from the two groups referred to above, an increasing proportion of ‘us’ are actually a subset of heterosexual men and women who loathe lesbians and support the transactivist agenda – but, because of the way language is being twisted, you’d never know that.

    Lesbians are an endangered species. I want my community back! Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared.

[just0nemorepage]

It's Kind of a Funny Story || Ned Vizzini || 444 pages -------------------------------------------------------- Top 3 Genres: Young Adult / Contemporary / Mental Health

Synopsis: Ambitious New York City teenager Craig Gilner is determined to succeed at life - which means getting into the right high school to get into the right job. But once Craig aces his way into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School, the pressure becomes unbearable. He stops eating and sleeping until, one night, he nearly kills himself.

Craig's suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected President Armelio. There, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.

Finished: January 28th, 2020.

Progress: 3 / 10. 30% complete.

My Rating: ★★★☆☆. [3/5]

My Review: [Under the read more - NOT SPOILER FREE]

So to be upfront – I have a half hour to write this review, as my night is very busy and I don’t want to wait until I get home to get this done, so I’ll see what I can do in thirty minutes!

I thought this was an incredible and well-represented depiction of mental illnesses in general, and particularly depression and anxiety. I thought it did an excellent job portraying and de-stigmatizing mental hospitals and the people in them, and the reasons WHY people go to them. I thought the process getting to the point of suicide, and the process in the hospital on the path to healing were accurate and well-paced and felt very realistic. Other illnesses and conditions were also mentioned, albeit briefly in the form of other patients in the hospital, but they were there.

What was honestly pretty terrible was how trans people were handled. There was one transgender character, and she was misgendered, stereotyped, insulted, belittled, called slurs, made fun of SO badly – so much of the current bullshit trans people have to go through, and it was portrayed as completely normal. None of it was challenged, none of it was corrected or fixed – in fact, her being trans was very much implied to be the reason why she was in the mental hospital in the first place. It was awful and cringey and SO badly done, SO badly handled – even the NURSES seemed to think her being trans was a disorder. Even SHE seemed to think being trans was a disorder.

Likely, using “transsexual” instead of “transgender” in the BOOK SUMMARY seems to be a dead giveaway that this is the author’s view of trans people, not a character’s poorly educated views.

So. Welcome to the reason why the book gets knocked down from five stars to three.

Honestly, if it didn’t handle mental health in general so annoyingly well, it would probably have gone down to a one or a two, for how badly it was handled.

There were some other poorly handled and unchallenged things, too – like saying someone has “balls” to have guts, calling someone a “pussy” for being a coward, the MC calling something “gay” as an insult ON THE LAST PAGE, MC being told to “not be a girl” when he gets emotional, one of the girls being called a “slut” behind her back for poorly reacting to a breakup – they weren’t overly frequent, but they were THERE, and they were COMPLETELY unchallenged and just passed without acknowledgement and just – yeah.

I would have liked to read a book like this – where the MC spends time in a mental hospital – where said MC doesn’t have a rich family, or a supportive family, even. Where MC CAN’T just “switch schools” and doesn’t have understanding friends willing to learn and be better and doesn’t have any kind of support system. A far more realistic situation of real world people with real world mental illnesses – since this one was so painfully focused on a white boy who is in literally EVERY WAY privileged as fuck – just, who happens to have severe depression and anxiety.

I like that that illustrates that mental illnesses don’t discriminate, but I feel enough emphasis wasn’t placed on how damn lucky he was to have all he had – all the systems and all the opportunities – to work towards getting better. That was mentioned a few times, sure, but in throwaways, and not in any kind of real context to make you actually THINK about how hard it would be if you were LITERALLY ANYBODY ELSE. The ending felt very hopeful, very full of sunshine and fairy tales, but almost like it was making a mockery of the mental illness journey of anyone – read, most other people – who would NOT be this lucky. It was a feel good ending, but boy it did NOT feel realistic. Maybe it was for Craig, but if you’re NOT a 15-year-old white boy? Don’t make me laugh.

For what it is though, and for the simplicity of what it portrayed, it was still very good, very well done, and is an excellent weapon against the stigma and shame that comes with mental illnesses. However – if you can find any better portrayal, any better character, any better writing, in ANY kind of similar book – dump this one, and read that one instead.

This one gets an average rating purely because it’s the first I’ve found of its kind, so far, and I myself had no idea what it would be like staying in a mental hospital. I did, in fact, learn quite a lot.

But the moment I find one that’s better written, and with better representation and handling of shitty language, out this one goes.