Looking on the web of late, I’ve found what anti-trans minded folk say about all stripes of trans people, but especially transsexuals.
I found something that was a cheerless discovery. Anti-trans sentiments that have been expressed by some radical lesbian feminists read very much like the anti-trans sentiments that have been expressed by some on the religious right.
Here are a couple of samples each of both groups:
From Regina Griggs, executive director of the Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, in the WorldNetDaily article Coed Locker Room Plan Sparks Surge Of Outrage:
“Gender identity disorders exist in the diagnostic statistics manual. Why would we want to promote cross-dressing, changing your sex? You’re not a man’s brain in a woman’s body and vice versa.”
From Sheila Jeffreys in the Journal of Lesbian Studies article Transgender Activism: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective:
“… As for the adults who came to us claiming to have discovered their “true” sexual identity and to have heard about sex-change operations, we psychiatrists have been distracted from studying the causes and natures of their mental misdirections by preparing them for surgery and for a life in the other sex. We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure and ultimately prevent it.”
From Jerry Leach ex-transsexual and reparative therapist, in his essay Men Are Men And Women Are Women:
“A man is always a man and a woman is always a woman. A man cannot ever become a real woman. A woman cannot ever become a real man. Surgical correction of the male and female transsexual literally throws us back to the days when the frontal lobotomy was considered to be the best possible medical/surgical option for a mentally ill condition. What is taking place within the heart of well-meaning therapists and medical professionals is nothing less than a horrible and inconceivable wrong, for even in the life of the most successfully transitioned transsexual, there is always the reality that this is nothing more than a self-created façade and false impression.”
From Janice Raymond, in her book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male:
“If it is impossible to change basic chromosomal structure, then it is necessary to take a more in-depth look at not only the terminology but also the reality of transsexualism. Can we call a person transsexed, biologically speaking, whose anatomical structure and hormonal balance have changed but who is still genetically XY or XX? If we don’t recognize chromosomal sex as determinative, plus the subsequent history that attends being chromosomal female or male, what are we really talking about when we say male or female? Is there any such enduring reality as biological maleness or femaleness?”
It’s an ugly thing to see anti-trans sentiments being directed at trans people from people outside of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, but it seems to me even uglier to see those sentiments directed at transgender people from within the LGBT community.
And yet, we all know those sentiments are far from uncommon in the LGBT community. How many lesbians have heard their lesbian peers deride trans women as not being real women? How many gay men have been in conversations with other gay men where trans women are derided as freaks? It’s no secret that members of the subcommunities of the LGBT community deride members of other subcommunities.
But it’s not like some trans people don’t deride their own trans peers. On publicly announcing that I was going to have a bilateral orchidectomy, one transsexual-vaginoplasty-essentialist wrote of me:
“For the 99th time men have a penis, women have a vagina.”
It seems that in many communities, there are people who want to define the members of other groups of people, or define who is an acceptable member within their own community. When we deride other members of our LGBT subcommunities, we implicitly state it’s acceptable for others to deride us for how we identify, for how we live our lives. Martin Luther King Jr. said something that applies to the broader LGBT community:
“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
And …
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Civil rights are human rights, and deriding others in a minority group because they are members of that minority group seems to me to be failure. A member of one minority community deriding the entirety of another minority group, or deriding another subcommunity group in their broader community, seems to be employing poor tools for chiseling out civil rights for any of us, let alone all of us.
I wonder how all of those who were interviewed for this article would react to the article floating around the internet recently about the farmer, who fathered children, went to the hospital with stomach pain. The doctors decided to do exploratory surgery for a stomach ulcer/hernia.
They were shocked to find that the “male” farmer/father had ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, cervix and vestigial vaginal tissue!