Dear Pagan community:
You were duped by a classic bait and switch. How can I say this? I was there during much of the history of the inclusion of the "t" in LGB, fought like hell for it back then. I was there when "transsexuality" was essentially erased and then appropriated by "transgender" and I fought like hell against that as well. Ironically against the LGB establishment in the form of the HRC and GLAAD.
There used to be a lot of transsexual voices on the internet, several years ago we all collectively decided that the constant attacks weren't worth it anymore and we all removed our blogs which may have been a mistake but one done when we "won" the medical battle with the revision of the DSM that finally decreed that when we corrected our bodies and our lives we were "cured" and the psychiatric community would then get the fuck out of our lives. And we breathed a collective sigh of relief, and got on with our lives. In the course of the battles leading up to that point we had to fight wholesale redefinitions of everything gender related to the point we had to constantly come up with new terms for concepts that had been understood up to then.
Back then there was maybe five active "TERFs" total on the internet and they were so hateful and vicious they were almost totally ignored. They were the lesbian equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church. The term TERF was actually coined by a transgender bait and switch artist known to lie about pretty much every aspect of trans history and was done to provoke them.
A little history is in order. Let's start with Stonewall. It was a tranny uprising, and yes, I get to use that word because I came out with it being a playful term we used for ourselves and has a rich part in actual trans-history. Gay men moved heaven and earth to erase that from their history, particularly those we came to call the "A"-Gays who ran the political side of gay rights, almost all rightwingers btw. Sylvia Rivera is credited with starting the Stonewall riot. I knew her, we respected each other and we both were together fighting her last battle before she died....... against the gay establishment in New York that cut deals to get their protection legally by trading off trans rights. I was at her funeral procession in the streets of New York City and had she survived her last bout with liver cancer, she planned to retire to the Maetreum of Cybele.
During the late eighties and early nineties was the heyday of the talk format tv shows. Every "sweeps" week, when the ratings were decided, they competed to get the most provocative guests and that often was transsexual women. The thing was transsexual women are statistically 2 points above the mean in intelligence and creativity, a medical fact. We are smart and creative in other words. These women did such a great job talking about the subject that they talked themselves out of sweeps week! The talk shows had to switch to gender bending club kids and married crossdressers as a result. Now for the shocker, I learned this many years later trying to make sense of why we had to fight the LGBs for our rights. In the early nineties, HRC (Human Rights Campaign) did a survey in North Carolina of all places on public acceptance of gay rights and trans rights. The gays came in at around 30% but trans rights came in at 80%! Yes, you read that correctly, we had won the battle for hearts and minds of the general public thanks to the brave women of transsexual history who did the talk show circuit. HRC freaked out...... especially when a bunch of us started a grassroots effort to lobby congress for trans civil rights. Trans women from around the country came to DC to lobby, most of us poor as church mice on our own dimes.
HRC literally bought our DC organizer with a condo in Florida! With her aid, they hit every democratic congressional office with pre-lobbying two weeks before each of our lobby days telling Senators and Congresscritter to "pay no attention to the crazy trannys". How do I know this? I was one of the best lobbyists and they took me aside, one after another and asked me "what the fuck is going on with this"??
Seven of us met at the end of one of the Lobby Day efforts at a restaurant in Bethesda, compared notes and went home determined to do something about this betrayal and we established the first actual grassroots organization to address the problem and confront HRC for their actions against our civil rights, NTAC. HRC pulled out all the stops to stop us including setting up phoney groups "opposing our methods", accusing us of all sorts of misdeeds and eventually founded their own bought and paid for version with offices in their own building and tame trannys to run it. At the same time they pushed for the "transgender" umbrella and tried to force transsexual and intersexed women under it. Transgender was a term coined by an earlier crossdresser who hated transsexual women, so there was a lot of push back by us on that term. Total war was waged on post operative women of transsexed and intersexed history with the aid of the A-Gays. Why? Because we came within a hair of winning our civil rights back then several times which would have made monkeys of the big money HRC who couldn't get any legislation passed.
When you hear the word transgender today, you are supposed to think of women of transsexual history but you are being sold a bill of goods because, for the most part, we left that movement and it means everyone else who messes with "gender", whatever the fuck that is. You are pushing for crossdressing men, drag queens, sexual fetishists etc to be forced into woman only space without realizing it and you started knee jerk reacting to womens groups that objected to that without a clue that was what you were doing. Why is it this is directed only at women? You know why.
My own experience transitioning was I literally lost everything in my life but I was totally accepted into lesbian circles then with them knowing my history and that I was bisexual myself. I used to tell transwomen that if they approached woman groups as women and not trans somethings, 99% of the time they would be accepted, I certainly found that true, even among the old school second wave feminists that it is oh so popular to trash these days............. Other women like me found the same thing to be true. But these days we want no part of these trans battles so for the most part you don't hear our voices.
I fully realize I am pissing into the wind with this but if a few wake up to the con job that is ripping Paganism apart, it was worth it.
I have to agree to a lot of this. I thought I had found some answers back in the old TGIC group when it existed and there was a rivalry between transgendered and Transsexuals. I eventually worked with Helen and Sue to create AGP which was geared more toward transsexuals. It seemed in those days getting the T added to the GLBQ soup was challenging as bills were passed one by one giving gays their rights as T-People became the last moving targets. The Pagan community for the most part has been pretty good with accepting T people in my experiance, althogh with the mainstream society labels are always confusing to the general public that has a variety of viewpoints ranging from understanding, confused and media driven BS clusterf**king. The american public is now split by the recent misgivings of North Carolina's bathroom issue over something that never was an issue until they tried to make it one. People get fed Media turdbits of misinformation that the right wing feeds them to try and label trans people in with the likes of pedophiles and rapists when there is no basis for it. This only feeds hate driven agendas causing innocent people including natural born females to be attacked when they do not fit the appearance of a female in the eyes of individuals that believe the BS fed to them by the evening news. We need to keep fighting and not give up ground as silence equals death or other bad ending for people like us who are on the fringes of acceptance in a world of deviciveness and bias.
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