TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.
| Tracking Down The Dead Ladies of Gender Town (Nothing Personal) |
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| Opinion - Global Warning | |||
| Lisa Jain Thompson | |||
| Sunday, 07 October 2007 19:01 | |||
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HBS men & women organize the future behind the scenes
Arlington, VA, USA. To the unbiased observer, or at least one immersed in Estradiol 17b, the majority of those claiming to be transgender seem to be more interested in making gender a competitive sport. Questions like — Who wins? Who loses? Who has the best strategy? Who can score the most points in front of their peers? – takes precedence over determining the true meaning of life within a sexually dimorphic species such as Homo Sapiens Sapiens (humanity, humankind, men and women as you may like it). [Please note all the statements herewithin are generalities and do not apply to ALL transgenders — YOU, personally, of course are different and this column does not apply to YOU. Nothing in the Universe is absolute except death, there will always be exceptions, but the general patterns are common enough that you could make a large sum of money betting on the probabilities.]
Transgenders seem to always be on the offense, interested in the minutiae of gender, scoring points by debating the societally imposed cultural straightjackets of breasts and vaginas, penises and penetration, and whether western civilization noticed who bled from between their legs in cycle with the moon and who had a throbbing erect cock whenever a cockless human was near.
The transgender community is loud, brash, and more apt to gain attention in the public crowds by talking over men and women born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS a.k.a. transsexuality) and shouting that they, the transgenders, are the true bearers of enlightened knowledge.
They demand our recognition.
Ok, so you're transgendered
and so busy supporting one another and attacking anyone who may raise a question or request a clarification, linking to each other's web sites, quoting each other's gender bibles and speechifying, that all your noisy shouts build an echo chamber as you attempt to impose your dominance on the rest of us, the ones who identify as male and female, men and women.
Klinger: Far away, too.
— M*A*S*H
In twenty five words or less, provide me a definition of transgender (and gender identity and gender expression) that will hold up in a court of law and can be understood by my neighbors and co-workers. Give me something they can agree to.
You may ask why HBS men and women do not join your clamor. The answer, as they say, is blowing in the wind.
We are out here, away from the universities and government supported non-profit organizations, out here working our 8 to 6 shifts and raising our families. We attend the PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences, shuttling our kids and grandkids back and forth between school, doctor's appointments, soccer games, and music lessons. Excuse us if choose to do the week's grocery shopping instead of dressing up to go online and debate what gender really means.
HBS men and women are behind the scenes, organizing the future. We have less notoriety than professional transgenders screaming for their right to enter women's bathrooms and showers (where are the transgenders shouting to be let into the men's restroom?) but, ultimately we will have more power as we continue to work quietly inside the infrastructure actually making things happen.
We are assistant district attorneys and attorney generals, judges and media reporters. We are managers of worldwide organizations and networks, architects of large logistics enterprises, writers of long range policy, soldiers defending our country, benefactors of political organizations, makers of automobiles and diggers of ditches. We are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and, if we are lucky grandparents with grandchildren on our knee. And yes, some of us are even professors living quietly the university life.
We are largely disconnected from the academic and liberal political blogosphere in which transgenders gather to chant their slogans against capitalism, democracy, and western civilization — against "The Man" who is keeping them down and preventing them from …
From what? Getting their hands dirty? Raising families? Working on a factory line or doing construction work in a hundred degree heat outside?
Who is preventing them from what?
If men and women born with HBS can make it, why not the transgendered?
We, the children of Harry Benjamin, are out here the world, frustrated that the media constantly cites the same loud transgenders as representatives of HBS men and women. Transgenders have some good points – no one should be harassed for how they dress or how they fit some pre-established cultural ideal — but they do not speak for us.
HBS men and women are out here, if you care to notice us and can hear us beneath the tumult of the cross-dressers and transgenders. We're out here with our families, living in the real world with husbands and wives and same sex spouses. We don't have the time to march on Congress and clog up the halls. We're too busy trying to keep our jobs, too busy cooking meals when our family is hungry, or washing clothes when the closet is almost empty, or doing dishes, making beds, and vacuuming.
The public face of transgenderism is essentially sexist, denigrating the rights of women to bolster the needs of cross-dressing men. The pattern of transgenderism is the pattern of male dominance.
Women want privacy in their bathrooms? Too bad, the transgender men want in.
HBS women follow medical protocols under the guidance of a therapist before sex reassignment? Foolish and not needed. Transgender men are able to change their sex with their clothes and back again.
Women think that having a penis is different from having a vagina? How provincial! Transgender men will take their working penises wherever they wish. No one need ever know whose body is testosterone driven. Hole or pole? No never mind, men and women are all the same.
At least the transgender men are.
Well the flower was made for beauty And the bee was made to sting All around this world Honey it's natural thing — John Fogerty, Natural Thing
 Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is a Co-Founder & Principal of TS-Si. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. She maintains another site, StarPoet.com, for her poetry and literary works.Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. Lisa welcomes your comments. Use the form below or email via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 27 October 2007 19:32 |
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Comments
Too many of us carry our transgenderism on our shoulders.
"See, world, I am transgendered, and I am going to push it in your face until you scream!"
Unfortunately, most folk are not interested in engaging someone like that. Change the word "transgendered" in the previous sentence to your favorite group and it works the same. Like it or not, most of the world is very uncomfortable with transgendered folk. At least they are uncomfortable until they have met one who does not shove it in their face. When they finally meet a transgendered person who seems normal, then they drop their guard and become more friendly.
Transgendered folk often carry their condition as an "affliction." They want to be quite sure that everyone out there knows that they are "afflicted" and then demand they do something about it. The most successful transgendered folk have done normal things. They become a normal person doing normal things. Walking into the store they buy normal things like normal people and then drive back to their normal home. If you understand that normal is a wide swath, then you get my picture.
Stop trying to smash people in the face with your transgenderism. They will be afraid or angry, neither of which will help the cause. Normal, rational, friendly approaches will always work best, even if it takes time.
Elizabeth (Texas)
[Transgender: Simply the on and off change of thought with a sexual aberration which the 'trans' love to call gender.]
Why I must ask are there so many that love that iffy label when there are so many who would never take it as a substitution in place of the term we love and are... women.
There are several reasons I write what I do:
1. "The Hitler But ..." mode of journalism assumes that opinions and actions are equal. Some of them are not, some cause harm to others. To assume that all opinions must be spoken of affirmatively is intellectual fraud. Adults make value judgements and act upon them.
2. The transgender movement causes great harm to HBS men and women when it insists that HBS is simply another form of transgender, just another social choice and not a physical medical issue. Their inclusion of HBS under the Transgender banner, their active appropriation of the term "transsexuality " as their own, leads the public to believe that HBS is a cultural "choice" similar, if not identical to transgenderism, cross-dressing, and transvestite fetish. Because of the vocal transgender activist in the public eye, the general population believes that a HBS woman is a man in a dress (which is how the transgenders describe themselves when they say they like and want to keep their penises).
This transgender poisoning of the discussion makes it more difficult for HBS men and women to transition and requires our constant explanation that we aren't cross-dressers or transvestites, we aren't part-time weekend men and women, and that HBS is not either a social construct or a personal, optional choice (like the transgenders and crossdressers).
The prevalence of the transgender kool-aid provides an inaccurate model for pre-op HBS men and women, confuses them with useless academic rhetoric designed to intimidate them, and delays both effective treatment and transition. Everyone is not the same. HBS is not a shade of transgender.
3. I am writing a column (see that bi-line below the subject?). I present ideas for discussion and insertion into the public dialog. A column, by nature, is opinion and comment and not straight news reporting (take a Journalism 101 class somewhere if you think otherwise). Global Warning appears in the Op-Ed section of this site, not one of the news section. I write to be read and to elicit comments and discussion, not to make friends or provide a sounding board for the unedited opinions of others. All the column needs to be is well written, logically structured, and interesting to my readers.
4. The aggressive transgender argument is intellectually flawed and unsupportable. They can't or won't define "transgender" or "gender identity" in meaninful terms that concisely explain what those terms mean. The definitions are so vague and all-encompassin g, I have seen one gender theorist write that being gay or lesbian is a subset of transgender, just different flavors of gender identity. A definition that includes the entire universe and excludes no one defines nothing. My columns frequently point out that the transgender emperor has no clothes.
5. We receive many more emails from Post-op HBS men and women worldwide, then we receive hate mail from the transgender community (and much of the correspondence we do receive from the transgender community involves viral worms and denial of service attacks. We have readers in the APA, the U.S. Congress, and politicians, physicians, and working scientists on every continent. Judging some of the angry correspondence, we are also read by students, academics, and gender theorists. What we write is being read and helping to direct the public conversation.
6. We are an HBS site, not a transgender, or a gay or lesbian site. We write for HBS men and women. I'm not worried about what the transgender community may think.
7. I like to write. I get an idea for a column and I write, using about a 1000 words most times. If you are transgender and don't like what I write either don't read my columns or send a well written comment with logical content (not name calling or unproven academic theories) and we all can discuss the issue. I (and TS-Si) follow the science whereever it may lead me. If the science proves my beliefs wrong, I change or refine my beliefs. That is the scientific method.
(Hitler? Seriously...)
As for name calling, what name calling? Which words upset you? Academic? Gender Theorists? Cross-dresser? Transgender? Transvestite?
Or are you upset with us calling ourselves HBS men and women and not the names you prefer to label us?
Where there are major differences, different nomenclature is essential. We are not all the same. A Transgender is not a Cross-dresser is not a Fetish Transvestite. A Draq Queen or King is none of the above.
The real world concerns itself with facts and results, not feelings. We are not in high school or the protected unreality of the university where personal "feelings" take precedence over everything else (including science and logic). We are all adults and no longer children. In the adult world personal feelings are a secondary concern to the fruits of scientific and medical research. I am not your social worker, your therapist, or your homeroom teacher.
The media reference to Hitler (which seems to have escaped some readers grasp) is a common referent in Journalistic Criticism. It comes from reporters who think that fair and balanced means equal time for every position and spend all their time looking for good things to say about the person or cause they spent the first half of the article critizing, e.g., :
Hitler killed millions of Jews but he liked dogs.
Mussolini ruined the Italian economy, but at least the trains ran on time.
George W. Bush may have stack overflow, but he loves his wife and his ranch.
As for naming people by name, it's hard to do when all the male transgenders are running around hiding behind their "femme" names rather than their legal ones. When there is an intellectual purpose to naming names, I name them.
And I WOULD be more specific about "trangender" if anyone could define what the word means in a way that would have some legal and scientific validity.
That any person likes dogs is irrelevant to the topic of their political career, regardless of what they did during their career (except perhaps Nixon). That not all people who describe themselves as transgender fit into the box you're painting IS relevant. If you were writing about these issues in terms of real people and real theories instead of an "us vs them" framework, we might actually be able to have a real discussion on important issues.
As it stands, for all any reader knows from what you've written, you're writing about two incoherent transgender people in your hometown and not any of the theorists, activists, politicians, and writers that the reader might actually have heard of.
On namecalling: its not the words you use, its how you use them and how you approach the issues at hand. It's fine to call Hitler a fascist dictator, the specific evidence is pretty overwhelming. Its another thing to talk down to an entire generation of transpeople (without even citing one example) as if none of us have ever worked in the real world (yet we can all somehow magically afford college?) and as if every one of us immediately accepts every theory our professors present us.
Now, if you would approach the issues rather than diverting the discussion to your objections to words and grammar, perhaps some progress could be made.
You do admit, however, that "transgender" is so broadly ill-defined as to be meaningless. Your words: "you're not going to get one definition of transgender." Exactly my point.
And again: when I write a news article, I name sources; when I write a by-lined column (which is opinion, not news), I do not unless naming the institution or person is critical to the what I write.
Besides, I'm not the one insisting that "transgender" is a unified group: the transgender activists are and they keep insisting that men and women born with Harry Benjaminin Syndrome are transgendered -- we are not.
By the way, Liz, what is your relationship to "transgender"? Where do you fit in along the great gender spectrum? Are you out at work? What type of work do you do? Does your family know? Are you out 24-7 or only part time? What are your credentials as an authority on transgender? What bell of yours did I ring?
Have fun.
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