Fairfax, VA, USA. I await the clown car with my daily hate mail once transgender activists get hold of my central point and can't resist asking their typical clown questions.

But to get started on this, we need to review my Sicilian heritage. Yes, that is what I just said. Bear with me on this.


Sicilian women often like to joke about the obsession of their local men with foreign blondes; and a smokin' black-haired, dark-eyed Sicilian girl is referred to as a mora (or Moor), while a redhead is a normanna (or Norman) — catchy terms widely used since the Middle Ages.

How Close To Africa Is Sicily Anyway?

We normally don’t ask the question that is hiding openly in the middle of the room although we Sicilians proudly admit our ancestry:

Sicanians, Elymians, Sicels, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals & Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Albanians, Spanish, North Africans, and Jews (and, more recently, the French, Germans, Italians, and Americans).

Well maybe not all of it. Some things we don’t talk about much, even if the rest of Europe does. We don’t talk about the “N” word so commonly applied to us by white Europe. My mother would get angry if I brought the subject up. She thought, I think, that it was a clown question, especially after I suggested that Sicily was just a hop, skip and a bed from Ethiopia.

My grandfather always told my kids to remember that they were Sicilian, not Italian. I try never to disagree with what my grandfather told me. My blood is mora, my skin a reddish olive (made more so by the bit of Iroquois that flows within me).

Want to make something of it?

Do You Believe In God?

First, why should anybody care? How does anything I might do affect the eternal salvation of your soul? What goes on between you and your god should stay between you and your god. Or do you get brownie points with him or her if somehow you “save” me? Gold stars, perhaps.

What sort of grade school religious system is that? If you think god is keeping score, you have limited him to being a queen bee adolescent girl gossiping, tracking and deciding who is in and who is not in the proper high school cliques. I do not want to be a member of that group. Never have, never will.

But what the hell do you mean when you say God? Seriously. Are you talking about Zeus? Yahweh? First Causes? The Big Bang? Or some media friendly old man played by George Burns and Morgan Freeman in the movies? If you are talking about some cosmic, all powerful loco parentis, I am not a five year child. If you are talking about a Jewish rabbi whose followers thought was the messiah, I would like to meet him and find out what he really said.

But the question itself is a gotcha, designed to catch you one way or the other, prove a polemical point and draw up sides. Any answer given says nothing about a god’s existence. Christianity and Islam are good at dividing into sects and sub-sects based on minimal theological distinctions that become the raison d’etre for perpetual hatred and destruction of human life.

I am a better Christian than the current Pope, but then so was Abraham Lincoln and Sister Teresa. It doesn’t take much. John XXIII was a better Christian than all those who have followed him.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says Morning, boys. How's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes What the hell is water? [Cited by David Foster]

Are you a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative, a progressive or a reactionary, a socialist or a capitalist, a believer or a non-believer?

I do not accept your or. The grammar of your sentence structure forces the answer into a dichotomy that does not exist in nature or politics. Life consists of series of buts and then you are dead. Nothing is absolute, everything is conditional. Do not confuse grammatical structure with reality. As John Adams said the abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. I will not allow you to clownishly word me into a foolish answer. I am an American by birth, British Isles, Sicilian and Iroquois by heritage, a certified, dues paying member of the human species and a bipedal primate free woman who is more than able to think for herself.

Your menu of choices limits my freedom and my liberty. I will not and cannot answer your clown question. We are not choosing sides for a kickball game at recess.

What is the difference between Transgender and Transsexual?

The question is nothing but another clownish gotcha. If you do anything but deny there are differences between being transgender and born transsexual, you are immediately charged with being hateful, hurtful, elitist, and probably a Christo-Fascist and Republican. So send in the clowns, I intend to answer the question. I do not fear the marching ids of the transgender mob. They are filled with social design polemic and carry no scientific weight.

While both Transgenders and Transsexuals are classified as mammals, think of them as two distinct orders.

Transgender is a general term applied to men and women who vary from culturally conventional gender roles. They transgress the societal expectations of how a man or woman should properly talk, dress, and act.

A transgender accepts — prefers even — the physical body and genitals with which they were born. All they wish is to live in a life role other than the one society expects, they do not wish to change their physical sex. Often they are opposed to the mammalian sexual binary that the vast majority of us are born male or female (with very few of us born ambiguous).

Many seem to believe that male and female are artificial constructions designed to oppress them. Some merely want to dress and live in the societal role of the other sex. Go for it. Most of us don’t really care. Some merely prefer to be sexually unconventional and provocative. So be it. Whatever rings your chimes.

Once a transgender always a transgender, but they aren’t transsexual, despite the continual stretch of transgender imaginations.

Transsexual applies to those men and women born with the knowledge that that their brains are a different physical sex from the genitalia they arrived with in the world. That is, transsexuality is an infrequent but common variant of human existence.

A transsexual is driven to bring their body into conformance with their actual physical identity through Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). Make-up, clothes, or acting out cannot replace the overriding need for surgical correction.

After surgery, a man or woman born transsexual are no longer transsexual. They are simply ordinary women and men who had a transsexual history. Obviously, transsexuals buy into the general human sexual binary (ever-mindful of the physical intersex exceptions). Why else would one have surgery if sex is merely a construct as the transgenders believe?

After all, and despite deliberate RadFem conflations, sex and gender are two different things. Summarily put, transgender is all about societal roles and expectations; transsexual is physical sex and bringing the body into conformance with the inner being. Never the twain shall meet.

Have said all that, I await the clown car with my daily hate mail.