trans-advocates are the problem?!!!

i just read the most infuriating article written by an alleged ‘gay-friendly’ person!

find it here;

perusing the multitude of comments gives some of the feelings others had upon reading this tripe, which differed vastly from my own. for me, a personal email to the author was necessary to adequately respond.

it read:
you are either very ignorant or incredibly cruel.
trivializing what is a most serious condition and attacking those who
seek to advocate for transgender children is idiotic.
obviously you have zero direct experience with these children
whose condition you equate with fantasizing about being a cat or a train.
I feel sorry for anyone who takes you serious as a doctor, educator or even
a human…
get some compassion, follow up on the hard research in the field, step outside your obvious absolutist agenda.
the point of view of those whose heads are firmly up their asses is bound to be full of shit, so I suggest you pull out before you suffocate. and by the way, fuck you for making the world an uglier place for those who might meet anyone who takes you seriously!

feel free to contact me …. I will gladly tell you in greater detail how and why you are utterly oblivious

moon

it isn’t that i don’t get the point of how a gender paradigm that is strictly binary is a bad thing. or that it should be perfectly fine for a boy to wear a dress and play with dolls.

but as evidenced by the story with which this woman prefaces her article, she really doesn’t have the slightest clue when it comes to the trans-gender child.

gender identity is nothing like make-believe, no matter how pervasive, that one is a cat or a train. in zeeona’s case it mattered not in the slightest that she, tho born in a male body, could wear dresses or play with dolls. to preface one’s remarks with such an analogy only evidences the fact of the author’s ignorance and prejudice.

while claiming to completely support ‘adult’ transgender people’s rights and identities, she would deny children being taken seriously about something as crucial as their very being! as tho they aren’t quite clear on the concept of who they are.

i have more than a handful of transgender/transsexual friends, and to the last one they all have expressed to me how much they wished they had been allowed to be who they are long before they reached the magickal ‘adulthood’ wherein the author of the article in question would take them seriously enough to grant them the boon of self-definition and self-determination.

how dare she!

my beautiful daughter might have committed suicide, long before attaining that age at which she might have that woman’s blessing! many, far too many, have done just that.

then there’s the fact that for transgender women, many of the ‘changes’ that testosterone brings on are very hard to reverse. the voice must be trained, the bones and body size can’t be undone. no matter how much of surgery these ‘late-bloomers’ can afford to get there is no doubt, in anyone’s mind, that had they been allowed to transition before going through puberty as a male, the results would be far superior.

to advocate for our children is only logical for parents who have seen the pain that being out of sync with their natal gender has caused these ‘less than adults’. to imply that we have merely ‘seized upon’ a fleeting fantasy that our children might outgrow did we not take them so seriously, is down-right dirty pool!

the most cutting edge research into transgender physiology suggests that this is not just some mental ideation or desire dreamed up because the societally imposed gender roles cause discomfort, but rather there are actual and measurable differences in the bodies, and brain structures (not just the minds) of transgender people. so why then should children be ignored and denied the proper medical treatment. would we deny them insulin, because it is potentially dangerous, if they were diabetic?

it seems to me a fair question.

just as surely as diabetics need their insulin to be healthy, or even just to stay alive, in the case of our transgender children a proven protocol exists to spare them suffering and even pre-mature death. (through suicide or self-destructive behaviours)

i am so infinitely grateful to those pioneers who have taken the needs of our transgender children seriously. who have done research to unravel the mystery of gender identity and i’m especially indebted to those transgender adults who have stood up to advocate for children like zeeona, writing books, sharing their wisdoms and clearing a path to the future for transgender people, of any age!

of course, it goes without saying that i will be an advocate for my transgender child, whose truth i needed three years to clearly hear, mainly because of the same sort of balderdash and ignorant crapola put forth by the author of this horrendous article.

and altho i don’t make a habit of raking people over the coals for their views, i meant every word of my harsh email to this woman, who i feel quite certain doesn’t give a shit. but i especially meant the part where i said that she is making the world an uglier place.

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back-handed blessings

people are the blessings life bestows on us. for better or for worse.

my last post had much to say about the way in which people reject or judge others, set up barriers between their selves and all the ‘someone elses’ that populate their world, or their smaller corner of community. altho i stand by every word, what i neglected to mention is that much blessing comes from these type of folk.

before anyone thinks i’ve completely lost it, allow me to explain by way of a parable.

~ once there was a kind-hearted woman, who was moved to compassion by many things. upon seeing a chrysalis attached to a branch that had fallen to the ground, she decided to bring it inside her home.
when it came time for the new creature to emerge, the woman was fortunate to be present to witness the miracle. so she sat near the branch, which she had stood in a jar upon her table.
the butterfly struggled hard and long to escape it’s confining shell, and the woman thought that she might help it with this trial. ever so gently and carefully, she opened the slit that the creature had made in the chrysalis, just enough so that the butterfly didn’t have to squeeze through such a small opening.
it worked, and the beautiful thing easily came forth its confinement!
after the butterfly emerged, it hung from it’s former cell, drying it’s brightly colored wings. but it couldn’t spread them out, no matter how it tried, they draped its body in folds. ~

what this woman didn’t understand was that the opening through which the emerging butterfly must escape, is small for a reason. the pressure of squeezing through that slit is the way that fluids from its body are pumped into the wings, allowing them to unfurl. without this the wings will be useless. the butterfly wont fly.

not that we necessarily require pressure from social inequality in order to spread our wings, but in my own case, all the rejection and judgement to which i have been subjected by all the ‘someone elses’ in my world have only served to make me stronger in my resolve to be precisely who i am…and i fly!

so for better or for worse, even those who are not well-intentioned have helped me, they are blessings of a kind.

no matter how much i hope for a kinder tomorrow to receive the new creature my daughter will grow to be, somewhere inside me is a faith in her that outweighs the need for this hope. because it is quite obvious to me, that if struggle has made me stronger, it wont be able to crush her! she’s far more advanced a soul than i!

so while hoping things for her future, for her life – after transition, – after reaching the magickal age of eighteen, when she’s an adult and as her parent i’m allowed to breathe a relieved sigh, i remind myself that some of the things that will help her to emerge, spread her beautiful wings and fly might be trials i would never have chosen for her…but may well be one way in which life will bless her.

boundaries or barriers?

as i write this on the eve of national transgender awareness day, many thoughts occur to mind.

one of them,a recurrent theme, is the ways in which people in one oppressed group sometimes erect boundaries within the group that exclude its own members from full acceptance.

one obvious example comes from within the lesbian community, of which i have been a member for coming on 45 years.

in this community there are those who feel it is absolutely okay to exclude from full membership, those who are not “woman born women”, in other words; transgender women. and these same purists will deny full acceptance to women, who like me, have had children and relationships with men in the past. or women, who like me, are able to love beyond physical gender, but who are primarily attracted to women.

how can we do this to one another?

i and a good friend of mine, herself a transsexual woman, have often spoken about such things as ‘disclosure’. for her, this means telling a prospective lover that she began life as a male-bodied person. for me it means letting a woman whom i am dating know that i am bi-sexual.

now, what possible difference could this make? the fact of my friends ‘male-bodied’ birth or my own ability to love a man?

i have had women decide to quit going out with me once they learned that my children weren’t ‘basted’. that i actually laid with men to conceive them. and some women that i have dated have been reluctant to share with me the fact that they are transsexual. (altho, it matters not the slightest to me)

why should some of us within the ‘queer community’ be expected to disclose things about our past? why is it considered fraudulent to present ourselves as we are today, without dredging up things from before? and what is the goal of ultimatums that we ‘come clean’ about such things, if not for purposes of discrimination?

as a woman who is primarily attracted to other women, the fact that i was able to lay with a man to conceive children, doesn’t make my attraction and affection for women any less real. i don’t ‘share’ women in bed with men, (gross and too kinky for me) i’m monogamist and faithful so if i’m with a women there’s not a man anywhere near to pollute our woman-love. still some women deem me unacceptable as a partner because i am bi-sexual.

and, of course all too often, it is considered a complete ‘deal breaker’ for some, if the woman they are crushing on is found out to be transsexual or transgender.

am i less of a woman-loving-woman for the fact of my past relationships that i should be rejected? is my friend less a woman for having been ‘male-bodied’ years ago that she must confess?

these boundaries that we within the gay community set up amongst our own numbers only seem barriers to me. and yet, knowing they exist, i will continue to feel compelled to disclose my bi-sexual tendencies despite the fact that they don’t define me. and transsexual or transgender women will be expected to disclose the natal circumstance of their male-bodied past, despite the fact of their womanhood.

luckily for me, i don’t mind and in fact embrace my bi-sexual identity, no matter that it cost me a chance with someone who can’t see beyond it. and luckily for my daughter, she is proud to be a girl who is transgender. she is definitely not in any closet!

still, i can’t help but wonder if, since my daughter is attracted to girls and has dreams of marrying a woman someday to share life with her, will the tomorrow in which her dreams unfurl have fewer of these boundaries? or will unnecessary heartbreak befall her at the whim of a someone who rejects her womanhood?

barriers are counter-intuitive to community, and labels are for soup cans. so in my humble opinion, we all need to just “get over it”.

transgender day!

this video clip is awesome!

being transgender, the right to be yourself..
how encouraging this is!
what beautiful people these are!

http://youtu.be/gNVw5HuqPco

it gets better…i hope!

sometimes i’m not sure how much about ‘life as it is’ today i should share with zeeona.

i rarely talk about the really scary stuff, like rape, hate-crimes, wife beatings.

but today she brought up the subject of bullying. perhaps because she had recently had an experience with it during the very brief installment at a private school. (the boy had teased her because she’s a girl. irony?)

(i wrote about it in this blog but can’t remember what i entitled the piece.)

she wondered why people bully. in attempting to answer the question, since i really can’t imagine a good reason for the behaviour, i suggested that when people are younger they sometimes don’t know how to act. maybe they don’t like their selves so they try to make others feel bad about their selves too…misery loves company.

zee then said, “well, at least grown-ups don’t bully.”

then looked to me for agreement on the statement, which unfortunately i couldn’t in all honesty provide.

instead, i went on to say that sometimes grown-ups do bully. like men bully or tease women. it hadn’t occurred to me that we were about to get into a talk about gender inequality. but i’ve recently been re-reading ‘whipping girl’ (a great book, by the way! definitely look it up. amazon has it) so i began to launch into the facts surrounding this concept. (deftly leaving out things like rape and sexual harassment that the notion of men bullying women had evoked in my mind)

only half a diatribe into the semi-rant i began to notice the look of disillusion wash over zeeona’s features.

she said “well, then that makes me wish i were male”

i must have had that ‘deer in the headlights’ look on my face and i was nearly speechless for half a second, before i said: “well, you could do that.”

she looked at me helplessly and said “how?!”

now, zeeona is not ignorant of the fact that she will have to take hormones, and have surgery to prevent her body from becoming ‘a man’s body’. her question had nothing to do with how she could be male physically. because she knows that as far as her external form is concerned it already is.

but, you see, she’s as much a girl as i am. and even if i woke up tomorrow with male genitalia, it wouldn’t change a thing as far as my identity is concerned. it is the same with zee.

she moved quickly onto “do grown men tease and bully other men?” to which i answered, that they do and it is often through this behaviour that they bond or develop relationships with one another.

then we were on to discussing other areas of what my philosophy professor at university would call “man’s inhumanity to man”.

as i reflected on this conversation throughout the day, i began to understand just how much a girl she is!

my initial shock when she said the thing about ‘being male’ was short-lived. i didn’t respond as did to try to unseat her from her female identity, but i admit that if she’d have taken that opportunity to ‘come out of the phase’ i would’ve been fine with switching gears right then and there to allow her to try on that male persona: the one she’d never worn, even while being seen and treated as a little cute boy.

this knee-jerk reaction has less to do with her identity, or my acceptance of her than it does the fears that linger deep in my psyche of the ugly parts of the real world. those parts that allow transphobic folk to bully, assault or murder transwomen. (it’s rarer to find such attacks against transmen: see also “whipping girl”)

so we come again to the kinds of question that all parents face: how much about ‘life as it is’ should we share with our children?

perhaps i’m part optimist after all, because one reason i’m loathe to bring up some of the things i fear with regard to zeeona’s tomorrows is that i hope that world will also ‘grow up’. that tendencies to fear and harm those who are ‘other-than’ will begin to fall away and a more fair societal paradigm rise instead.

every day i come across evidence that today’s attitudes and ideals are in a state of flux with respect to transgender people. on the one hand, not a day goes by when there isn’t an article in the news (i get mine from the internet, twitter, and various websites) about some horrendous thing being done to a woman simply because she is transgender or transsexual.

at the same time there are many high-profile transgender people helping to bring about awareness regarding trans issues, (in poland a transgender person and open homosexual were recently elected into two of the highest political positions in the land,) and ever increasing news bites about new legislation made to protect transgender folk against hate crimes and discrimination.

so, it maybe that it’s okay not to share with zeeona today’s version of ‘life as it is’. because maybe, the cliche going around these days is true. maybe in tomorrow’s world, ‘it gets better’.

whose sin is it? how is it fraud?

any given day, in my perusal of news stories about transgender issues, i happen across many unfortunate examples of just how far we HAVEN’T come as a society.

this one seemed truly telling, not just because it belied the apparent progress of various attempts at equality, but exhibited how the very institutions that should see to the spiritual and educational needs of the persons they serve can betray them.

the headline read:

“calif. baptist university expels transgender student for fraud”

and you guessed it! the alleged ‘fraud’ had nothing to do with attempting to dupe someone out of moneys, to con them into giving something, or any other illicit actions conjured up by the term.

instead, it had to do with checking the female box of an online application form.

tho a natal male, domaine javier has considered herself female since she was a young child, and lives as a woman.

born in the philippines, domaine began dressing like the girl she is at age 13, was valedictorian of her high school class and was selected homecoming queen at riverside city college. she had hoped to transfer to california baptist university to study nursing.

the article goes on to say that the school officials discovered the facts behind domaine’s natal gender from an episode of the mtv reality show “i’m passing as someone i’m not”

the article further states that the university expelled domaine in august for violating its conduct code, the particulars of which make no mention of transgender folk, only of ‘homosexuality’.

many things irked me about the article, not the least of which was how in it domaine was consistently referred to by male pronouns, a clear indication that her female identity was rejected even in the recounting of her story.

the fact that laws prohibiting discrimination aren’t applied to ‘private institutions, seems more fraudulent to me than domaine’s representing her self as female!

so.. what! if a black student were rejected at this fine institution because of his not being white, that would be okay? since the laws against discrimination don’t apply?

a transgender person’s identity is not a lifestyle choice! tho neither is being gay. but morality aside, which might logically take homosexuality as sin, what fraud has domaine committed? what is her sin?

why should she be made to suffer if some of god’s alleged advocates on earth have minds smaller than god’s creation, and take it upon themselves to judge, where jesus expressly told them not to!

isn’t this their sin?

my daughter was betrayed by her natal gender, she is not a fraud when she says who she is! rather, when she was still dressing as a boy and being introduced as one and referred to with male pronouns, the honesty she possesses wouldn’t allow the ruse, but she would openly admit, “i’m not really a boy…i’m a girl inside”

would that these various private institutions, these guardians of ‘god’s will’ were a tenth as honest and forthright as domaine javier appears to be and as my daughter most assuredly is!

just a tenth…i think the religious folk call it a tithe.

let them tithe of their compassion and leave judgement to the one whom they claim to represent!