Sour Grapes?
Drakyn posted recently about Heart’s/womensspace’s snipe at the Transgender Day of Remembrance:
“My gut, experience, knowledge tell me that the group of persons which will receive the absolute least sympathy and concern is female persons. We are trafficked, prostituted, enslaved, raped, all of the time by all sorts of men, ho hum, no big deal. But if it’s a boy or a transgender person, suddenly that’s a whole nother level.”
As I said in Drakyn’s discussion:
There are some lines cis women shouldn’t cross. You can participate in the Day of Remembrance, or you can ignore it, but don’t you dare begrudge it.
We have the Transgender Day of Remembrance is because it is a whole ‘nother level when a trans person is killed. A level down. As in trans panic defense actually working, as in massive victim blaming, as in society seeing trans lives as disposable. As in the murders being a matter of brutal overkill. I am not sure what world Heart lives on, but it’s not one where trans lives are valued over cis women’s lives.
Unfortunately, Heart sees everything trans women gain as something stolen from her - from all cis women. She accuses us of appropriating and colonizing womanhood, but she uses both words inappropriately. Talking about colonization the way she does is appropriation: If trans women aren’t marching on Women’s Country, with guns, sabers, diseased blankets and a mandatory religion, using “colonization” in this context is naked appropriation. You don’t colonize by becoming, you colonize by dominating, disenfranchising, othering, enslaving, and murdering.
While I wouldn’t accuse Heart of trying to colonize trans women experiences (she wants to deny that our experiences are valid, not claim them for her own - she only appropriates cis women experiences), she does try to dominate, disenfranchize, and other trans women whenever possible. She aggressively shouts us down when we claim to have experiences in common with cis women. She tells us that we’re not allowed to use goddess symbolism, she insists (sometimes) that we are men, or acting as men, or acting on male privilege. Further, she cheers on regular posters who make even more outrageous and transphobic statements, while claiming all along that she doesn’t believe or think those things because she never said them.
But she whines that trans people dare to remember our dead.
November 25, 2007 at 9:37 pm
-applause-
November 25, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Unfortunately, Heart sees everything trans women gain as something stolen from her - from all cis women. She accuses us of appropriating and colonizing womanhood, but she uses both words inappropriately. Talking about colonization the way she does is appropriation: If trans women aren’t marching on Women’s Country, with guns, sabers, diseased blankets and a mandatory religion, using “colonization” in this context is naked appropriation. You don’t colonize by becoming, you colonize by dominating, disenfranchising, othering, enslaving, and murdering.
For real.
And, it’s not just appropriation, IMO, it’s also active intense evasion of her and other white cis women’s actual really-truly-membership in a group that is on this actual physical land to begin with due to those actual acts you describe. If we can focus on these twisted inverted stories about trans women, gee, we can ignore and displace our own actual real position as perpetrators and oppressors because no we are just the oppressed victims and …. I’ve heard this story before. I wish I could say, Heart is just a fucking nutjob (which she is, right?) but this kind of distortion crap is all over the place. It’s always everyone else who is Teh Oppressor and Teh Violator Against Teh Pure Innocent White Cis Women whose shit doesn’t even stink and who is the true definition of benign and good.
Also, have I mentioned yet that I have all sorts of piseed-ness about MWMF “The Land” shit when it is such a white thing to begin with? That may be a tangent but grrr IT IS SO NOT “OUR” LAND.
November 25, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Yeah, a complete evasion of white women’s complicity in actual for real colonization. And yes, this brand of radical feminism gets heavily into distortion rather than dealing with women of color, trans women, women with disabilities, sex-positive women, as people. We’re all just abstractions and tokens to attack, demonize, pathologize, or appropriate. Radical feminism even made appropriation of lesbianism the Party policy.
And yeah, I’ve never been comfortable referring to the land that MWMF happens on as “The Land.” I just call it the fest or festival.
November 26, 2007 at 12:05 am
*growls with anger*
November 26, 2007 at 12:51 am
Just as a clarification - the post in which she adds that comment isn’t about the transgender day of remembrance, but it was posted on November 21st, which is suspicious timing to complain about how trans people get too much sympathy for being victimized.
The post itself is about Afghani men hiring teenaged boys to dress as women and be sexual partners, and making a specious comparison between them and trans women.
November 26, 2007 at 3:53 am
she actually fucking typed that?
Oh my god. OMFG!
Cisgender women are not the only people on the face of this fucking planet that suffer, how has she NOT figured that out yet?
Oh, wait, she hasn’t, because apparently Heart is the only person on the face of the earth that has really suffered, in the name of womyn of course….how could ANY other person forget THAT?? I mean, after all, anything and everything is, apparently, all about her.
November 26, 2007 at 9:45 am
I’m so sorry about this. She embarrasses me as a feminist every time she opens her ignorant mouth.
Heart, listen up: The whole reason transpeople become victims is because they ARE NOT considered men anymore. It is then open-season on them, AS IT IS for women. Transmen aren’t regarded as “real” men and punished for that (Brandon Teena), while transwomyn are seen as counterfeit women/failed men, as indeed, you seem to agree. Sexism and misogyny are at the roots of transphobic violence. This is Feminism 101, what Andrea Dworkin meant when she said “a transsexual is in a state of emergency” and recognized that one should not interfere with their process. Have you forgotten that?
Heart’s theory directly contradicts itself. The fact that she continues to propagate this 70s-Janice Raymond nonsense, is due to her own prejudice and transphobia, not an honest engagement with feminist theory. (Obviously, since she can’t even dialogue with anyone who disagrees with her.) Heart refuses to adapt her theory to real people’s lives, and instead imposes theory on real people, as the Bible-believers do. THEORY BEFORE PEOPLE = SCRIPTURE BEFORE PEOPLE. Same thing. People are expendable, to a fundamentalist. And Heart is a fundamentalist before she is anything else.
What exactly does she think transpeople should do? That is the question I would put to her. Does she understand that anyone presenting a gender-identity that doesn’t match up with their legal ID–assigned by the government based on birth-assignment (something I also did not understand for a long time), is at actual physical risk? She obviously doesn’t care about that, and in fact, seems to think transpeople deserve some kind of punishment. Because one thing we can see from TDoR, is that they ARE being punished. Does Heart approve? If not, what is she doing to end it?
She is not about ENDING it, she is about CONTINUING THE PUNISHMENT.
I think we see exactly what Heart is about. She is a TRANSPHOBE, and should be regarded as any other person who thinks ANY group of people–ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE– is expendable: Hater.
November 26, 2007 at 11:14 am
*applause*
I wish I had something profound to say Lisa but all I can really do is knee-jerkily vomit on Heart’s shoes because… who SAYS that? How can anyone whose whole schtick is supposedly anti-violence work snigger at someone talking about murder?
November 26, 2007 at 11:45 am
because she’s a compleat narcissist and that’s what they do. hide the venial and the ugly behind false piety.
November 26, 2007 at 11:50 am
“Does Heart approve? If not, what is she doing to end it?”
she includes the phrase “and transphobia” among the list of woes and ills Men perpetuate against the world every once in a while. and she, like, actually talked to a couple of transfolk who were rilly rilly extra out of their way polite to her. sometimes. unlike her dear friend lucky whom she’s gone a fest-ing with, arms around each other, she does not think it’s totally on to suggest that transwomen don’t belong in women’s bathrooms on account of they might rape someone, or are psycho killers, etc. not -all- transwomen, anyway. she does make these distinctions.
i totally think she deserves an award for that, don’t you?
November 26, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Jill just linked you from feministe, btw:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/11/26/transgender-privilege/
November 26, 2007 at 1:11 pm
… and I can’t get to Feministe. :( I just get “Error establishing a database connection.”
Daisy, Dworkin said that? Wow, I never knew. Anyway, Heart’s not about ending it, because that would supposedly put trans issues above women’s issues, and she’d never ever fight for men’s rights, and of course all trans women are men, except when Heart’s talking to us directly, at which point she’s inconsistent.
Belle, yeah, she’s really down with the tokenizing when it suits her. For example, when saying that transphobia is something other people do.
Ren, when I read it, I think I said “Oh my god. OMFG!” too. And now we’re on the second day of the “16 days of activism against violence against women,” which sort of makes Heart’s complaint look even more petty, if that’s even possible.
November 26, 2007 at 1:37 pm
egh, feministe always seems to have server tsuris these days. maybe if you go in by the powweb door…i’ll check
November 26, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Some other tidbits from that warlord thread:
Xochitl:
Satsuma:
I was surprised to learn that trans women go into prostitution because it’s awesome and we love fucking for survival. I’m sure lots of trans women who are in prostitution would react similarly. Especially those who get paid the least when the johns don’t stiff them, when the johns don’t come back and mug the women to get their money back, who are shot down, run over, stabbed, and otherwise brutalized by men who suddenly decide that it’s necessary to prove his manhood to murder a tranny.
Yeah, you totally don’t sound like you’re ignorant of real trans women and are just filling the void with hostile assumptions.
And all this crap about trans women “being better women than real women” isn’t something I’ve ever heard from a trans woman. Sure, I know some who, early in transition, get really weird about policing and defining womanhood, but they grow out of it. Seriously, they’re learning, not defining anything.
And the “strangest sex stereotyping?” What the hell? We’re not even talking about human beings, we’re talking about imaginary caricatures populating Satsuma’s brain.
Satsuma, who said to a trans woman in Heart’s ENDA post:
Does this sharing of ideas happen by radical feminists telling trans women that we’re caricatures of womanhood, that we’re invaders in women’s country, that any consideration at all that trans women are at a higher risk of murder than anyone else is stealing from consideration for cis women?
Why present one face when a trans woman is right there talking to you, and a different face when she’s not? Are they really different faces at all? When you’re lecturing Abby on how she experiences male privilege, isn’t it really the same thing? You’re defining trans woman experiences in terms of radical feminism, without any acknowledgement of trans woman experiences?
November 26, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I already checked powweb, but thank you.
Every avenue I’ve looked down has been blocked. :(
November 26, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Daisy, Dworkin said that?
Yes, I think it was in WOMAN HATING. They’ve dropped it down the memory hole, of course. This was all about MTFs (no mention of FTMs) since it was the 70s. But she was very sympathetic, not negative. The first negativity was from Robin Morgan, Mary Daly and Janice Raymond. Jeffreys climbed on the bandwagon some years after that.
I don’t recall Catherine MacKinnon saying anything anti-trans, ever. I could be wrong, but don’t think so.
November 26, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] you hate it when those selfish trans people have the audacity to recognize that trans people are regularly discriminated against, assaulted and even killed? [...]
November 26, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I doubt it’s even on MacKinnon’s radar, much. I -do- know she’s said stupid-as-shit things about how fights for gay rights were a distraction from feminism cause you know it’s more men and their sex, with men; lesbians should ally with peaceful wimminlovers and not those nasty bath-and-cottage-hopping buttfuckers, thankee. (it’s in the intro to a charming little anthology called, uhhhh, something like The Sexual Liberals and the War On Feminism, ed. guess who? Janice Raymond! and her now-co-runner-of CATW Dorcen Leidholdt. it’s a -great- little book, i tell you).
November 26, 2007 at 10:10 pm
>>but oftentimes, I wonder when do people become their authentic selves and at what social cost?
when they don’t feel like they’re being judged or threatened or rendered un-human at every step, asshole. you know, SAFE.
November 26, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I’m pretty sure that a woman who talks about how getting married and having children makes a woman stupid is a pretty strange feminist/lesbian stereotype.
November 27, 2007 at 3:01 am
Jeez, Lisa: you are blowing me away.
Your last sentence says it all.
I am sorry, you know, just SO DAMN FUCKING sorry for what you and others have experienced.
I’m with you, okay?
100% totally with you — as are all us of here.
November 27, 2007 at 3:27 am
Lisa: your blog regularly blows me away.
Thank you for bringing my attention to this. I hadn’t realised quite how low Heart would stoop to discriminate, but, wow. With you all the way.
November 27, 2007 at 3:30 am
If I wanted to give her that much attention, I could build a house with all the transphobia that she posts or allows.
Thank you for the post. :)
Thank you, Kim.
November 27, 2007 at 5:03 am
Gahh! This woman is just despicable! From all I’ve heard about and from her, it seems she was less of a bigot back when she was one of James Dobson’s bootlickers. I mean, what sort of disgusting human being would say the shit that she does?
Her and her posse just show their bigotry every single time they open their mouths. You shouldn’t have to tell a grown-assed woman that reading one article won’t provide you with enough information to know what’s really going on in any situation. I’m going to write about this debacle today after I finally get to bed. It’s 7a.m. and if I try to talk about this now, I’ll probably just end up cussing and ranting.
November 27, 2007 at 8:34 am
Oh, she’s lower than a snake’s belly. As if more evidence were needed.
This blog is gonna help change things, Lisa, have no doubt, but I’m so sorry about all the shit like this that you have to wade through in the process.
November 27, 2007 at 8:37 am
>>From all I’ve heard about and from her, it seems she was less of a bigot back when she was one of James Dobson’s bootlickers. >>
You know, I would really, really like to know what, if anything, she had to say about o say reproductive rights, or gay people, during that time? and if she’s ever made any sort of actual reparations for it? and no, sucking up to supra feminist-lesbians, declaring oneself a “political lesbian” and buying overpriced shit at Michfest doesn’t suffice, not when you’re busy denigrating and deriding the -rest- of the “LGBTUVWXYZ” on a regular basis.
November 27, 2007 at 11:04 am
well, as easy as it is to think she is an idiot (which I think she is, I mean come on, who attacks a memorial for people brutally murdered?) but I have noticed that people like this exist because they do represent a voice. We can hate NARTH for publishing articles telling parents to encourage their children to bully gender varient children, and we can hate Dobson for……being Dobson but as odious as what these people say is, there is a large amount of people who internally nod their head.
I used to go to a church (Before I was out) which used to pray that God strike down and kill everyone in the annual pride parade (I wasn’t exactly nodding my head on that, but I didn’t speak out either….till I did then I wasn’t in that church very long). I find it easier to see her not just as one person who refuses to admit that they are phobic and hurting people but also a symbolic representation of what many (hopefully not most) but many people are thinking. If my own mother says, “I don’t have a problem with you lesbians, but why do those gay men always have to be so……you know, in the gay parades” then I am thinking there are quite a few people thinking, “You know if those T people just shut up and stopped drawing attention to themselves then maybe they wouldn’t be killed so often” or “These T people are trying to make themselves into something special, like (insert group you identify with) hasn’t had people killed this year; do they think they are going to guilt me into caring about them?”
I am not saying that it is pleasant but at least it gives one an idea of where the ignorance is and how to go back to the building block basics, though I am not sure how much simplier it could get since the North American general understanding of T still hasn’t got that gender identity and sexual orientation are DIFFERENT. And that being a transgendered individual doesn’t mean they are having continious sex that can only be referred to in hushed tones and in probably in revelations as a “Sign of the times”.
Thank you for the post - it was a slap in the face wake up that, yeah, it is an uphill struggle and that it seems every inch will have to be defended, again….and again.
November 27, 2007 at 12:52 pm
From Heart’s post, this caught my attention:
She’s clearly hoping someone will take the bait and claim that there’s more concern about the abuse of transgender people than women. No one does, so she adds it herself:
Hmm, MY gut and experience tell me that NO ONE who is victimized will receive much in the way of sympathy and concern. But let Heart explain why there’s a federal Violence Against Women Act when there isn’t a Violence Against Transgender People Act.
But what’s also frustrating about this is her claim that there’s any confusion at all between transgender women, and boys who have been prostituted and force-feminized. It comes from the same place as Catherine Crouch, when she said this in response to the controversy over her film “The Gendercator”:
Again, the specious claim that there is any fundamental ‘confusion’ over who is transgender and who isn’t. This happens because feminists of this stripe have refused to acknowledge the core of our narrative - as Julia Serano put it, the experience of having a dissonance between our subconscious sex and our body - because it is inconvenient for them ideologically.
It’s like when we were kids, and one of our friends decided to be annoying when we talk: “Hey, do you hear something? I don’t hear anything. Must be the wind, it sounds almost like someone’s talking.”
They can’t hear what we are saying, so they don’t know, on a fundamental level, who we really are.
November 27, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I don’t get this, “who someone is” sentiment. I believe some is the life they choose to live.
November 27, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Elizabeth,
Yes, there’s a cultural infrastructure that supports transphobic, racist, ableist, sexist, classist thought, and makes each acceptable to voice in public to varying degrees. Heart and her commenters support and reinforce this infrastructure, just as John Aravosis does.
Cicely, thanks!
Sabrina, it’s more that they consciously choose to ignore us and silence us whenever possible. There was a thread on the IBTP forum in which someone spent time to explain in detail what it’s like to be a transsexual person, and one of the moderators told her that she was “taking up too much space” and using verbiage to intimidate women, and that these were male domination tactics and she’d better shut up. I think Drakyn might’ve been there for that.
Tulip,
How often do they act like grown-assed women when stuff like this comes up?
Yeah, it took me a few days before I could post it without just ranting and spitting profanity. I had to post when I did because of the activism against violence against women, as well as Heart’s enthusiastic support of that (and revealing the lie in her concern trolling about transgender lives being too valuable).
November 27, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Yeah, she never identified herself as a trans*woman on that thread, but of course everyone assumed she was. She id write long posts that were a bit hard to follow (lots of tangents and not a lot of formatting), but instead of asking her to use line breaks or something someone started a thread in another part of the forums asking about “trolls who write huge posts” and who take up space like men. She stopped posting because she felt attacked and hurt (we exchanged AIM screen names and chatted some). The thread’s in the Sex and Gender section and is titled Transphobia. Of course, not too long after she left, Delphyne, Justicewalks, and others got off topic and started debating whether or not drag was like blackface (that thread was split off though) and then Transphobia died.
November 27, 2007 at 3:23 pm
That’s just the tone argument again. What Nezua calls the drowning maestro: “Stop posting like that or we’ll ban you from the forum.”
The fucking tone thing drives me up the wall. Maybe if I didn’t see it two or three times a day at a minimum.
November 27, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Here is the first comment on the Transphobia thread about Mamelon’s posting style.
And here is a part of it, “It is a hallmark of dude-speak to start a topic with a seemingly innocent question designed to lure humorless feminists into a discussion that will prove once and for all that we suck. It is also a hallmark of dude-speak on any online forum that all you have to do is talk long enough and loud enough and you win.”
And nothing Mamelon had said was attacking feminists; someone else mentioned MWMF and their exclusionary policy.
And then a mod came in and told Mamelon that her posts were too long (and no, it doesn’t matter if you’re being academic or that you want to clarify things, or that you want to refute common misinformation) and “I don’t give a damn what you started as, what you are now, what you think you are or who you identify with: if you act like a troll you’ll be treated like a troll.”
November 27, 2007 at 5:11 pm
“They seem like me, so I am not understanding what is the difference between them and me.”
I think we have the root of the problem.
maybe instead of, or rather in addition to, the various identity/political 101’s we have, we need a “Boundaries 101.”
“-This- is -me.- -That- is -you.- You; me. You; me. See?”
it’s just most people who don’t need this explained tend to kind of assume everyone else also learned this when they were, you know, very small children.
November 27, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Thank you, drakyn - that’s exactly it.
I found it because, when I found a promising blog or forum, I’d search for trans discussions first.
And yeah, boundaries - huge. Like, say, you have a thread that relates directly to how many trans people are killed brutally every year, you don’t ask questions like “Doesn’t SRS support the patriarchy?”
Of course it does, just like having a frakking vagina supports the patriarchy.
November 27, 2007 at 8:15 pm
I apologize for entertaining the “justify yourself” questions.
November 27, 2007 at 8:18 pm
You have nothing to apologize for, Jay. You didn’t post asdf’s long lead up to “Doesn’t SRS make the patriarchy stronger?” question, and you didn’t lure Rainsong into the thread.
You’re awesome, as far as I’m concerned, and not just because you didn’t do those things. :)
It’s hard not to answer those questions, too. :(
November 27, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Thank you. (:
What’s always struck me as extra-bizarre about Rainsong (well, one of many thing) is how trans men and transmasculine folks have no place in her various theories. maybe i should be happy about that.
I wish I were as articulate as you and Holly are.
November 27, 2007 at 8:38 pm
What I hate is when *I* do it. Like my last rant had several places where I said “trans women” when I should have said men and women, women and men, or people. :(
I like the category of “extra-bizarre” for Rainsong. She’s just… I don’t know, it’s like, the way she talks, it doesn’t ever make sense. Like her response to my angry post on Feministe… I wasn’t talking to her, about her, responding to her, or even acknowledging her, but she has to make my anger about her.
She really has zero sense of or respect for boundaries, I think.
Oh, and for articulate, shoot for little light. I’ve been linking her Seam of Skin and Scales around because I wish I could write something like that.
November 27, 2007 at 10:02 pm
i know it’s a term that’s been used as a weapon, and unfairly so, but in her case i really do think it’s apt, Rainsong/etc.: sociopath. I mean, did you see those Michfest threads where she’s basically enacting her whole abusive relationship of/with a girl one third of her age? I mean, it’s all playing out right there in the thread. it’s horrid. and then of course guess what kind of conclusions her ex finally comes to, as urged on by Heart and others?
i wonder how they explain it away when a cis woman abuses her partner; or does that just never ever ever happen in Magical Radical Land?
November 27, 2007 at 10:04 pm
oh yeah and: the only way to get me to shut up is to let me keep talking, or however that went. classic energy creature move, there.
November 27, 2007 at 10:10 pm
I haven’t seen those threads.
I went to look, and got stuck on some jerk insisting that trans women construct sexual orientation as a way to revise our histories, not because of honest attractions.
November 27, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Wait, crap…Jill on the MWMF forum is Rainsong. Has to be. Talking about being misclassified, about trans women who transition late being men…
November 28, 2007 at 3:49 am
we now mock victims of sexual violence and murder as part of our liberation?
unbelieveable
November 28, 2007 at 11:04 am
wait wait…she’s calling herself -Jill- now??
O-o
“the call is coming from inside the house…”
November 28, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Well, Jill complains a lot about trans women who transition late, insists she was misassigned, has a “book” she sends to people so they can read about her life, and was banned multiple times from the MWMF forum.
BA: We made the mistake of forgetting our proper place. We get our servings after the real ladies are done, or something. Or I’m bitter.
November 28, 2007 at 2:54 pm
i’m just wondering: did “Jill” first appear before or after “Bliss” started her latest blatherings at feministe? and was put on mod notice by…Jill?
November 28, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Yeah, she predates that thread by at least a few weeks.
Man, I so wanted to respond to her comment that no one addresses her arguments because they can’t, and explain that dismantling her arguments is easy; acknowledging her existence makes her into the goddamned superflu.
She just needs to:
November 28, 2007 at 10:48 pm
who, Blanche or B/R/J/etc? i’m pretty certain the latter doesn’t have friends. just bared-necks-du-jour.
the former–yeah, that’s pretty apt, i’d say. it’s kind of almost sad, really. *chomp chomp chomp the popcorn*
November 28, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Both, really.
The quote is Cordelia telling Buffy off. :)
November 28, 2007 at 11:59 pm
i eventually gave in and blocked the michfest forums from my computer. i certainly don’t feel i should make an account and respond, but lurking was wrong too.
November 29, 2007 at 12:03 am
I did that with the Ms. Magazine forum back in 2004 or so, when there was still a Ms. Magazine forum. I made an account but never posted there. Just reading it was…well, it’s like reading the MWMF forum.
I actually did post to the MWMF forum a couple months ago, but I let myself get dragged too far into their worldview and had to disengage before I said something I’d seriously regret.
I don’t really lurk there now - I just went to look for something specific, pointed out that Bailey’s a eugenicist who’s all for aborting gay fetuses and explained the medical pressure to create false histories that trans people have had to deal with in the past.
It’s not as bad right this moment as it often can be, but it’ll get worse again.
November 29, 2007 at 1:16 am
yeah, i just meant because i’m a guy and all. obviously their forums are accessible to anyone who can view the page, but it’s kind of an ethical toss-up, especially when there were discussions on “butch flight” or “what’s so wrong with being a masculine woman”–conversations that drew lines all over my body (there i go personalizing it again) but still i had qualms with responding to.
i don’t demonize michfest and indeed support any woman who wants to attend.
i’m probably getting off track. i think this topic and the gendercator one have really been thought provoking insofar as how someone like me (male identified, not particularly trans identified, queer but not because of trans status, midtransition) can respond to what i view as attacks on my choices *if* these attacks occur in what is more or less lesbian space or women’s spaces.
November 29, 2007 at 1:25 am
Oh, speaking of Gendercator! I keep forgetting to mention that Mattilda dropped by and answered your comment on that post.
I think it’s appropriate for trans men to respond to attacks on their choices. I know that most of the attacks occur in lesbian or women’s spaces, but that doesn’t excuse them.
Also, “drawing lines across your body” is an excellent metaphor. I don’t remember where I first came across it, but I think it really describes how this crap affects us.
I don’t demonize MichFest, but I do demonize the policy, which has loosened up since its enactment. It’s still “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but no one’s stopping trans women from attending.
Because of the attitude, though, I do wish women - trans or cis - would not attend, any more than I’d want people to frequent a business that disallows people of color (not that those can even legally exist now).