Y'all know how much disdain I have for the WBT's (women born transsexual) or as I more truthfully label them the WWBT's (white women born transsexual). The reason I don't like them is because they are the kissing cousins to radical feminists.They are too busy clutching on to privilege like a wino holding his last bottle of MD 20/20 and disrespectfully attacking anyone who disagrees with their attempts to create this bullshit racist hierarchy to separate themselves from the rest of the multicultural transgender masses based on whether or not you have a neovagina.
It came to my attention that a WWBT was pissed because she was disrespectfully asked to leave a Catholic church parish that she'd been faithfully attending for over 20 years. That's jacked up, but instead of focusing her righteous anger on the Roman Catholic Church who has spread the anti-transgender poison that's now filtering down to the Catholic flock level, who does she blame?
The activists in the community.
One of their frequent rants of the WWBT crowd on transgender message boards is that if we activists wouldn't 'rock the boat' then the haters would leave us alone to live in peace.
Yeah right. I don't know what world you live in, but our enemies have no intention of leaving us alone. It's either stand up and fight for your dignity, self respect and human rights or get run over by fundamentalist fueled tyranny. Sometimes you even have to call out your friends and allies for disrespecting you as well.
If you'd grown up as a person of color instead of privileged white males you'd know this. Thank God there are far more people that are cognizant of that and not only aren't going to meekly submit to injustice, but are willing to fight it head on.
They should be commended for doing so, not attacked and disparaged as you WWBT's tend to do. You can split hairs all you want and call yourselves sufferers of HBS (Harry Benjamin Syndrome), but to the unwashed Fox News watching masses out there you're still transsexuals or worse. You put your pantyhose on one leg at a time just like a pre-op or non-op does and you are still targets for the same discrimination and violence we face. The difference between you and me is that we activists here and all over the world are putting our lives on the line in some cases to fight the madness so that future generations don't have to.
It's time for y'all to put the big girl panties on and fight your real enemies. The religious fundamentalists are. The neo-Mattachine anti-inclusion gays and lesbians are. The radical feminists are. These are the people causing the problems in your lives.
The activists are the peeps who are trying to solve them.
10 comments:
Hi,
First off, love your blog. I can't believe that the girl would blame the activist. I'm willing to bet that if it was not FOR the activist, we would not have made the progress that we've made so far. Sure we have a long way to go, but without activism that has taken place we would be in much worse shape then we are now. I'm not an activist, but to be honest I have been thinking of way that I can help, because I'm getting tired of our brothers and sisters getting the shaft all the time. Whenever I see bigoted comment on article (such as the article on trans vets, by the way. Thanks for your service) I'm begining to jump in and correct there misguided thoughts. I'd ask the girl if all our rights were totally stripped and they began to just kill us off without legal action, what would she do? Would she finally look to the activist for help? Activist have a purpose!
Keep up the good work girl.
Hugs Michelle
As the old aphorism goes, "Better we die on our feet than live on our knees."
I'm not the least bit surprised as this is the same mindset we see in the gay community all the time.
Gay Mafia tries to create a racial hierarchy and oppress those who don't fit their myopic view. After all these these are the same folks who blamed blacks for the Prop 8 fallout.
The problem with many white gays and WWBTs (and obviously this doesn't apply to all whites cause there are some good ones, just the guilty party) is that they still have the privileged mindset and are trying to recapture their privilege by oppressing others within the gay and transgendered community.
They don't understand what it's like be a visible minority and the burden that carries because for most of their life, many of them haven't had to face it.
And I echo Michelle's sentiment. Keep up the great work.
good point, Dennis
One problem I have with the medical gatekeeping that women with "HBS" can get into is that they don't seem to understand the disability rights movement, either. (In particular, the medical vs. social models of disability).
For instance, one of the things disability rights activists point out is that, a lot of times, non-disabled people get to define who we are (e.g. putting people in diagnostic categories, etc).
I could be totally presumptuous, but when I hear people say, "But I'm not like *you*--I have a medical condition!" I think they are talking about disability. And if you are going to talk about disability, it would be really nice if you did your frickin' homework about the disability community before shooting off your mouth. For one thing, you'd learn that the disability community is as full of scary, boat-rocking activists as the trans* community is.
First off, I know nothing about the original story nor the exact words of the person you wrote about. I'm not a fan of the HBS brigade either and I agree, we need to keep our eyes on the prize and who's in our way from getting it. But in that process, I really hope we don't attack one another or, at the very least, can understand where each other is coming from and what our unique challenges are. To me it's not the labels we use to distinguish groups within our larger community, rather the unfair judgements we place on those groups and whether we're ready to listen to their voices that counts.
Neither do I know of many within the wide range of trans-related peeps who don't feel disrespected, misunderstood, underpaid, unsafe, glossed-over and, often, inaccurately represented. That's regardless of color, economic situation, 'passability', pre-post-non, whatever. I hope none of us feel the need to demonize one another or take our righteous anger out on similarly oppressed transpeoples.
Activism in and of itself means little if it doesn't speak to the people it's attempting to help. Activism mixed with dismissiveness, entitlement or condescension isn't what I choose to support. Activists who don't listen to me won't get any of my passion. Again, I don't support what you suggested the transwoman in the article said, nor excuse it, but I also want to know exactly who and what she was talking about when she railed against activists. Some I like and others I can do without their good intentions.
I am not familiar with the woman who was asked to leave her parish, despite being a member for 20 years. But I have repeatedly had discussions with conservative Catholics about transsexualism. There is nothing in Catholic teaching (despite all its problems) which would justify kicking out a transsexual.
By expelling the woman this parish not only did her a grave injustice, they were did harm to the Catholic Church.
Gina,
While I agree with you in principle, experience has taught me there are just some people in our community like the WWBT's that don't get it, don't want to get it and never will.
I said:
One problem I have with the medical gatekeeping that women with "HBS" can get into is that they don't seem to understand the disability rights movement, either.
I'm sorry. I retract scare quotes around HBS. My use of them was wrong and unnecessary. But everything else still stands.
And Monica, I don't care if people get what I'm talking about or not, just that they listen and give me the space to say what I need to say. The reality is, there are WIDELY varying needs and experiences in the trans/gender variant/cd communities which overlap but don't necessarily breed understanding. What I do expect is a smidgeon of mutual empathy, good manners and an acknowledgment of each other's needs for rights and protections which are self-defined as necessary for each group.
The problem Gina, is that the WWBT's want monologue, not dialogue.
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