Pimp Slapping The Rad Fems Back

Well, I've had my say about the latest hate screed from a rad fem.

Other trans blogs are chiming in as I speak.   I'll post those responses to "Bev Jo's" BS in this post.

Teh Rain 

Sadly So

An Open Response To The Author Of 'TAMCM'

Goodbye Mary Daly-And Please Take The Transphobia With You

TransGriot Note: My latest post for Global Comment.

One of the major reasons I don't like radical feminism is the virulent transphobia that was espoused by the quartet of Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer, and the woman that died January 3, Mary Daly.

While Daly was a brilliant thinker, she was controversial to put it mildly.

She once advocated that only ten percent of the men on Planet Earth should be left alive, and refused to allow men in her women's studies classrooms at Boston College.

She was called out by womanist Audre Lorde for her racism in Lorde's famous May 6, 1979 Open Letter To Mary Daly.

Lorde criticized her for failing to address race or acknowledge the stories of women of color in Daly's 1978 book Gyn/Ecology.

Daly never responded to Lorde's letter, which she published four months later.

Daly's transphobia was in full effect in Gyn/Ecology as well when she referred to trans people as "Frankensteinian" and living in a "contrived and artifactual condition".

“Although the resistance Mary Daly’s feminist theology offered to patriarchal oppression is commendable, a spirituality that elevates one’s own kind by demonizing an ‘other’ – as hers did for transgender/genderqueer folks – is ultimately one for which I have no sympathy,” said transgender activist and historian Dr. Susan Stryker. “Her moralistic condemnation of transsexuals as death-loving Frankenstein monsters was a powerful impetus for my own efforts to reclaim the transformative power of the monstrous and refute its stigma for trans people.”

You can read the rest of the Mary Daly post there.

The Rad Fem Ones

TransGriot Note: Since the 25th anniversary of the release of Prince's Purple Rain movie is fast approaching, and I'm more than a little pissed about the latest 'womyn born womyn' shenanigans playing out over the Vancouver pharmacy, thought it was time for another of my infamous song rewrites.

Grab your iPods or your Prince Purple Rain CD and sing along.

The Rad Fem Ones
sung to the tune of 'The Beautiful Ones' by Prince and the Revolution


Rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
Why you hate on me?
Rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
I'm a she don't call me he
U make me waste my time
Your dogma warps your minds, rad fems

Rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
Chill with the trans hate alright?
Oh rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
Don't tread on my civil rights
Transition was a hard grind
The rad fem ones they hurt us everytime

Finished my transition
Brought harmony to my body and my mind
The rad fem ones
Always hate transpeople
Always everytime

If I told u rad fems
That I have rights f u
Oh rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
If I came to The Land
Would that be cool?

No peeps we're not confused
The rad fem ones
We're tired of being abused

Baby, baby,
Baby, baby,
Baby, baby,
Baby,
What's it gonna be rad fems?

I'm not a him
I'm just she
Cause I am boo
Said I am boo
Tell me, rad fems
Do u hate me?
I gotta know, I gotta know
Do u hate me?
Rad fems, rad fems, rad fems
Listen 2 me
I know where I'm going baby)
I said I know what I need
One thing, one thing's 4 certain baby
I know what I want, yeah
and it won't please u baby
please u, baby
I'm not going down on my knees
Not for u
Not me boo
Baby, baby, baby,
Not for u

Not me boo

'Comedian' Jay Mohr Disses The First Lady

During a recent interview with ESPN's Jim Rome, comedian Jay Mohr tastelessly slammed First Lady Michelle Obama’s looks. And since she's 5'11", guess where he went to do it?



"Michelle Obama - that is a big dude. When Barack plays pick up games at the White House, you know he picks Michelle as his forward, maybe his [center] depending on who’s in Congress that day."

"That has to be like being married to Elton Brand. She is a big dude. I like when she put her arm around the Queen of England and she put her in a headlock and said, “I’ve been waiting 200 years to put my arms around you lady.”

"I like how she shaved off her eyebrows, and then drew them back way too high and in an arch, and then way back down, so she always looks super surprised. Michelle Obama kind of looks like the Count on Sesame Street. One - ah ah - One Black President - ah ah."

Here we go again with that tired 'it's a man' meme automatically hurled at any woman above 5'7" tall. And where is the feminist movement who zealously defended Sen. Clinton and Sarah Palin last year when they were hammered by what they considered sexist attacks?

As usual, when it's a Black woman being attacked, their silence is deafening.

Ain't Feeling Feminism

Feminism, according to a popular bumper sticker is the radical notion that women are people, too. Many feminists have forgotten over the years that the word 'people' also includes their Black, Latina, Asian and native sisters as well as their transgender ones.

While I wholeheartedly agree and support as a transwoman equality for women, I also noted the gulf between the predominately white feminist movement and women of color. I noted how they loudly and zealously rallied to the defense of Hillary Clinton for perceived sexist comments during last year's primary, but were deafeningly silent when Michelle Obama was attacked.

I also remembered the radical feminist anti-transgender BS from their patron saints Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer and follow on books by transphobe feminists Mary Daly, Catherine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan and Sheila Jeffreys.

Raymond once stated that 'transsexuality must be morally mandated out of existence' and it didn't get much better in her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire-The Making of The She-Male.

"All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves .... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive." (Raymond, 1979)

In fact, Janice Raymond for transwomen that transitioned during the 70s and 80's along with the ones who grew up in my era was the most hated person in the transgender community until HRC's Elizabeth Birch took away her title in the late 90's with her anti-transgender inclusion rhetoric.

Germaine Greer isn't liked by some transwomen either, and cosigned with Raymond when she made this comment comparing transwomen to the character Norman Bates in the movie Psycho:

The transsexual is identified as such solely on his/her own script, which can be as learned as any sex-typed behaviour and as editorialized as autobiographies usually are. The lack of insight that MTF transsexuals usually show about the extent of their acceptance as females should be an indication that their behaviour is less rational than it seems. There is a witness to the transsexual’s script, a witness who is never consulted. She is the person who built the transsexual’s body of her own flesh and brought it up as her son or daughter, the transsexual’s worst enemy, his/her mother.

Whatever else it is gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. When a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving at a stroke that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more honourable than any female impersonator’s; his achievement is to gag all those who would call his bluff. When he forces his way into the few private spaces women may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with threats and hate mail, he does as rapists have always done.”

The injection of transphobic hatred and the logic defying justifications of it across the first and second waves of feminist thought was passed on to the new school of feminists who continue to eagerly drink the 'hate on transwomen' Kool Aid.

While we transwomen have had a contentious thirty-six years of drama with the feminist community, it pales in comparison with the ongoing parallel struggle that women of color have with them. They have fought the ongoing silencing of their voices in the feminist movement, got tired of being dissed, ignored and being accused of or being labeled as 'crazy' or 'racist' anytime they critiqued their treatment.

Black women finally said to hell with them and began calling themselves womanists, a term which was coined by author Alice Walker and comes from her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Womanists focus on issues that are broader based that what feminism focuses on, and include issues of race and class that feminism shies away from.

Over the last few years I've gotten to know a few womanists, become friends with them and discovered to my great pleasure that they are light years more enlightened on transgender issues and are serious about supporting their transsisters.

So if you wonder why myself and some transwomen aren't feeling feminism or have a detached ambivalence to it, now you know.