Rad Fems-Still Letting The Transhate Flow

Last night I was having a relatively peaceful evening surfing the Web when I stumbled across another rambling hate on transwomen screed.

It was on The Magazine Project blog and penned by a rad fem drone called "Bev Jo"  entitled 'Transwomen Are Merely Castrated Men."

You'll note when you hit the link that the post has been taken down, but had 13 likes and the comment section is full of rad fem drones cosigning that disco era hate speech on a supposedly friendly LGBT blog.

With friends like these, who needs right wing enemies? 


Unlike the 70's and 80's rad fems, this is the second decade of a new century in case it escaped your attention.   Not only are we not hiding in stealth anymore, we have the capability to hit your stuck on delusional flat asses right back 

If that sounds harsh, damn skippy it is.   I and other transwomen are beyond sick and tired of your long debunked circular arguments being regurgitated over and over and wielded like a club to bat transwomen with to pump up your frayed egos and vanilla flavored privilege.

The new twist was throwing Anne Lawrence's BS in the mix, but it still adds up to a toxic transphobic stew of hate worthy of anything our right wing detractors throw at us.

Yes, I know there are rad fems that don't subscribe to the trans bashing that regularly occurs in the rad fem blogosphere and rad fem spaces.   But until you forcefully call out the people who engage in it, you are by your silence in the matter complicit in enabling it.

And don't worry "Bev Jo", most self respecting transwomen I know don't want to be anywhere near you clueless Janice Raymond-Germaine Greer wannabees.

Can somebody call the Southern Poverty Law Center and get them to declare radical feminism a hate group?

Jim Fouratt's May 27, 2000 Transphobic NY Times Letter

TransGriot Note:   Longtime transphobe Jim Fouratt has been trying to spin his divisive image in New York City and gay history recently by appearing on a 2009 episode of the Colbert Report.   But Colbert or the writers trying to sanitize this image didn't ask him about this. 

We folks with long memories in the trans community won't forget this transphobic email.    It was his response to the NY Times magazine article entitled 'An Inconvenient Woman'.    

It's as Dr Lynn Conway wrote about later, a classic example of the transphobia that runs rampant in the gay  men from that time period.    

 <<Forwarded Message:
Subj: ALERT: New York Times promotes sexual reasigment (sic) as a solution to gender varinace (sic)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000528mag-calpernia.html

Date: Saturday, May 27, 2000 2:58:21 PM
From: JimFour@aol.com
I am shocked to hear a member of the Imperial Court endorsing this blatantly homophobic article written by a gayman. Yes, this is a tragic story. Murdered because he was perceived to be gay, Barry Winchell deserves all our grief and anger. As do his loved ones including a gender variant gayman self named Calpernia Sarah Addams, a professional gender illusionist.

All around us we see these attacks on gaymen who do not conform to some kind of Tom of Finland or Andrew Sullivan image, What is new is we now see gay academics and pop journalists embracing this new push to make gaymen and lesbians straight by leading them to endure painful physical body manipulation and dangerous hormonal injects to take on the topography of the conventional definition of what is male and what is female. Modern medicine is once again trying to cure us of our desire for same sex love.

Our gender variant gay and lesbian population is under intense pressure to deny their homosexuality and to take all physical, hormonal and emotional steps in order to be accepted into heterosexual society.
First we had Boys Don't Cry which told the horrific story of a 19 year old baby butch lesbian who was first raped and than murdered because she had the audacity to role play and act on her desire to love and have sex with women. In death Brandon Teen became the poster girl of the reparative therapy movement (aka transgendered) for adult gender variant gaymen and women and in this guise was deemed acceptable frirst to Hollywood and than to a larger straight audience. 

We are familuar with the smarmy tabloid journalism of gaywriter David France. Who could forget his bizarre book on Andrew Crispo? But does the New York Times need to sink to the level of the National Inquirer doing a Talk-ish sex/celebrity/death feature? I would hope not.

The Barry Winchell story needs to be told. How homophobia both external and more importantly internally puts at risk most homosexuals and lesbains and all gender variant individuals, How the rush to gender reassign through the wonders of modern medicine has ultimately failed ... where in the sensational picture of a professional skin strutter was there any reference to the 30 year John Hopkins study of sexual reassignment and how ultimately it did not improve the self image or well being of the subjects in their program. The results of this study caused John Hopkins to cease sexual reassignment as a solution to gender dysfunction. Or where is the information on how most transsexuals who are not closeted have very few job options other than in the adult entertainment and/or sex industry...Wendy Carlos and Dr. Renee Richard's are the exceptions.

The Imperial Court can be a powerful voice in confronting the solutions that are now being promoted by mainstream publications like the New Times and by the toxic, anti-gay/lesbian "queer" academics. Neither group is a friend of the Cherry Grove and/or Court community, Why can't Calpernia Sarah Addams dress, act and be himself as a gaymen, The Court sets a powerful role model of how to be who ever you want to be and to be true to your gay male identity. After all, this construction of 'women" is totally informed by gaymale sensibility and has little in reality to do with the essence of being female.

Speak up. Help those gender variant gaymen and women who are under siege to save their pennies to mutilate their bodies to gain acceptance into the heterosexual society.

Would be most interesting in hearing each of your response to this increasingly serious attack on who we are and how we live.
Jim Fouratt >>

Why The Trans Community Hates Dr. Paul McHugh

"The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness—but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged)...." Dr. Paul McHugh 2004 Surgical Sex.

If you've noticed the spike in anti-trans rhetoric coming from the Catholic Church that has resulted in an increase in transphobia and hate violence crimes directed at transpeople in Latin America and other heavily Catholic spots on the planet, you have this man to thank for it.

You also have this man to thank for the 'transsexuality is a choice' meme that we have had to constantly fight as well.

But there is one group that he zealously defends. Catholic priests facing sex abuse charges.

Dr. Paul McHugh is another one of our longtime enemies of the trans community who first got the attention of our community in 1979. As then chair of the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department from 1975-2001 he shut down the Gender Program based on that infamous 1977 John Meyer study he ordered that claimed there was no real benefit to these services.

As a longtime critic of trans issues, McHugh has ties to neoconservative Catholic groups, was a member of the GW Bush Administration's President's Council on Bioethics, and is frequently quoted by anti-transgender groups such as NARTH and the Concerned Women for America.

McHugh claims responsibility for helping get J. Michael Bailey's anti-trans character assassination waste of trees The Man Who Would Be Queen published through the National Academy of Sciences.

He was tapped as the Vatican Advisor on trans issues and set the table for the current 'hate on transpeople' attitudes now prevalent in the Vatican since 2003 and now spreading like a cancer through the Roman Catholic Church.

Paul McHugh is also a supporter and proponent of Ray Blanchard's dubious autogynephelia theory that he created in 1989.

The "transgender" activists (now often allied with gay liberation movements) still argue that their members are entitled to whatever surgery they want, and they still claim that their sexual dysphoria represents a true conception of their sexual identity. They have made some protests against the diagnosis of autogynephilia as a mechanism to generate demands for sex-change operations, but they have offered little evidence to refute the diagnosis. Psychiatrists are taking better sexual histories from those requesting sex-change surgery and are discovering more examples of this strange male exhibitionist proclivity

McHugh not only leads the attacks on transpeople with a fanatical zeal, he did so against the late Dr. George Tiller to the point that in 2007 he was ordered by Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison to cease and desist. The anti-Tiller public statements by him and others in the conservative movement led to Tiller's death.

McHugh has the blood of our brothers and sisters around the world on his hands as well, and is deserving of the antipathy heaped upon him in our community.

Why The Trans Community Hates Dr. Janice G. Raymond

“I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence”

Before there was an HRC and its various leaders pissing us off, the Religious Right, Jim Fouratt, The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, Rep. Barney Frank, Dr. Paul McHugh, the Catholic Church, the Tea Klux Klan, The WWBT's, or Julie Bindel and a long list of radical feminists hating on transpeople, there was the trans community's original Public Enemy Number One.

She is radical feminist UMass professor Dr. Janice G. Raymond. While she focuses her time on her award winning work combating prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women, back in her disco era collegiate days her rhetorical sights were trained on transwomen.

The animus between the trans community and her starts in 1977 while she was being supervised in her Boston College Ethics and Society doctoral studies by Mary Daly, the same transphobe who called us 'Frankensteinian.'

That doctoral thesis was turned into the infamous 1979 book entitled The Transsexual Empire-The Making of the She-Male.

In that transphobic waste of trees she stated among other things:

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

"Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity”.

This book sowed the seeds for the anti-trans attitudes prevalent in radical feminism today, the 1980's anti-trans attitudes in the feminist movement, and the sometimes bitter acrimony that transpeople of my generation and the one that preceded me feel toward feminism.

It also inspired transwoman Sandy Stone, who was attacked in Raymond's book, to write an essay entitled The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.

It's sad because both transwomen and cis feminists should have been playing on the same team. Thanks to the book affirming the transphobia that existed in some feminist quarters, they didn't.

While The Transsexual Empire was bad enough to the trans community, another anti-trans screed she penned had more devastating effects for us in American society.

In 1980 Dr. Raymond wrote a paper entitled Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery, for the US Government. This not well publicized tome discussed the topic of federal aid for trans people seeking rehabilitation and health services.

This paper effectively eliminated federal and state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals. It has forced incarcerated trans people to file federal court cases to get back trans related medical treatment they lost as a result of Raymond's transphobic pen.

When the federal and state governments dropped funding for indigent transpeople, it was used as a pretext by private health insurance companies to follow the federal government’s lead and deny or disallow services to trans patients for any medical treatment remotely related to being trans, including breast cancer or genital cancer. The cancer denials were extrapolated to be a consequence of treatment for transsexuality.

The resulting decade long negativity toward Janice Raymond was so strong it took the 1995 rise of Elizabeth Birch and some publicized anti-trans remarks by her as head of HRC to supplant Raymond as Trans Public Enemy Number One.

For you folks who are wondering why you can't use the insurance policies you pay for to cover much of the medical work you need done or wonder why the Medicaid and Medicare taxes you pay doesn't cover SRS or any trans related care, you have Dr. Janice G. Raymond and her unleashed disco era transphobia to thank for that.

Gay People, Chill With The Transphobic Hatin' On Ruth Johnson

One of the things I really get tired of is transphobia. It's especially galling when the phobic reactions are coming out of the mouths of your own people or so called allies.

Towleroad has a post about transphobe/homophobe Ruth Johnson winning the five person race last weekend at the state convention to get the GOP nod for Michigan Secretary of State.

Check out the reactions of some transphobic Towleroad readers in the comment thread.

***

I feel so sorry for the transgendered man in the picture. The Secretary of State should be ashamed!
Posted by: candideinnc | Aug 25, 2010 9:17:05 AM

Looks like Brian Brown in drag.
Posted by: Brian in Texas | Aug 25, 2010 11:54:02 AM

Wait, that blond in the photo is a CHICK?
Posted by: ManPuppy Gay Social Network | Aug 25, 2010 7:27:33 PM

Ruth Johnson has a johnson. Chrissakes, the b***h looks like a fuckin' dude! And, an ugly fuckin' dude at that... This is what the word irony was invented for. And michigan is a shit state for gay rights...it's full of trash, esp, the upper peninsula.
Posted by: TANK | Aug 25, 2010 10:23:58 PM

***


Okay, Ruth Johnson's hatin' on the community for political gain, so y'all want to strike back and hate on her. I get that. I understand the underlying frustrations in that stance. I know that she once received a 2002 endorsement from the gay community and note that you wish to express your disdain and sling shady insults at her via your First Amendment free speech rights.

But one of the major issues the trans community has a problem with right now and for decades with gay men is the rampant transphobia in your ranks.

It ain't funny, it ain't cute, and it's disrespectful to us as your allies to do so.

But then again, since when did some of y'all ever care about what we thought, even if it turned out later that we were right?

Bottom line is that you need to treat people the way you wish to be treated. If the script was flipped and a trans blog's commenters were using anti-gay epithets in the comment thread to demonize a cis opponent, y'all would be screaming bloody murder.

I'm not a fan of hers nor of any Republican. I'm not saying stop flinging insults at Miss Thang. What I am saying is find other attributes you can creatively attack her for and refrain from using transphobic insults to do so.