Defectives, Freaks and Perverts: When TS/TG People Attack Other TG/TS People

06/16/2012 — Suzan

We’ve all encountered them, especially on line and it has been a major
part of the “World of Transwarcraft.”

And it is going to have to be something that we put aside if we are
going to work together not only as transsexual or transgender people
but as progressives and working people working as part of an even
bigger coalition.

I don’t care if the insult hurler is part of the HBS Mob insulting
transgender people or part of the Transgender Borg insulting the
genitals of post-op transsexual people.

It’s bullshit and a way of ignoring the humanity of others.

Further those of us who hope to work together need to start calling
out the individuals engaging in this and stop speaking in
generalities.  All post-op transsexual, evne thouse who uses such
phrases as WBT, post-transsexual or person of transsexual history to
describe themselves are not the individuals insulting TG people.

Generalizing and assigning the characteristics of a particularly nasty
individual to the entire class of people is how racism is structured.

Likewise most transgender people, particularly activists are pragmatic
people willing to change their thinking to adapt to changing
situation.  Most are not the Transgender Borg, who are part of this
cult who do not converse but rather playback dogmatic nonsense in a
hostile and aggressive manner.

Funny thing is I rarely encounter these creatures of the internet in
the real world so it may well be that this behavior is a product of
the relative anonymity of the on-line world where people feel free to
let their id and ego run rampant in a game of my ego is all powerful.

When I came on line sixteen years ago I was near bottom, struggling
with alcoholism and nearly suicidal.  I started volunteering at the LA
Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and met people like Jake
Hale and Susan Stryker who helped me see my self-worth.  Then I met
Tina who helped me get sober.  Along the path to sobriety I took some
false paths because I was trying to get rid of a lot of garbage that
had helped me to become a drunk.

At first I got rid of a lot of good as well as the bad.  Then I
realize that renouncing the hippie ethos was a mistake and what I
really needed to tackle was all the abuse that was at the root of so
much of my self-destructive behavior.

The hippie stuff probably pulled me through when so many of my friends died.

You see some of that hippie stuff helped me to feel free to come out
to the members of my collective in 1969. the very idea of be yourself
and do as you must, harm no one, wer magor components of the hippie
ethos.

Hell listen to the songs of the Jefferson Airplane before they became
the Starship.

The idea of I am you and you are me and we are all in this together.

Or that we are all outlaws in the eyes of Amerika.

There was a time when we proudly wore the label of “Freaks”, because
not being part of the gray world of button down collars, shirtwaist
dresses and white picket fences was a good thing.

Not sharing in the warlike consciousness of greed was a good thing.

One of the things that surprised some of my friend at the transsexual
counseling center I co-ran in the early 1970s, was that I wasn’t
embarrassed to take people out on their first public appearance.

That I had the fuck’em attitude towards those who stared at the people
I was accompanying.

The secret is we are all freaks of one sort or another.

It isn’t a crime to be different and the rules of conformity are only
rules to slaves.

We are people not a bunch of labels.

When you are born transsexual or transgender you are the one who has
to figure out how to live with it.  Society dumps a shit load of
oppression on TS/TG people, even more than it dumps on gay and lesbian
people because we violate their ideas of there being this radical
difference between men and women, the total linkage between sex and
gender.

Our existence questions  the absoluteness of those classifications.

Thursday night Tina and I watched St Misbehavin: The WavyGravy Story.
Hugh Romney started out a beat poet in Greenwich Village during the
late 1950s. He went on to become a hippie and a great humanitarian.
(If you have Showtime on demand they are playing St Misbehavin’ until
6/26.  Its in their documentaries section of the on demand listing)

Once I had been sober for a couple of years and realized that I
shouldn’t have trusted the news media, including the New York Times
when it came to lying us into the war in Iraq I started sliding back
to my left wing hippie roots.

I never liked Stalinists or politically correct people who use dogma to lie.

I don’t use sweet pure expunged and expurgated language, I have a potty mouth.

But I believe in standing up for the bullied and oppressed and I
believe in the human rights and dignity of all.

Which is why I get fed up with transsexuals who think they are the
only pure transsexual and that most others are degenerate perverts.
Or think that people who may be TG because of economics or personal
choice are some how degenerates scum.

If you call TGs degenerates scum it says more about you than it does
about the person you are putting down.

When you expect me to agree you dishonor all my TG friends who had an
even harder life than I had.  Friends who were so abused that only
heroin would take away the pain, friend who died of pill over doses
and AIDS.  Friends who lacked social services and places to go for
treatment.

I really don’t even share the assumed hostility towards transvestites
as a class.  I don’t need to understand it to wonder why they are
stigmatized and not Civil War reenactors, or costumed Comic-Con
attendees.

Seems the only reason they are picked on is because of a passage in
Deuteronomy that is on the level of eating shell fish.

But most of all the horizontal hostility is harming everyone.  At a
time when the rich right wing elite is crushing the most vulnerable
people around we are being scapegoated in a manner that is truly
frightening.

[Video: <http://youtu.be/-DIluFDkw0g> Jefferson Airplane - Let's Get Together]

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